For 20 years, York-based poet Jack Mapanje has been writing a book about his years as a political prisoner in a Malawi jail. Now it is finished. He spoke to STEPHEN LEWIS.

SEPTEMBER 25, 1987. Friday. A day like any other for Jack Mapanje, head of English at the University of Malawi.

A poet, linguist and married father of three young children, he was thinking only about the reception to be given for the new lecturer from Australia, lunch at the Zomba Gymkhana Club, and dinner with his family that evening.

In the bar at the Gymkhana Club, however, his laughter with friends was interrupted by a harsh voice. “Anyone here by the name of Mapanje? Dr Jack Mapanje?”

He’d been summonsed by the commissioner of police. “We’ve been directed by his excellency, the life president, the Ngawazi Dr H Kamuzu Banda, to arrest you,” the man told him.

It was the beginning of a nightmare that was to last four years. Handcuffed, Jack underwent an interrogation at police headquarters that was as baffling as it was sinister.

There was nothing in his files to indicate why he should have been arrested, the inspector general of police Elliot Mbedza told him. “So, before we take you to prison according to the wishes of his excellency, we thought we should ask you just three questions. Who are you? Why do you think we should detain and imprison you? What have you done … to warrant imprisonment?”

“I was so terrified I just sat quiet,” Jack says, speaking from the home in New Earswick where he lives with his wife Mercy, a midwife.

Even now, almost 24 years later, Jack still doesn’t know what he did to incur the wrath of the life president.

A few years earlier, while studying for his PhD in London, he had published a volume of poetry, Of Chameleons And Gods, that had been interpreted by some as political.

The language was veiled, Jack says. “In dictatorships, you find ways in which you can speak.” But dictators tend to be very good at spotting in careful language implied criticisms of their regime: and Banda was no exception.

Two years before his arrest, the book had been withdrawn from circulation in Malawi. An old schoolteacher showed him a letter instructing copies of the book be removed. “I read the letter, and I’m shivering, and I’m feeling ‘this is it!” he says.

Then nothing happened for two years. “This is exactly what these characters do. They don’t punish you today. They wait until you feel safe and sound, then they strike.”

As they did that day in 1987. Without ever being charged, he was taken to the notorious Mikuyu Prison. And there he remained for “three years, seven months, 16 days and more than 12 hours.” He recites it like a mantra.

When he arrived, he was stripped naked and searched. His book is written in the present tense, which gives it huge impact. “I am as naked as Adam. He (the commander of the prison’s night shift) runs his coarse hands over my naked body as if to confirm what else I might be hiding under my skin. I weep inwardly with angry impotence. Finally, he removes my glasses.” Jack fought for those, saying he couldn’t see without them, but they were taken anyway.

The first cell he was put in was for one man only: a narrow cement cell three steps long by three steps wide.

Later, he was moved to a communal cell for political prisoners that could ‘sleep’ up to 45. There were no beds, just sleeping spaces five feet long and a foot wide outlined in white on the cement floor; no pillows, blankets or mattresses. “It can be cold, cement, it can be cold, my friend,” he says, remembering.

Outside, an international campaign began for him to be freed. He was declared a prisoner of conscience, and writers and academics around the world joined organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to campaign on his behalf.

The British High Commissioner in Malawi, Nigel Wenban-Smith, did his bit. “He used to drive his motorcar, his diplomatic car with flag flying, and go to visit my wife. He would drive to the hospital where my wife was a nurse.” He gives a delighted, gravelly chuckle.

“And he would be seen, that was the biggest thing.”

The prisoners had just hints of what was going on outside, through smuggled notes and messages. But for the most part, the days dragged on.

It was grim: but somehow Jack manages to inject moments of humour into his narrative.

Like the time a prisoner escaped. There was pandemonium, he writes, as the prisoners realised there would be a search.

“Everyone’s fumbling for their broken pieces of razor blades, the needles, paper money, newspaper cuttings about campaigns for our release, precious letters… These must be hidden in cracks in the walls, in the ceiling rafters above, or torn to bits, chewed and swallowed, or flushed down the toilet.” And, of course, the cell’s only toilet blocked, and had to be unblocked by a prisoner who once prided himself as being ‘the best plumber in town…’ In the end, after three years, seven months, 16 days and more than 12 hours, the campaign for his release worked. When he was sent for, the prison guard who came to get him didn’t know what for. There may be more charges, he said: or perhaps Jack was going to be transferred or released. But there was another possibility. “If it is anything else, we will send some men with you and will tell your wife that you left here alive...”

Fear swelled in him: but it was release after all, not death.

There were still those who would have liked to see him dead, however. So when the offer came, through friends, of a visiting scholarship in York, he and his family accepted it.

That was in 1991. They’ve been here ever since: Jack’s wife working as a nurse, he himself taking guest lectureships and professorships at different UK universities, most recently York St John.

Banda was eventually forced from office in 1994.

Jack’s book is a labour of love that has taken him 20 years to write: and he hopes it will serve as a reminder to his countrymen never to allow their country to revert to the brutal days of Banda, when “we lived in fear of everything and everybody including our own shadows.”

Above all, though, Jack says, the book is the story of his life. “And now, I’m satisfied it can go into the world...”

And Crocodiles Are Hungry At Night by Jack Mapanje is published by ayebia, priced £12.99. It is available from ayebia.co.uk, on Amazon, or can be ordered from local bookshops.