Therefore, Mapanje’s other two collections can appropriately be limned as a writer’s
continued attempt as an intellectual to break through the dykes of state suppression and
repression in order to engage power in a dialogue of truth dissent. If he dons the toga of
an oral artist and is expected to enlist his service in praise of the state, he disappoints state
power, for his activism and creativity cannot be located in the mien of an encomiast as he
was more of a gadfly and thorn in the flesh of the state. Needless to say, his sympathy
then, as it is now, was with the oppressed masses. This point also brings one to the often
expressed reservations about the mediation of the postcolonial intellectual, since one
could as well have his position and responsibility assumed by, say, the tax payer or union
leader, social activist or parent (R. Radhakrishnan 2003: 321). The reason for such
reservations, Radhakrishnan explains, is because it is not uncommon for the “the critic-
intellectual” to be “divorced from the politics of solidarity and constituency.” What is
more, “the critic is forever looking for that radical ‘elsewhere’ that will validate
‘perennial readings against the grain’ and the intellectual is busy planning multiple
transgressions to avoid being located ideologically and / or macropolitically” (321).
However, this kind of poststructuralist allegation of escapism cannot, in fairness, be
levelled against Mapanje, not least because his solidarity with the people cannot be
denied.
The fact of his solidarity with the people as a credible symbol of social mediation runs
through both his activism and arrest. And it is because of this fact that it is possible to
argue that his poetry, whether written in prison or exile, has always been about exile.
Indeed, Mapanje comes in the long list of African writers who have suffered
imprisonment (Nadine Gordimer 1992:6). But it is also important to reflect on how his
imprisonment and torture speak to the Malawian colonial memory and its adoption in the
postcolonial era to silence, either fatally or otherwise, those perceived by the state to be
elements of subversion. James Currey’s (2008:257-8) account of the memory is important
in the way it links the experience of the Malawian postcolony and the high-handedness of
Banda to the antecedent of colonial repression. The most cited of the history of repression
was the 1915 execution of John Chilembwe and his followers for protesting against the