Assess Jack Mapanje’s response to censorship and oppression. Jack Mapanje is a Malawian poet and author who was born in 1944. He was the head of English at the University of Malawi before being imprisoned in 1987, allegedly for his collection ‘ Of Chameleons and God’s’ which criticized the administration of President Hastings Banda. He was released in 1991 and emigrated to the UK where he worked as a teacher. The poem “The Song of Chickens” (4) protests against a master who protects his chickens from hawks only to prey on them himself.
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Mapanje says he wrote this poem in 1970 following the visit of South African president John Vorster to Malawi. In 1967, while most African countries boycotted South Africa because of its apartheid policies and practices, Banda established diplomatic relations and signed trade agreements with South Africa. Not only did Banda host Vorster in Malawi; he also reciprocated the visit in 1971. In the first stanza of the poem, the chickens ask their master why, after putting on a fight to protect them from predators—using bows and arrows and catapults, his hands “steaming with hawk blood” (4)—he has tuned to prey on them himself.
They question him: “Why do you talk with knives now, / Your hands teaming with eggshells / And hot blood from your own chickens? / Is it to impress your visitors? ” (4). The master who once used bows and now uses knives shows the improvement of technology and symbolizes the passing of time. The use of the word eggshells shows that Banda took advantage of his people who were helpless and can also be interpreted to mean that he was taking advantage of the youth in his country, ensuring that he had a strong hold on the future of the country through its youth.
The poem can be read as criticism of Banda. It criticizes him for his lavish entertainment of the visiting South African president. It asks him why, after calling himself a Savior and Nkhoswe of his people, he has turned into a beast that preys on his people. Banda, who led the nation to independence, lectured everyone on how he sacrificed a successful medical career in Britain and Ghana to come back to liberate his people from white domination and exploitation.
For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, the time captured in the poem “The Song of Chickens,” Banda arrested, tortured, and killed hundreds of Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused to become members of his Malawi Congress Party, salute the flag, or attend his official functions. Many of them and others were forced into exile. It is for these reasons that Msiska suggests the poem becomes “an allegorisation of the political situation in Malawi through the idea of the keeper turned poacher, where the everyday practice of slaughtering chicken for guests becomes a metaphor for the leadership’s betrayal of the ideals of the anti-colonial struggle. Mapanje suggests in the poem that the behavior of the master, in this case Banda, who protects but then destroys, is both hypocritical and sadistic. In “When This Carnival Finally Closes” (61), Mapanje not only compares Banda’s leadership to a carnival in which he is a god but also warns that this carnival will someday come to an end: When this frothful carnival finally closes, brother
When your drumming veins dry, these very officers (drumming veins can allude to the blood in his veins or his love for going on stages and making a show by dancing to the drums) Will burn the scripts of the praises we sang to you And shatter the calabashes you drank from. (trying to destroy all his possessions as a form of cleansing of the nation, making sure that no bad omens associated with his Presidency stays in this world after he leave, part of the ritual to ensure that his spirit has left this world. Your Charms, these drums, and the effigies blazing will Become the accomplices to your lie-achieved world! ( the world he created through his lies and bad deeds) Your bamboo hut on the beach they’ll make a bonfire Under the cover of giving their hero a true traditional ( they would pretend to be sending you off as a hero to ensure that your followers do not create tension but would be happy that you have gone) Burial, though in truth to rid themselves of another Deadly spirit that might otherwise have haunted them,
And at the wake new mask dancers will quickly leap Into the arena dancing to tighter skins, boasting Other calabashes as the undertakers jest: What did he think he would become, a God? The Devil! ( this is a jest as to how Banda thought he would live forever and how he likened himself to God when in fact he was closer to the Devil, also alluding to how he would pay for his transgressions on this plain. ) (61) The “frothful” carnival was most obvious when Banda took to entertaining his mbumba (women) from each district at Sanjika Palace in Blantyre.
His public appearances were often processions of singing and dancing people, clad in party uniform on which was imprinted Banda’s face. The carnival affair where he is at the center is “a lie-achieved world,” and he is not closer to “a God” than “the devil. ” The poem suggests, implicitly, that behind the carnival is a political nightmare Malawians cannot wait to see the end of. Banda’s fall from power or death would therefore be celebrated with a cleansing of the nation of his spirit.
The poem suggests that Banda is indeed mortal, contrary to what his titles and praise names such as Wamuyaya suggest. Mapanje mocks Banda for his failure to see that his life is only a “frothful” carnival that, like all carnivals, is bound to come to an end. His dancing and singing in pomp and ceremony are exposed as hollow and a travesty of reality. CITATION Roscoe, Adrian. Misiska, Mpalive-Hangson. The Quiet Chameleon: Poetry from Central Africa ,London: Hans Zell Publishers, 1992 Mapanje, Jack. Of Chameleons and Gods. London: Heinemann, 1981
