Paper long abstract:

Author: Tunde Awosanmi

Africa’s 21st century challenge is human-centered self-governance for true global prestige. The continent’s current failed-state status originated from its immediate postcolonial past. Militocracy, a contra-democratic force, is a monumental prism for interrogating the Nigerian past for the ultra-colonial arrest and detention of its right and freedom to genuine statehood.

Resistance by human rights activists was a logical justification of the systemic anomaly of military despotism. Subsequently, social critics like Wole Soyinka, Gani Fawehinmi, Beko Ransome-Kuti, Femi Falana, Tunde Thompson, Sunny Irabor, Kunle Ajibade and Chris Anyanwu were imprisoned without trial under criticism-intolerant regimes and decrees, while the less fortunate like Dele Giwa and Saro Wiwa were letter-bombed and hanged, respectively. Accounts by some of the surviving scapegoats: hereby classified as literature of detention or detention narratives – a faction of the Nigerian military-citizens relationship - thus deserves worthy explication.

Though the Nigerian military tyranny had been thematically appraised from several social and humanistic angles, the study of detention narratives as a body of faction had been excluded. Privileging it as the analytical center of my discourse, the prison chronicle objectivizes the Nigerian past by describing the process and actual accomplishment of the horrific microwaving of the citizenry via denial of human rights, and the ultimate symbolic assassination of the state.

I shall argue that detention narratives such as Ige’s Detainees’ Diary, Wiwa’s A Month an a Day, Ajibade’s Jailed for Life, Anyanwu’s Days of Terror, etc., are not just emotive rendering of a political prisoner’s psychological ordeal. Apart from being historical, social, political and literary documents, they can be scriptural mechanism for a nation’s introspective rebecoming, thus an aperture for the retrieval of the already condemned future of an African state.