Life-writing as Political Critique: Kunle Ajibade’s Jailed for Life: a Reporter’s Prison Notes and Chris Anyanwu’s The Days of Terror: a Journalist Eye-witness Account of Nigeria in the Hands of Its Worst Tyrant

Abstract

Life-writing, which usually manifests in the form of personal narrative, has a social dynamics the author explores as a social energy of her/his story, but also as a platform, especially in a postcolonial society, for engaging the socio-political realities of her/his society in pursuit of social justice. From this perspective, I read Kunle Ajibade’s Jailed for Life: a Reporter’s Prison Notes and Chris Anyanwu in The Days of Terror: a Journalist Eye-witness Account of Nigeria in the Hands of Its Worst Tyrant, showing how, beyond narrating their personal trauma as political prisoners, they historicise the condition of tyranny in Nigerian in the 1990s. The point is emphasised that life-writing is also a site of resistance, and by writing their prison memoirs Ajibade and Anyanwu, noted dissident journalists, perform acts of resistance in continuation of their struggle for a democratic Nigeria.