It’s easy to see why poet Frank Chipasula was exiled for two decades from Kamuzu Banda’s Malawi.
More than 15 years after Banda, now dead, was defeated in the elections that ushered in multiparty politics in Malawi, Chipasula’s diction remains acerbic, his attitude uncompromising, showing none of that ”ah, he’s dead; let’s be nice to him” default stance.
Chipasula describes Banda as ”this short man, completely senile”.
He says on the phone from Durban: ”This fellow was crazy by the time he went to Malawi.
You didn’t need to spend much time around him to realise that he was completely nuts.”
Chipasula is one of the poets who have been performing at the 14th edition of the Poetry Africa Festival that, to do justice to its name, has also been to Blantyre (Malawi’s commercial capital), Harare, Cape Town and will culminate in Durban.
Reminiscing about Banda — a close friend of the West and the apartheid regime’s key ally in the region — Chipasula explains that the late dictator didn’t say much that was intelligible.
All he ever said was that he ”had come from England and the United States ‘to break up this stupid federation and bring you freedom’.
People praised him for this nonsense”.
The federation was made up of Northern and Southern Rhodesia (Zambia and Zimbabwe, respectively) and Nyasaland, as Malawi was known then. The mega state existed from 19Â 53 to 19Â 63.
The mood of his poetry from this period is sombre yet militant, its accents tortured and its vision unblinking and searing.
Like other poets from that era, he wrote a political poem titled Manifesto on Ars Poetica, one of 12 included in The Heinemann Book of African Poetry in English that came out in 1990.
”I will pierce the silence around our land with sharp metaphors/And I will point the light of my poems into the dark/ nooks where our people are pounded to pulp,” he wrote.
The poet and publisher, now based in southern Illinois where he teaches, published Visions and Reflections, his first book of poems, in 19Â 72.
He misses Malawi and his village, Likoma, on an island in Lake Malawi.
”It’s home,” he tells me, pondering whether he would rather live there. ”If I had a choice, I would go back.”
But he insists he is no longer in exile. ”Exile was worse than jail. The first year was especially bad,” he says.
In about 1973 he was on the verge of sliding off into the abyss. He was reckless and angry, yet impotent to do much to stop the dictatorship.
But it was not all bad because it was about this time that he met peripatetic Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah, then living in Tanzania.
Armah told him to try his hand at fiction, a less intensive genre. He also met Zanele Mbeki, then a deputy director of the International University Exchange Fund, who awarded him a scholarship to complete his studies at the University of Zambia.
I have been reading his poetry from that period and I can see why he had to try something else.
The fury is incandescent, his sense of betrayal palpable. It’s a rage I find oddly familiar, something I routinely saw years ago talking to exiled Zimbabwean youth living in Jo’burg.
One of the dirges, titled A Love Poem for my Country, begins: ”I have nothing to give you, but my anger/And the filaments of my hatred reach across the border.”
The penultimate stanza goes: ”My country, remember I neither blinked nor went to sleep/My country, I never let your life slide downhill…”
