Ngugi wa Thiong’o recounts the year he spent imprisoned at Kenya’s Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, all for writing a play that empowered the community but challenged the regime. Powerful, insightful, humorous at times, and a good history lesson on White colonialism in Black communities. ( )

This republished edition is really divided into two distinct parts: the first half is about Kenyan political history as a British colony, with the second half on the day-to-day injustices of being a political prisoner. Further confusing matters is the reality that the book is not structured in a linear fashion, jumping around in time from the author's arrest to the colonial times in the late 1800s/early 1900s to the country's liberation, with too many names to remember. To summarize the first half, quoting wa Thiong'o: "Pillage, plunder and murder. That was the colonial way." The only thing he forgot was imprisonment. He compares the capitulation of Kenyatta and Thuku with the long list of those for whom "detention and imprisonment couldn't break their spirits; it could at most break their bodies." He also recognizes the unity with indigenous Indians in their anti-imperialist struggle. The second half was lost on me, except for the funny story about how his drafts on toilet paper were seized (along with the final versions, which had been re-rolled), casting him into depression, until the drafts were returned ironically because of the writing. N.B.: the other rolls were eventually recovered as well.
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For fans of A Long Walk to Remember (Nelson Mandela), Wrestling with the Devil is a prison memoir that is raw and real and exposes so much of what happened in Kenya. Highly recommend. ( )