escaping the debilitating atmosphere of home as he prepares for a new way of life in
which his allegiance will be divided simultaneously between Britain and Malawi. It also
explains why the specificity of the place of countries of destination in determining
transnational practice as put forward by Muzzucato (133), must be challenged. This is
because the initial motivation begins from the countries of origin whose government
attitude either encourages or discourages transnational cultures particularly those meant
to liberalize a permanent human flow across borders of other nations.
Nevertheless, the repressive regime of the Malawian nation which eventually forced a
transnational identity upon Mapanje is not without an exhibition of affinity with the
colonial history of Malawi and the imperial Britain. For a writer whose advanced study
had taken him to Britain in his younger days, the specificity of the colonial link had
already been established since the study then had been sponsored by the Malawian state
in a bid to make the young poet “drink from the source” of modernity, as we find in Of
Chameleons and Gods (33). Such affinity which eventually charts the course of
transnational human flow in the postcolonial world finds parallel in the way Paris
remains “a narrative construct in the minds of its former colonial subjects” (Dominic
Thomas 2007:156). A similar transnational flow is found in the movement from Lagos to
London in Ofeimun’s London Letter and Other Poems. As will be argued in the
discussion of the collection, this is not unconnected with the colonial history that binds
both cities.
Concerning the solidarity which the formation of transnational identities allows, it is not
uncommon to find a banding together of people for the agitation for more rights in their
countries of destinations much as they also remain committed to the unfolding of events
in their countries of origin. Again, Mapanje’s The Last of the Sweet Bananas illustrates
this so enthrallingly given the way his reflections in the collection speak both to
situations in Malawi and London where he can no longer be considered a bird of passage
or outsider as in the days of his study when his impression of London was articulated in
Of Chameleons and Gods. An instance of the affirmation of rights along the lines of
solidarity of people of similar status in Britain is evident in The Last of the Sweet