But we all shared a common feeling: something beautiful, something like the promise of a new dawn had been betrayed, and our presence and situation at Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison was a logical outcome of that historical betrayal.

Irretrievable loss! Had we really come to this? Was prison our destiny as a Kenyan people? Fated always to plunge back to the days of the colony only hours after being tantalized with glimpses of new dawns? What of the million dead and maimed? Was it only to enable a depraved few to carry on the colonial philosophy for which the lives of countless poor men, women, and children had been sacrificed?

In the cell, each political prisoner would struggle against mounting despair – the inevitable outcome of bitter reflections churned over and over in the mind. For here one had no helper except one's own experiences and history. That, I would say, was the real loneliness of prison life. In the silence of one's cell, one had to fight, all alone, against a thousand demons struggling for the mastery of one's soul. Their dominant method was to show continually that there was only one way of looking at things, that there was only one history and culture, which moved in circles, so that the beginning and the end were the same. You moved only to find yourself back on the same spot. What was the point of making the effort? We were all the chil-dren of Sisyphus fated forever to roll the heavy stone of tyranny up the steep hill of struggle, only to see it roll back to the bottom.