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UK-based Malawian poet, Jack Mapanje, on Saturday launches the Edinburgh Book Festival’s Imprisoned Writers series in Edinburgh, Scotland to celebrate Amnesty International’s role in his release from detention under the MCP era in 1991.
Mapanje, his wife Mercy and their children exiled themselves to the UK 12 years ago after his release from Mikuyu Maximum Detention Centre in Zomba. More than three years previously, on 25 September, 1987, for no apparent reason, he had been arrested and detained at the pleasure of former head of state Kamuzu Banda.
Even the secret police who arrested him seemed genuinely puzzled about why they were detaining him. He spent three years, seven months and 16 days in Mikuyu without a trial.
“I treasure the Edinburgh Festival because it has done great things for my release,” he says.
He added: “In prison, when I heard that Scotland had joined the gang of people fighting for my release, every Scottish Presbyterian Christian in prison said ‘You are going to be released! When Scottish people get on to a thing, Banda has no chance!’”
At Saturday’s launch, Mapanje will read from Gathering Seaweed, a collection of African prison writing, past and present, which he has edited.
Soon, Mapanje will begin a new job with the University of Newcastle, teaching an MA course in the Literature of Incarceration.
“If I had not been under dictatorship, I would probably not have become a poet,” he says. “The joke at the time was that you couldn’t pee in Malawi without official clearance. You couldn’t travel. You couldn’t go and buy food at the market if you hadn’t got a Malawian Congress Party card. You couldn’t jump on buses without this, pregnant women couldn’t go to hospital. That was the type of world where we lived.
“And if you were a university lecturer, everybody was looking at you. If you published a good academic book, they did not trust you, they thought you wanted power. The society did not want anybody who was imaginative to achieve anything. The only people who could achieve were those in power, and our job was to praise them. In a situation like that, you just find yourself picking up a pen and saying, ‘To hell with this, I want to protest’.
In Mikuyu Prison, his writing found a sharper, more direct voice. These writings, which he held in his head because he was denied the use of writing materials, were published after his release in The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison. And then there was the poetry.
His second book Of Gods and Chameleons, published in the UK in 1981, was an elegant criticism of the Banda regime, carefully veiled in allegory and metaphor.
A third book, Skipping Without Ropes, which also alludes to the prison experience, followed in 1998.
Now he is preparing his New and Selected Poems for publication.
Has his writing changed after a decade of freedom?
“To be blunt, the poems have become more explicit, less poetic, less metaphorical, whether that is an improvement or not I don’t know. But also, it is about a process of becoming normal,” he says.
So there are poems about gathering seashells on Bridlington beach, about taxis, about the thrust and parry of everyday life.
“I think I want to write the poems I have always wanted to write,” he says. “I was interrupted, because I started writing political poems.”
The new poems also reflect his ambivalent attitude towards Britain, a place of sanctuary, but also a place of exile.
Mapanje was one the country’s most promising academics, and, to the rest of the world, one of Africa’s brightest young poets.
With a PhD in linguistics from University College London, he became head of the department of language and literature at the University of Malawi aged 39.
He founded a linguistics association for the 10 universities of Southern Africa.
That ambition, that success, he guesses, was his crime.
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