At the end of her 2001 novel Mutiny, South African-born and Mauritian-based author Lindsey Collen thanks the people who have helped her in the writing of the novel, including the ones who shared arrest and trial with her in 1981 on political charges associated with the Diego Garcia affair. Collen´s wholehearted participation in grass roots politics and her work in Ledikasyon pu Travayer, a labour organization based in the Mauritian capital Port Louis, prove her commitment to fighting for the rights of the working class, both men and women. Having experienced incarceration first hand and subsequently setting her novel Mutiny inside a prison, Collen belongs to what may appear in the current cult of the individual to be a dying race of committed writers. She suffered death threats over her award-winning novel The Rape of Sita (1993) but instead of toning down her writing she has continued to speak out on issues that she regards as violations of personal freedom and basic human rights. In this paper I would like to analyze Collen´s narrative strategy in her novel Mutiny. The three women in the prison cell gradually form a bond of friendship and solidarity which leads them on to make a bid for freedom. Through the stories each woman tells of her alleged crime, the reader and her fellow cell mates come to an understanding of the fickleness and arbitrariness of the justice system wherever democracy is at a low ebb.