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And Crocodiles are Hungry at Night

By Jack Mapanje

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Guernica / a Magazine of Art & Politics

Please Click here for further reviews on  Jack Mapanje’s Memoir: And Crocodiles are Hungry at Night

Martin Banham

University of Leeds

It is sobering that the prison memoir is one of the most consistent products of contemporary African writers. In 1987 the Malawian poet and scholar Jack Mapanje, then teaching at Chancellor College of the University of Malawi, was arrested and imprisoned without charge – an incarceration that was to last for three-and-a-half years. This experience has been chronicled in Mapanje’s poetry (see, for instance, The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison, in Heinemann’s African Writing Series) and in the same series Mapanje edited Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing gathering together material from everyone from Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, to Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Now Mapanje’s own long-awaited memoir is published – ‘A chronicle of a poet’s imprisonment under life president Banda of Malawi’. When Mapanje was released from prison, he and his family left Malawi and he has never substantially resettled in his home country. The gestation of this memoir is remarkable. The years of imprisonment are recorded in intimate detail, conversations, activities, personalities, in a manner that would suggest that the writer was keeping a daily written chronicle – which, of course, he had no means or possibility of doing. In fact Mapanje reconstructed those traumatic days, from a certain necessary distance in time and via recreating the experience in question and answer sessions with students and colleagues in the UK, the Netherlands and Ireland, rebuilding the awful memory. An impressive quality of the memoir is Mapanje’s resolute optimism, making the smallest incidents vehicles of hope rather than despair. Beyond the suffering of Banda’s political prisoners recorded here, Mapanje shows the awful paranoia created by his dictatorship, with police, academics and civil servants terrified of being thought to be disloyal to ‘his excellency, the life president, the Ngwazi Dr H Kamuzu Banda’. Mapanje, in a bizarre episode, notes that even his presence at a gathering of linguistics scholars in Harare, was regarded as being potentially subversive.

To welcome prison memoirs seems perverse. But Mapanje’s should be read by all who believe in the power of the human spirit to overcome evil.

Important endorsements for Jack Mapanje’s Memoir: And Crocodiles are Hungry at Night – With a Foreword by Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Jack Mapanje’s memoir not only chronicles his imprisonment, it also sets out how the life of a young poet and academic is viciously destroyed by the absence of academic freedom. Brilliantly crafted, with a touch of humour even in grim circumstances, this is a moving contribution to the growing world literature of incarceration. As such it has universal appeal.
-- Lady Antonia Fraser DBE
Vice-President (former President)
English PEN

Jack Mapanje’s imprisonment without trial or charge was the subject of protests by linguists, writers, academics, human rights organizations and lovers of freedom throughout the world. Apart from being an ordinary prison memoir, the writer offers us a rare glimpse on how inner circles operate in repressive regimes, in order to protect themselves and the despots they serve. This work is crafted with passion, cheek and wry humour. But it is a necessary warning to future African leaders to care about the people who vote them into power. It is also a testimony to the efforts of those who fight for
prisoners of conscience throughout the world. A long-awaited and welcome contribution to the growing world literature of political incarceration.
-- Noam Chomsky
Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA.

And Crocodiles are Hungry at Night is a powerful contribution to the genre of the prison memoir in Africa. Jack Mapanje presents the moving account of a poet’s imprisonment by the state, his struggle to probe the hidden motives for this arrest and his attempt to provide an unforgettable record of the architecture of imprisonment and the perpetual struggle between the forces of truth and those of naked power. In 1981, Jack Mapanje was a budding poet and scholar in Malawi. His first collection of poetry, Of Chameleons and Gods had just been published in the prestigious Heinemann African Writers Series and his scholarly work in linguistics was also transforming language and literary studies in Central Africa—his work was drawing international attention. But two years later the state ordered the withdrawal of Mapanje’s poetry from all schools, institutions of higher learning and bookstores. In 1987, Mapanje was arrested by the Malawian secret police and imprisoned without charge until 1991. This book is a recollection of those years in prison. Written in the tradition of the African prison memoir and often echoing the works of other famous prison graduates such as the Noble Laureate Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Detained, the memoir chronicles Mapanje’s retrospective attempt to explain the cause and terms of his imprisonment, to recall in tranquility the terror of arrest, the process of incarceration and the daily struggle to hold on to some measure of sanity and spiritual freedom.
-- Dr Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University, USA.

Mapanje’s memoir powerfully recounts the human will to survival as well as the capacity to confound even the most repressive and highly organized regime of surveillance and offers an important historical resource of Postcolonial Malawi. It has the intensity of Soyinka’s The Man Died, the moral and political purpose of Ngũgĩ’s Detained and the anguished, but immensely hopeful tone of Vera Chirwa’s, Fearless Fighter.
-- Dr Mpalive-Hangson Msiska, Reader in English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London.