IN this week’s edition of our column we continue to make running commentaries on Rodgers Malenga’s collection of poems entitled, ‘Race to Manda Hill.’
This collection of verse was first published by Times Print Park (Z) Limited in 2011 and as mentioned last week went on to win an Ngoma Award in 2012, rated as the best entry in the poetry category.
What makes me return to it this week and perhaps one or two more weeks is to attempt in making the point that even with a little training in the arts one can still make a difference.
Another compelling reason is one of a reminder to teachers in High Schools and tertiary
institutions that there ismotley of talent and skills inherent in our youth waiting to be tweaked to flower by a committed and enlightened School Master or University don.
I will revisit this matter at some point to interrogate its validity as to whether all that one needs is talent and skill, knowing so well how our education standards have declined in recent years to affectin negative terms so drasticallythe genres oftheater and drama, fine
arts, music and song, fiction and poetry.
Malenga was my apprentice at a High School where my task was to teach Literature in English as we called it then; I remember how all too often I would sneak in a poem or two and mostly took advantage of the formative years to good effect before concentrating on examinable
material in the last year.
But that happened because I was adequately tutored and oriented during my tertiary training by highly gifted hands and tongue ofliterary academicians.
Anyhow, ‘The Race to Manda Hill’ offers a great range of themes about village life, climate change, social and economic milieu, politics, religion, judiciary, culture and an allusion to history.
For a young man trying his hand in a totally new trade, this in itself, is commendable.
In his fast-paced style of a person gasping for breath but wishing to say the last word before breathing his or her last Malenga, in the poem ‘The Season,’ laments about the devastating
effects of climate change:
The sun hates us so much It heats and burns us to the lungs
It’s no longer friendly
It has turned against us
The snow is no longer snoring
It is awake with violence
Turning our life into hell Malenga’s use of pun as in ‘snow is no longer snoring’ sometimes works but in other cases if falls flat as when he is talking about ‘bubble fish bubbling.’
In a quest to use rhyme in a line, the poet loses his sense of purpose in a discourse and the emotional power of the poem drops quickly and fades from memory.
He will need to martial his technique to keep the emotive pulse of a reader sustained.
But he knows how to keep his reader glued to his book because the inconclusive nature of  ‘The Season’ finally finds a conclusion in another poem, ‘Man versus Nature;’ in here the poet provides reasons for climate change though simple but he proffers the cause:
The axe is busy
The charcoal is the blood, it keeps life alive
Rivers cry for trees, banks empty
The sun sucking its fluid
Deserts in the making
The remaining shrubs cry in agony
Burnt into flames for fertiliser
The heavens can’t cry
Lakes taking to its feet
Beaches growing
Here is a poet who wants to make a point and says it as it is; so simply butabrogating even the poetic license in its expression and so he will tell us about ‘lakes taking to itsfeet.’ This isthe Nigerian,
Amos Totuala of the ‘Palm wine Drinkard,’ not given to and bound by
any rules governing grammatical traditions and conventions.
His point though is that man is the cause for global warming; he indiscriminately cuts down trees for his survival whether that is for enriching the soil under cultivation as is the case for chitemene system (slash and burn) practiced by the Bemba people of Northern Province or for the needed energy at the household level where charcoal is the prime factor, that is not any matter to him.
But he takes us on a journey of talessimple as it is—after all, others before him have done that, stating their case slackly albeitin a much more technically nobler fashion.
Here is Don Mattera who was incarcerated after the
Soweto uprising in Apartheid South Africa:
Each morning
Corner of Pritchard and Joubert
Leaning on a dust crutch
Near a pavement dust-bin
An old man begs
Not expecting much
His spectacles are cracked and dirty
And does not see my black hand
Drop a cent into his scurvy palm
But instinctively he matters:
Thank you my Baas!
Strange, that for a cent
A man can call his brother, Baas.
The poet is an angry man when it comes to issues of livelihood and settlement; ‘the burning issues of our day’ as the late Nigerian author and poet, Chinua Achebe, would have it; he runs at measured and tortured pace to hit out at the settlement gone insane, inequalities and corruption.
He rumbles with grinned teeth at issues of the haves and the have-nots, development and a lack of it, bright lights and unlit dark settlements, paved roads and potholes, mansions and shacks.
Quick witted, he places them side by side and hits lines of fury at each one of them.
Never mind whether this is poetry or prose cut up to look like poetry; he writes with emotional power and sometimes he hits so hard drums become ‘straightened’ as in ‘Slum Life:’
Empty straightened drums
Brick from mud
Mortar of mud
Remnants of wood
From carpentry shops
Holed doors
And card boxes
Produce our homes
This, the poet says, is his paradise for him where water is a luxury, litter is scattered all over, dog and man scavenge rubbish pits for survival, and drainages are blocked, and flies roam about and so do drunken youths with vulgar language.
And yet just ‘across the river’ another
paradise emerges, bold and beautiful:
It’s a city that never snoozes
Roads crisscross
Like cobwebs
It’s a city
Where it never stops raining
Where grass drink water in summer
Flowers have food to eat
Pets and people
Die of obesity
Bins full of remnants of food
This is their paradise
A country within a country
It is a parody of sorts as the poet causes us todo an introspection as a community, toenter a hospital ward where the ‘white angels’ plough their trade in grime circumstances of ‘peeping cockroaches, rusty beds, torn linen, cruising rats, bad smell and walls with peeled old
coat.’
In ‘Virtue,’ the poet paints scene after scene of moral degeneration and wide spread depravity. Observing every day human activity, he plays before our own eyes sketches of collective brokenness and crumbling moral fiber of a community whose ‘centre cannot hold,’ things have fallen apart.Apparently, not even the church is spared the poet’s bitter vile of thepen because there too, he observes, self-indulgence holds sway.