the country, Kamuzu Banda. Other collections of his are The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu
Prison (1993), Skipping without Ropes (1998) and The Last of the Sweet Bananas (2005). This
study will focus on the first and the latest, namely Of Chameleons and Gods and The last of the
Sweet Bananas. His prison experience also inspired his editorship of an anthology of African
prison writing titled Gathering Seaweed (2002).
Mongane Wally Serote. This fine artist who is bound to the South African and indeed African
cause in his writing is certainly the most prolific in his generation, especially in Southern Africa.
He was a notable voice in the Black Consciousness movement in the days of impassioned protest
against apartheid. Some of his collections are Behold, Mama Flowers (1978), No Baby Must Weep
(1975), and Scatter the Ashes and Go (2002), among others. He is by no means a stranger to exile
and this is evident in most of his collections. As a novelist he has also published To Every Birth its
Blood (1981). However, for the purpose of this study the focus will be on Freedom Lament and
Song (1997) and History is the Home Address (2004). His poetry, as discussed, often assumes a
narrative approach to get across to his readers, and challenges Africans to the necessity of holding
memory in high esteem in order to take on the accessible present as well as the unpredictable yet
inevitable future.
Exile and African Experience
Considered in the orthodox sense for the purpose of convenient discursive departure,
exile, that result of dislocation from one’s native land, occupies a conspicuous place in
poetic exploration in particular and literary conception in general. This is perhaps so
because human history all the world over is characterized by elements and moments of
dislocation at one point or the other. The veracity of this remark is underscored by an
assertion as George Lamming’s (1960: 24) that “The exile is... a universal figure... and
to be in exile is to be alive”. But perhaps there must be an admission of an extremely
allegorical twist to this notion of Lamming’s apprehension of the concept. This is in view
of the fact that the context from which the assertion extracts articulation revolves around
the capacity of the political to engender estrangement. More literally, therefore, exile