This kind of brief illustration of the historiography of transnationalism is necessary in
view of the fact that the Malawian nation against whose social imaginary the discussion
of exilic transnationalism is going to be examined in Mapanje’s The Last of the Sweet
Bananas fits so appropriately into the question of the failure of modernity in Africa. But
first it is apposite to acknowledge that the study of the “New Poems” section in the
collection will not be compelling enough, if one ignores the interface between this recent
exilic reflection and the sustained preoccupation of Mapanje’s previous collections after
Of Chameleons and Gods. Both The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison and Skipping
without Ropes provide enthralling, if shocking revelations on the unmaking of a
postcolonial state and the unenviable impact of modernity on the African state. Taken for
granted that the colonial power established the culture of “clientelism” and privileged a
few, among the elite, the Malawi that President Hastings Kamuzu Banda ran was
typically that of civilian autocracy. His pattern of autocracy and grip on the nation was so
grim as to inspire a consistent comparison of the land with “Chingwe’s hole” in the
poetry of Mapanje. Banda’s career of autocracy which held out for more than three
decades from independence is recounted thus:
In many respects, Malawi’s history has followed the pattern shared by many other African
nations. After decades of exploitation under British rule, an organized political resistance
movement directed by the Nyasaland African Congress (NAC) led to Malawian independence
in 1964. Dreams of self-determination and a more equitable distribution of resources and
wealth were quickly revealed to be illusions, however, as the NAC transformed itself from an
independence movement into Malawi’s sole political party, Malawi Congress Party (MCP),
and as Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the figurehead of the independence movement, quickly
consolidated power within that party. For thirty years, the people of Malawi suffered under a
system no more democratic or less exploitative than the colonial order (David Jefferess 2000:
106-107).The bastardization of power to please his foreign collaborators and marginalize the
people whose mandate brought him to power was done through the autocratic promotion
of members of his immediate family to the level of strategic state officials. As Berman
(10) has argued, the pattern of political process in the postcolonial states is about nothing
but the “politics of the belly”. Explaining further, he sees the process as the “arena of
political tribalism, not the moral ethnicity of a community of rights and obligations
against the competing interests of rival ethnicities [to the extent that there is hardly any