Poetry
Voice of Agony
Sauti ya Dhiki
Abdilatif Abdalla · 1973
Synopsis
A collection of poems composed in prison between 1969 and 1972 and smuggled out on scraps of paper. Written in the Swahili of Mombasa and following classical prosody, metre and rhyme, the poems speak of the prisoner's anguish and of his faithfulness to the truth despite the price to be paid, as in N'shishiyelo ni lilo, and throw down a challenge to those who had him locked up.
Context
The collection appeared in 1973 in Nairobi from Oxford University Press. It is regarded as one of the most important collections of Swahili poetry of the twentieth century. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o sees its author as the first political and literary prisoner of independent Kenya. Its first complete English translation, by Ken Walibora, appeared in 2024 from the University of Michigan Press.
Who it is for
For discovering the great Swahili poetry written in prison, readable in English only recently, not in French.
Prizes and reception
It received the first Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature awarded in the Swahili category.
Sources for this page 10
The pages consulted to check this page.