A Glimpse of the Moon

About ten years ago I turned down the opportunity to travel with the poet Jack Mapanje on a writers’ trip to Malawi. I’d met Jack when I gave a reading at Warwick University and was struck by his keen joviality: a combination of acute wit and warmth of personality. Foolishly, pleading the need to finish a novel, I missed out on getting to know a remarkable man more closely and on his home ground.

Then, last year, I heard an interview with Jack on the BBC, talking about his memoir of life as a political prisoner in Malawi from 1987 to 1991. Its title, And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night, refers to one of the methods used to dispose of the bodies of prisoners of the Banda regime – by tipping them into crocodile-infested waters. A little history. The British colony of Nyasaland became independent Malawi in 1964 and Dr Hastings Banda was appointed as Prime Minister. The nominally democratic republic was soon converted into a one-party state and in 1971 Banda was declared President for Life. Which he very nearly was; he held his position as dictator until 1994. He died in 1997. His regime had regularly imprisoned political enemies, rivals and anyone foolish enough to cross, knowingly or unknowingly, one of his informers or secret policemen. Jack Mapanje’s account begins on 25 September 1987. He is 43, a professor at the University of Malawi, Head of the Department of Language and Linguistics, and an internationally renowned poet. A man alive to the possibilities of arrest by the regime he has criticized in his poems, but regarding himself as reasonably safe at the moment from its depredations. It is pay-day. He goes to a bar for a drink with a colleague and his world collapses. The word ‘Kafkaesque’ is over-used but its implied mixture of black comedy and nightmare illogicality suits perfectly the ordeal to which Jack is now subjected. He is arrested in the bar by a high-ranking police officer, handcuffed and, after searches of his office and house, taken to the police station for interrogation. He faces a board of eight commissioners of police and is informed that the order for his arrest has come directly from the President for Life. His interrogators seem a little puzzled. The security services have no details of him in their files, and neither have any charges been laid against him. Who are you? they ask. Why do you think we should detain and imprison you? And so on, without irony, and as if genuinely puzzled. His answers are not satisfactorily self-incriminating, but they do not prevent the chairman from declaring to his fellow officers:

Gentlemen, could you please ensure that Dr Mapanje is kept in a prison where the cockroaches are controlled, until such a time that His Excellency decides to have him released?

So it’s off to Mikuyu prison, where unfortunately the cockroaches are not under control. The new prisoner is stripped naked and made to put on the foya, a prison uniform of stained and unwashed oversize shirt and shorts. He is then conducted to a cement-floored cell, to spend his first night of incarceration with his only companions: cockroaches, night flies and waiting mosquitoes. Jack Mapanje makes no bones about the fear and humiliation he felt, but luckily – and there are gradations of ‘luck’ in even the worst of circumstances – he learns that things have improved somewhat recently: because of international pressure ‘the prison authorities have temporarily suspended the use of physical torture . . . torture by electric tongs and other dangerous objects is reserved only for those who break prison rules’. This and other valuable tips for the beginner are conveyed by a fellow prisoner over a breakfast of porridge writhing with maggots. After a short stay, Jack is transferred from a single cell to D4 – a mass cell with no beds, simply forty-five spaces marked in white paint on the bare concrete floor. The only blankets are rags. But this is the most coveted cell in the prison: ‘cell-mates there have more freedom of movement than in any other’. And warm and welcoming companionship. And this is where Jack Mapanje’s book, after the terrifying but idiotic pantomime of his arrest, enters another dimension. Day after day of intolerable boredom and despair must now be endured, but his account is always fascinating, and full of rich humour; it may be gallows humour at times, but it is also often extraordinarily warm and heartening. If Jack wonders if his poems have landed him here, there are in D4 prisoners who have been inside for fifteen years without trial, without charge and for no discernible reason. Others have been imprisoned for many years simply because they had travelled or lived abroad and so are automatically suspected as spies. Still others are business competitors of Banda’s cronies or have upset some political jobsworth; and there are those poor unfortunates who have been swept up by the security services simply because such people need to make a regular number of arrests to justify their own positions. A month passes. Jack has been forbidden any contact with his family: they cannot know if he is alive or dead; he is one of the ‘disappeared’. Two of the prisoners, TS and Brown, adopt Jack into their ‘team’. It seems that not all the guards are drunken brutes and one of them, nicknamed ‘Noriega’, is willing to carry letters outside. As the prison provides neither reading nor writing materials, Jack’s first letter to his wife is written on two Lifebuoy soap wrappers. A second goes to his friend, Father Pat O’Malley, a priest in Malawi. At last, in November 1987, letters are passed back hidden in a bible. Father Pat has phoned news of Jack’s arrest to a fellow priest in Ireland (the priests speaking in Gaelic to flummox any secret policeman tapping the line). News of his arrest has been circulated to the BBC, the journal Index on Censorship, International PEN and others. But his imprisonment goes on; endless games of ludo and draughts, weevil-ridden food, unmistakable tension at night as condemned prisoners are taken away for execution, aching boredom, and a small epiphany of beauty when a fellow prisoner brings Jack a present of a beautiful moth. Noriega brings press-cuttings and letters from friends abroad that detail the efforts being made on his behalf. The already awful conditions deteriorate even further when a prisoner escapes. Knowing that their cell will be turned upside down, the prisoners feverishly attempt to hide all their contraband:

