Jack Mapanje

A famous poet in literary circles as well as liberal politics. Noam Chomsky and others petitioned the Malawi government to release him for wrongful imprisonment.

"Mapanje was among those who dared to speak out against the brutal rule of the dictator Hastings Banda in Malawi. The message was metaphoric though unmistakable: the monster-for-life had 'persistently blatantly wrung / And squelched nimble necks of sparrows /… dangled them in the sun / Until the last drop of truth has / Fallen' ('Where Dissent is Meat for Crocodiles'). Before his arrest, on 25 September 1987, Mapanje's work was necessarily oblique, conjuring up images of 'turbid top cockroaches', as well as chameleons, elephants, hyenas, crows, and vultures. In fact his offending first collection, Of Chameleons and Gods, was published in 1981 and only withdrawn from Malawian libraries and bookstores (by a directive from the Banda regime's Censorship Board) in June 1985." Source: Dr. Jules Smith, Contemporarywriters.com

2 Audio Links of his poems:
Visiting Zomba Plateau

Scrubbing the Furious Walls of Mikuyu