This collection of essays is more a new book than a revised edition. I have excluded three pieces contained in the previous edition because some of the data and information they carried have been overtaken by events. I have re-written nearly all the other pieces, mostly excising data that seemed to cloud the central issues. I have also changed most of the titles completely. The result is, I hope, essays which are clearer in the formulation and presentation of the main idea. I have also added four new pieces, including the fourth Dubois Nkrumah Padmore memorial lecture given in Accra, Ghana, in 1995 on the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Dubois Memorial Centre. And finally although I have kept the format of three parts, I have re-named them: War of Images, Words and Powers, and Links of Hope. But all the essays are united by the same spirit which animated the previous edition: the relationship between writing and politics. As in the first edition, I am using the term Writers in Politics in a number of senses: writing about politics; writers and literary texts getting caught up in power struggles of the day; social relationships in literature reflecting and commenting on those in society; and questions of the right to write which are ultimately problems of democratic space and human rights.

Much water has flown under the bridge since the first edition which came out in 1982 together with Detained; A Writer’s Prison Diary and the English translations of Devil on the Cross and I Will Marry When I Want. When I left Kenya on 7 June 1982, it was only for a short stay in London to help in the launching of those books. But political changes in Kenya were swift. Many fine intellectuals and numerous students from Nairobi University were imprisoned on crimes of thought. Among the questions which many of them were asked in the torture chambers was whether they had read my books and what they thought of them. In my talks to the Royal African and Commonwealth societies and in numerous press interviews I had denounced the new turn in the tides. But my plans to return home were still intact.