The Female condition as double incarceration in Wambui Otieno's Mau Mau daughter

Abstract

Focusing on Kenyan freedom fighter Wambui Otieno's narrative Mau Mau's daughter 1998, this article discusses the interplay between incarceration and the female condition. It bears clarifying that Otieno's narrative of confinement was written and published forty years after the fact of her detention. The time of this writing may be relatively recent, the events it evokes are not. The prison life narrative offers useful insights into the treatment of the figurative and literal incarceration incomtemporary African literature by and about women, particularly in regard to life writing genres. Given the passage of time between the narration and the occurrence of the narrated events, there are several possibilities to be deduced here: 1) She could have been too far removed from the actual events to render an accurate account of what really transpired; 2) or the passage of time would have enabled her to see things more lucidly; 3) and more importantly, her perceptions could have been tremendously influenced by the subsequent events and experiences in the intervening decades, shaping and moulding her memory and her interpretation of her detention story. It may well be that the passage of time enabled and enhanced her capacity to tell a story whose telling is like opening an old wound.