By IPS Correspondents
BLANTRYE, Sep 9 2003 (IPS)

Malawi’s award-winning poet Jack Mapanje is using his work to remind Malawians of the country’s former notorious detention camps.

Mapanje, along with other politicians, critical of Hastings Banda’s dictatorship, was detained without charge or trial for years.

Mapanje, who visits Malawi frequently from his new home in Britain, was detained during the one-party state (1964-1994) of the late dictator, Banda, for writing and narrating works deemed critical of the regime.

Like most poets, who have been through detention, Mapanje’s work has been cryptic.

One of his shortest poems, ‘For a friend taken, 1976’, tells it all:

"Even robots flick amber first And you can whiz down the bloody road before the red if you like!" It was this poem, extracted from the anthology, ‘Of Chameleons and Gods’, which landed him at the infamous Mikuyu Maximum Detention Camp. Most politicians, who matter in present-day Malawi, have been through this camp.

The anthology, first published in 1981, took the Banda regime six years to ban and arrest Mapanje.

Says Mapanje: "The verse in this volume spans 10 years in which I have been attempting to find a voice as a way of preserving some sanity. Obviously where personal voices are too muffled, one is tempted like the chameleon, who failed to deliver Chiuta’s (God’s) message of life, to bask in one’s brilliant camouflage. This explains why the product of these energies sometimes sounds too cryptic to be decoded."

Yet someone deciphered his work and reported Mapanje to the authorities. He was picked by security agents on Sep. 25, 1987, while having a drink with a friend at Gymkhana Club, a joint in the former capital, Zomba. At the time, Mapanje was the head of English department at Chancellor College, a branch of the University of Malawi. He lost his job for good.

While at Mikuyu, Mapanje was handcuffed and put in leg irons, on and off, and was frequently switched between squalid isolation and punishment blocs for three years and seven months.

"For 18 months, my wife didn’t know where I was," he recalls. It was with help from fellow inmate, Brown Mpinganjira, now leader of the opposition National Democratic Alliance that he managed to send his wife the first note to break the jinx of his whereabouts.

Mpinganjira asked him if he had a ‘toilet’ paper, and when he said he had, he advised him to pretend he was going to the toilet. While in the toilet, he would scribble a note to his wife on a cover of a bathing soap.

"Mpinganjira used to hide a tiny lead pencil in (his hair) which I used for writing a note to my wife. I gave it back to him. How he found his own means of smuggling it out of the prison, I still don’t know. But it was soon after that when I saw my wife coming to visit me for the first time," he recalls.

Tough prison conditions made it hard for Mapanje to practice poetry so much so that he began forgetting 25 poems that he had memorised on his way to incarceration. "After a year or so, I could only remember five poems. But I kept their titles in my head and recollected them upon my release," he says.

Thanks to pressure from the ‘Writers in Prison Committee of International Pen’, which loosened the screws on Banda’s regime, Mapanje was finally released in 1990. After failing to reclaim his job, he fled to self-exile in Britain.

His first anthology, compiled after Mikuyu, the ‘Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison’ draws parallels between the former dictatorial state and the present-day administration.

The cryptic verses contained in them serve as a reminder of state of oppression and human rights abuses, which were widely entrenched in Banda’s Malawi for over three decades. One of the interesting cryptic pieces in the second anthology is the rhythmic ‘Skipping Without Ropes’.

In the poem, Mapanje refers to an episode at Mikuyu when inmates had to skip without ropes in order to sweat and stink so as to convince guards to give them access to the shower, which was only allowed to be taken in seconds.

Critics say Mapanje’s poetry has nurtured his poetic mind and helped to make his talent flourish, confirming the belief that oppression and tough conditions stimulate creativity in human beings.

"Difficulties have always brought out probably the best in human beings and writing and writers are no exception," says Olufemi Abodunrin, head of English department at Chancellor College. Imagination, he says, is the only tool incarcerated writers rely upon to aid their creativity in translating their wishes if they were free.

"An imagined world is always interesting. The more the problems, the more the creativity – as this is a mind’s game. When dealing with minds that are imaginative, even the censorship board simply aids creativity," he says.

Alfred Msadala, a renowned Malawian critic, says when a creative mind has been inhibited the person behind it will explore crypt to advance his arguments and denounce the oppression. "Writers in oppressive regimes will always find an alternative voice, and in doing so they become more creative," he says.

Mapanje is now free to read his poetry in public, at home and in Britain, where he has been living in the past 12 years with his family.

"Yes, oppression aids creativity, but that does not mean that we desire bad regimes," says Mapanje, who will soon join the University of Newcastle, Britain, where he has just landed a job as lecturer in the literature of incarceration.

His successor at Chancellor College, Abodunrin agrees. "No writer will pray for confinement. But when it becomes inevitable, the results are that creativity grows," he says.

Mapanje has won numerous international awards and recognition and has travelled in many countries to read his poetry.

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