consolidation in the post-colonies. By specifically focusing on Jack Mapanje’s Of
Chameleons and Gods and The Last of the Sweet Bananas , I have argued that the
postcolonial aspiration towards the appropriation of western sophistication is nothing but
the appropriation of a mirage. Not least because the travel and navigatory quest that aided
the West in imposing its ontological order on Africa, as was the case elsewhere, failed to
anticipate the prospects of demystification that would ultimately follow as the colonized
and later formerly colonized people would engage in reverse travel to the West where
they would on their own either uphold or critically dispute Western modernity’s claims.
For the most part in the Mapanje collections, the latter is the case. If the pursuit of further
studies informed Mapanje’s first travel to Britain where has was expected to “drink from
the source”, the social, spatial and structural realities, on the contrary, do more to deny
the West the claims of civilization with respect to the previously derogated backwardness
of Africa.
The aforesaid sums the mandate of re-reading which I have done Of Chameleons and
Gods. However, in The Last of the Sweet Bananas , the argument which has set off more
viscerally against the backdrop of civilian dictatorship of Kamuzu Banda, shows that the
option of transnationalism within the context of exile can be instigated by state hostility
in the postcolony. This at the same time makes a statement on the legacy of colonialism
as not having succeeded in enthroning administrative fairness that would allow for the
freedom of articulating dissenting opinions. If subsequently a transnational identity
becomes the only available option of escape from state oppression and repression as the
case of Mapanje represents the lot of many others that were incarcerated and later
released by Banda regime, the fleeting values of the sense of freedom from repressions of
home leave the transnational migrant with the challenge of survival and feeling at home
at the same time in the West. It must therefore be the ordeals and challenges of being
designated and treated as outsiders and strangers despite the right to be considered
citizens of the West that continually inform engagement with issues affecting home from
exile as is the case in Mapanje’s poetry and writings. Thus writing about Britain also
means writing about Malawi at the same time which illustrates the simultaneity of the
import that transnationalism espouses. Nevertheless, home, despite its memory of trauma,