basis for] trust in the state as an impersonal arbiter of conflict or an honest and
disinterested distributor of public resources.” But the configuration of ethnic solidarity in
such postcolonial states is not as generic as it seems to appear in the explication of
Berman. For, with Banda his own brand of “political tribalism” had to do primarily with
his mistress Cecilia Kadzamira: “it was the tale of how the permanent mistress launched
the promotion of her uncles, sister and brothers and their extended family” (Jack Mapanje
(2002: 182). The strategic appointment of Banda’s extended family fortified his mission
of autocracy and intolerance to opposition. To achieve this more successfully, various
formations like the military, the Police, the Young Pioneers, a special hit-squad, were
instituted to terrorize, kill, maim, imprison and exile opposition and whoever was
imagined to be a threat, genuine or otherwise, to his government. Crucially important
still, Banda also instituted a complementary culture of deceit; for he “maintained order
and his hold on power through intimidation while “reality” was moulded in a culture of
deceit” (David Jefferess 2000: 108). This is what Mapanje himself in another essay calls
“the orality of dictatorship” (2002: 178). It was perhaps for this that as a poet in such a
culture of “chameleon politics” Mapanje himself turned into a poet whose creative mien
and texture were no less reflective of the pervasive deceits of the state. The subterranean
metaphors matched the deceit of the state and pitched him against Banda himself in a
contest of wits. His response on the ban of his first collection based on the
recommendation of the country’s censor board showed he was actually in a kind of
contest for the soul of the nation with the country’s first President for Life. So he writes
in “On Banning Of Chameleons and Gods ”:
The fragrance of your banning order is not
Pungent enough after four years & one re-
print dear sister & your brother’s threat,
How do you enjoy squinting only
At lines without bothering to ask what even
Swallows perched on the barbed wires of your
Central Prisons already know? Who does not
Know who pokes at whose nation’s wounds raw?
& why should my poking at wounds matter more
Than your hacking at people’s innocent necks?
No, for children’s sake, unchain these truths;
Release the verse you’ve locked in your hearts! (35)