STEPHEN LEWIS talks to a man for whom laughter became a way of surviving.

THERE'S a poem in Jack Mapanje's new book that should give everyone in York who reads it a prickle of shame. Entitled simply The Delights Of Moving House, Tang Hall, York, it describes the reception he and his family received after they arrived in the city from Malawi, where Jack had been held without trial for nearly four years in the notorious Mikuyu Maximum Detention Centre.

The poem is devastatingly simple.

When we first arrived in Tang Hall

The children welcomed us by stealing

Glances at us, sniggering over the hedge,

Milling about the front door hedge after school,

Spitting loudly, monkey-faking without ambiguity

Until some started throwing eggs at our windows,

Sometimes writing 'F*** OFF' on the windscreen

Of the car we had bought near the scrap-yard.

The award-winning poet and academic gives a great rumbling belly-laugh when he recites this, his face beaming good-naturedly.

He is obviously not one to hold a grudge and it was, after all, 13 years ago.

At the time, he and his family did find it desperately upsetting to have monkey-gestures made at them and eggs thrown at their windows, he says.

After surviving four years as a political prisoner in a brutal Malawi jail, it was the last thing he expected on coming here.

"That was our first impression of York," he says, "and it was extremely upsetting. We had come from a dictatorship into a country which we thought was free."

He gives another of those rumbling, cheerful laughs. "But this was actually minor stuff. We usually laughed it off, and said 'we have seen greater things than this'."

He says many of the kids who tormented them when they first arrived have now grown up and become good friends with his own children.

It certainly wasn't enough to damage his affection for York. His release from prison came after a massive international campaign, involving floods of letters being sent to the regime of Malawi's then 'President for Life', Hastings Banda.

Jack says that campaign was effectively co-ordinated by Landeg White, of the Centre for Southern African Studies at York University. "He was the de facto chairman of the campaign for my release," he says, his face splitting into a wide smile.

So it was only natural that when he was eventually released from prison in May 1991 - after "three years seven months 16 days and more than 12 hours" as he notes in the introduction to his new book The Last Of The Sweet Bananas - it should be York he and his family came to.

He was offered a visiting scholarship at York University, along with accommodation for himself, his wife Mercy and their three children, and he has been in the city ever since.

Jack now teaches at the University of Newcastle, Mercy re-trained as a nurse and works at York Hospital, his two daughters work in London, and his son is still at York College.

Thirteen years after first coming to York the family now lives in New Earswick, where Jack says they are very happy. They deserve to have found a bit of peace.

In 1984, Jack was a 39-year-old rising star in his own country. Born in 1944 under British colonial rule in a poor village in what was later to become the Republic of Malawi, he had, after a Catholic education in his own country, gone on to gain a PhD in Linguistics at University College, London.

In 1984 he was a published poet whose first 1981 book of poems, Chameleons And Gods, won the Rotterdam International Poetry Award, and was appointed head of the English Department at Chancellor College, the University of Malawi.

However, they were dangerous times to be an academic. The country's Life President, Dr Hastings Banda, had done quite well, says Jack, until Malawi achieved political and administrative independence from Britain.

But then he became increasingly suspicious and paranoid and did not like academics and thinkers.

In 1985, Chameleons And Gods was banned as subversive and on September 25 1987, Jack himself was imprisoned.

He remembers the moment well. He was in the Gymkhana Club, a relic of colonialism, having a drink with colleagues.

"This man walks in and says 'is there a Dr Mapanje here?'" he recalls. "I said 'yes, that's me', and he said 'there is a man in the next bar who is waiting for you.'"

It was the commissioner of police. Jack was handcuffed and taken to police headquarters, where he was left waiting in a police cell. "I didn't know what I was waiting for," he says. "I thought I was waiting for death."

He was then brought through to sit at a huge oval table. The chief of police sat at the head, with other top policemen sitting around. Then the chief of police told Jack he had been personally directed by 'His Excellency the Life President' to arrest him.

The odd thing was, he didn't know why. There was no investigation - that would have been tantamount to doubting the dictator's word, says Jack - but the chief of police did want to know if Jack could shed any light on his arrest. "He said 'please tell us why we have to detain you and arrest you and imprison you'," recalls Jack with another of those great laughs.

It were as if the policeman was genuinely puzzled and wanted to know what Jack had done. Jack himself didn't know. He spent the next two weeks in solitary confinement, before being put with other political prisoners in cell D4 of the notorious Mikuyu Prison. He was immediately surrounded by the other prisoners, who told him they had been there 17, 15, 14 or 11 years. "And I said 'bloody hell, I've only been here two weeks and it already seems like a million years!'" he says.

Conditions in the prison were appalling. Between 15 and 25 people shared the same cold concrete cell. There were no beds, blankets or pillows, just rags on which to sleep. The food was "maggoty, stinking, terrible", and there was no access to medical facilities.

There was no physical torture - not unless you broke the prison rules - but were no books either, no newspapers, radio or TV, no exercise, and perhaps worst of all no contact with family.

Jack says they survived because of laughter.

"Many of us discovered that the best way of fighting a dictator is not to allow yourself to die," he says. "If you die, he has won. So you survive. We used every trick in the book to survive and the biggest was laughter.

"We were laughing at ourselves, telling each other stories, making up lies - we enjoyed each-others' lies. Someone would tell a lie, and someone else would say 'he told me this two weeks ago, but he's forgotten this detail!'" He gives another of those laughs that shake his whole body.

Throughout nearly four years in prison, he was able to smuggle notes out to friends outside thanks to a friendly prison warder the inmates knew as 'Noriega'. And all the while, although he didn't know it, the campaign for his release was gathering momentum.

It wasn't until he was released, again on the personal direction of Hastings Banda, that he realised just how much international support there had been for him. It is a story he has told in another of the poems in his new book, The Parable Of My Renault 4 Driver, Stavanger.

He had a friend who had taught him how to drive, and who had subsequently gone to work for the post office in the rural district where his wife had been exiled during his imprisonment.

Jack was on the telephone there trying to get through to the British Council shortly after his release, when he heard a booming voice behind him.

It was his old friend the driver - and he had been given the duty of sorting out all the Mapanje 'protest' mail.

First he apologised to Jack for not having been able to acknowledge Mercy while Jack was in prison, for 'fear of recrimination'. "But then he told me 'you're the most dangerous man I have ever comes across!'" says Jack, with a gurgling, delighted laugh. "He said in the last three months before I was released they had been receiving three bags of mail every day.

"Bags and bags of mail, coming from everywhere. New Zealand, South America, Australia, Japan, Italy, and that's not to mention the UK and US. There were even letters from Soweto. I just said 'God, thank you very much'. And that's when I realised there had been so many people fighting for me."

The Last Of The Sweet Bananas: New And Selected Poems by Jack Mapanje is published by Bloodaxe Books tomorrow priced £9.95.

Updated: 10:09 Wednesday, May 26, 2004