But secure in your voices of solidarity,
We’ll crush the crocodiles
That crack our brittle bones.
Do not falter then, brother,
Do not waver, dear brethren,
But craft on the verses
Whose ceaseless whisper resonates
Beyond the Whitehalls of our dreams! (195)“On Driving his Political Enemy to Scarborough” and “Rested amongst Fellow Hyenas,
Finally” show that even after release from prison and the breather that followed after
moving to Britain, the harrowing experience of his imprisonment notwithstanding, his
passion to engage the despotism of Banda was not depleted. For instance, he still testifies
to have personally rallied “within the city of York those rebels you/ Could not stomach
only weeks of our independence,/ Seeking not their scholarly papers, but their learned/
Memories of your wrath at the first cabinet and other/ Crises you’ll bequeath this tender
nation.” Definitely here is a list of a section of Malawian intellectuals much older than
Mapanje, who must have played some active part in the emergence of Malawi as a new
independent state. However, Banda’s intolerance saw to it that within the formative years
of the new state these intellectuals had all been exiled from the continent.^48 Their ordeal
in the hand of Banda and which preceded that of Mapanje must have also constituted a
source of inspiration, which several decades after settled for a banding together with
them. The making of the activist intellectual in Mapanje must therefore also be attributed
to these older intellectual figures whose reckoning, true to the fact of making the personal
self, must “transcend more than one generation” (Bruce Ross 1991: ix). His intervention
in taking the “rebels” is so strong that if this is a crime against the state, he will not mind
being imprisoned again. It brings up again the question about the appropriate way to
punish, as from hindsight, he realizes there were only phantom charges against him then
based on the allegations of treason preferred against. So “If you should invent/ Another
prison for me... let it be for reason/ Not the conjectures of your mistress about my
48
David Rubadiri, one of the personalities to whom the poem is dedicated, went into exile early in the post-
independence history of the country, obviously in order to avoid being eliminated, (although he had prior to
this time spent his early life in Uganda where he had his high school and university education). The
paradox of his career is that today, his contribution to the creation of modern African literature is best
assessed within the core East African region, especially Kenya and Uganda. See K. Senanu and T. Vincent
2003.