Gakaara wa Wanjau was areested on the eventful night of 20th October 1952 - and for eight years from then had to make the rounds of harsh colonial detention camps in Emergency Kenya. But he was not a kelpless man in the grip of manipulative history: he had been a perceptive and skilful writer and had used his pen to give voice to Kenya's nationalist aspirations; he now entered an historic moment armed with the same pen. And so, from the time of his arrest to the point of his release in 1960 he kept a diary which throbs with the experiences of colonial detention. The man who had from the 1940s served as the author for the Mau Mau nationalist cause now became a chronicler of the human drama being enacted at a climactic stage in the nationalist struggle.