When Ngugi wa Thiong'o was detained without trial in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison in 1977-78, he had no paper. He used toilet paper. Scratching with a ballpoint pen on the rough sheets in a prison cell, he wrote Devil on the Cross, his first novel in Kikuyu. The writing was so small and the sheets so fragile that he had to be extraordinarily careful. The novel, which was about economic exploitation and political corruption in post-independence Kenya, was eventually smuggled out and published. It was later read aloud to communities across central Kenya who could not read it themselves.