recruitment and casuality of Nyasas in the First World War.^46 The ruthlessness with
which colonial authorities dealt with nationalists in this period would eventually become
a memorial tool deployed by the autocracy of Banda to repress those considered to be
enemies of the state. However, Banda found a clever way of labelling subversion, as it
would ramify any form of writing capable of being duplicated and circulated without
receiving the approval of the censorship board (Lupenga Mphande 1996:81). Punishable
by imprisonment, there really was no way Mapanje would have escaped imprisonment by
the state, given the vibrancy and the urgency with which his poetry spread as an
articulation of a national experience.The banning of his first collection was already an indication of the alienation forced on
him by the state, which means that the prison years which The Chattering Wagtails of
Mikuyu Prison represents does not recount or reflect on the poet’s experience in isolation
from that of the rest of the oppressed both within and outside prison in the country. For
instance, the prologue to the collection after his unconditional release from a three year
detention reads:From the vaults of Chingwe’s Hole
Come these chattering wagtails,
Desperate voices of fractured souls
Nestling on desert walls of prisons
And exiles, afflicted or self-imposed,
Laughters and ceaseless tears shed
In the chaos of invented autocracies
Now darkly out of bounds beyond
These tranquil walls of York.
Justice! (1)Capturing his travails in detention and the eventual release, the collection is a testimony of
a conscientized mind against the unconscionable disingenuities of state autocracy. Skipping
without Ropes is an ascension of the reflection on the aberrations of state power; however,
it also significantly announces in a more direct way the second commencement of
46
Nyasaland was the designation of Malawi in the colonial years.