50 years 50 cases

Jack Mapanje
Country of origin:
Malawi
Occupation:
Sutton-Hibbert/Rex Features

Poet, editor, linguist and human

rights activist
Status:
Released in 1991;
living in the UK

Born in Malawi in 1944, Jack Mapanje, one of Africa’s most distinguished

poets, studied in England before returning to teach at the University of
Malawi.
His first collection of poems, Of Chameleons and Gods, published in the
UK in 1981, was banned in Malawi in June 1985 due to its being ‘full of ...
coded attacks’ on the ruling dictatorship of Hastings Kamuzu Banda. Two
years later, in September 1987, he was imprisoned without trial or charge by
the Malawian government.
Many writers, linguists and human rights activists campaigned for
his release, including Harold Pinter and Wole Soyinka, and in 1990 he was
awarded the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award. Despite
this international pressure, Mapanje served almost four years in Mikuyu
prison, where he composed his second collection of poetry, The Chattering
Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison, and most of his third collection, Skipping without
Ropes. He was finally released in May 1991.
Following his release, Mapanje wrote to PEN, stating, ‘I was told
personally that it was the efforts and pressure from certain distinguished
bodies in the UK which made my release possible. One such body is English
PEN.’ Mapanje later settled in England with his family and is now a senior
lecturer in creative writing at the University of Newcastle.
Between 2002 and 2004, Mapanje was poet in residence at The
Wordsworth Trust and in 2007 he was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry
Prize (Best Poetry Collection) for Beasts Of Nalunga. Other works include
The Last Sweet Banana, Altar Boy at Sixty, and Gathering Seaweed: African
Prison Writing. His prison memoir And Crocodiles Are Hungry At Night will
be published by James Currey in 2011.

© Index on Censorship/English PEN

166
 1980s

On His Royal Blindness Paramount Chief Kwangala

by Jack Mapanje

I admire the quixotic display of your paramountcy

How you brandish our ancestral shields and spears
Among your warriors dazzled by your loftiness
But I fear the way you spend your golden breath
Those impromptu, long-winded tirades of your might
In the heat, do they suit your brittle constitution?

I know I too must sing to such royal happiness

And I am not arguing. Wasn’t I too tucked away in my
Loin-cloth infested by jiggers and fleas before
Your bright eminence showed up? How could I quibble
Over your having changed all that? How dare I when
We have scribbled our praises all over our graves?

Why should I quarrel when I too have known mask

Dancers making troubled journeys to the gold mines
On bare feet and bringing back fake European gadgets
The broken pipes, torn coats, crumpled bowler hats,
Dangling mirrors and rusty tincans to make their
Mask dancing strange? Didn’t my brothers die there?

No, your grace, I am no alarmist nor banterer

I am only a child surprised how you broadly disparage
Me shocked by the tedium of your continuous palaver. I
Adore your majesty. But paramountcy is like a raindrop
On a vast sea. Why should we wait for the children to
Tell us about our toothless gums or our showing flies?

© Jack Mapanje/Pearson/Heinemann
39(4): 166/167, DOI: 10.11770306422010390616

167