the broken pieces of razor blades, the needles, paper money, newspaper cuttings about campaigns for our release, precious letters from relatives and friends . . . These must be hidden in cracks in the wall, in the ceiling rafters . . . torn to bits, chewed and swallowed, or flushed down the toilet . . . There is mayhem in D4.

The guards arrive, flinging the door wide open and screaming at the prisoners, beating with truncheons those too slow to move, and driving them naked from the cell. Strip searches become a daily humiliating ritual. The prisoners are transferred to B-Wing. B-Wing makes D4 seem quite a desirable residence. Their new quarters are ‘in a state that no human could be expected to survive’. There is a fearsome, persistent stench of rottenness. The wire mesh above the exercise yard is home to hundreds of magpies, with inevitable results. Cracks in the walls and floor house eagerly expectant scorpions, mosquitoes, fleas and maggots – ‘rats, bats and cockroaches roam the cobweb roof . . .’ But even in this hell, there are slender compensations to be grasped: the cell is near the entrance gate, and a prisoner hoisted on the shoulders of others can see who is coming and going. They can hear ‘dogs barking and children crying, and feel closer to the reality we have left behind’. They can catch a glimpse of the moon. At last, in late 1988, things begin to improve a little. Jack is finally allowed a visit from his wife and family, accompanied by Father Pat who has not ceased to liaise with other friends abroad. News comes of political unrest and unprecedented demonstrations in Malawi. It is the first sign of a crack in Banda’s autocracy. Things are moving fast. Banda had been one of the few allies the white apartheid regime of South Africa had, but, in 1990, Mandela is released. Very slowly conditions begin to improve in Mikuyu prison and batches of prisoners are released. Jack Mapanje is not among them. By February 1991 he is in despair as one after another his friends depart. It is not until May 1991, after three years, seven months, sixteen days and twelve hours, that he is finally released. He is dazed by the colours of the landscape outside; ‘the flames of the forest’. The chief of the country’s police force, the same man who had first interrogated him, greets him amiably. They have another somewhat surreal conversation. Once again, Jack is asked the question, ‘Dr Mapanje – who are you?’ The puzzlement is now evidently caused by an inability to see why there should have been such international pressure and so many famous politicians, writers and churchmen agitating for the release of one poet. Jack Mapanje writes of yet another country in which the brightest and the best are harried, imprisoned and sometimes murdered by thugs, crooks and incompetent buffoons. But goodness and cheerfulness keep breaking through. Let Jack have the last word. In an interview in 2000 he recalled ‘Noriega’, the guard whose help was so invaluable to the prisoners: ‘there was this guard in the prison, very good, very reliable. There are some people in the world so kind, so good you don’t believe it.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 45 © William Palmer 2015