In the last two weeks, we sought to lock horns with Africa’s tyrannical leadership propped by a cadre of sycophants as revealed in the corpus of African literature represented by a selection of Malawian poetry. The matter of concern is that quite often African failed political leadership is adequately buttressed by foragers whose sole aim and purpose is self-preservation.
And since one cannot rule out fear by this group of people and, to a large extent the fear of the unknown, subjugation of others, lunching of the unfortunate and sheer brutality holds sway. But as we also noticed, writers including poets who live under such totalitarian regimes use pen and paper to find a voice albeit a suffocated and muffled voice to squeeze in a strangled thrill for some kind of speech.
It is in this light that we did a sketchy study of a few poems by three Malawian poets, Steve Chimombo, K.L. Lapukeni and EdisonMpina, all of whom writingunder a regime- gone-bizarre during the late Kamuzu Banda of Malawi in the 70s. The response of the three Malawian poets and those of others in their country and elsewhere is not uncommon in an Africa of a betrayed cause for the good of the less privileged people forwhom, ironically, the liberation struggle for independence was fought, so one would be made to assume. It is for their cause that the late Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, was accused by his critics ofabandoning ‘pure’ art for what Achebe himself called ‘applied’ art; the kind of art which is submerged in propaganda and journalistic expression. Achebe was accused offorsaking pureart which characterized his early works: ‘Things Fall Apart,’ No longer at Ease’ and ‘Arrow of God.’
Once espousing the idea of a writer as a teacher of his people, he later opted to be more aggressive towards injustice and oppression committed by the new leadership of Nigerian. Although at once he retorted sharply to his anti-pure art criticism: ‘But who care?’ as long as, Achebe responded, he was writing to educate his people;however, one ofAfrica’s greatest story- tellerswas later made to care or, so it seemed, as the political surrogates got out of hand in his country.
That is how, ‘A Man of the People’ came into being, a moderately, politicalsubtlety of an art whose story ends in a coup d’état.Although Achebe is essentially a fiction writer, he would once in a while resort to the genre of poetry, the form of art that would stimulate immediate response to the brutality of theBiafrans in the Eastern part of that country by the federal government of Nigeria in the 60s— it would seem to me that fiction would have taken unnecessarily long time to air his emotive thoughts as can be noticed in his poem, ‘Refugee Mother and Child.’ To wit:

No Madonna and Child could touch
Her tenderness for a son
She soon would have to forget…
The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea,
Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs
And dried- up bottoms waddling in labored steps
Behind blown-empty bellies. Most mothers there
Had long ceased to care, but not this one;
She held a ghost –smile between her teeth,
And in her eyes the memory
Of a mother’s pride…she had bathed him
And rubbed him down with bare palms.
She took from the bundle of their possessions
A broken comb and combed
The rust-colored hair left on his skull
And then—humming in her eyes—began carefully to part it.
In their former life this was perhaps
A little daily act of no consequence
Before his breakfast and school; now she did it
Like putting flowers on a tiny grave.

There can be no more blatant display of horror in describing human tragedy of a people under the heavy hand ofcrimes committed against humanity. Described as in fiction, Achebe’s details are dehumanizing for the mother and her child in a refugee camp. Here too she represents the suffering of her womenfolk and their siblings under the devastating Biafran war of Nigeria. You will notice here the controlled demeanor of an artist which helps build emotions in the reader’s mind. Indeed, great art is associated with this sort of craft. The agitation against a new socio-political order of new masters is not confined to one particular African country as Chenjerai Hove, a Zimbabwean poet, once wrote in ‘You will forget’:

If you stay in comfort too long
You will not know
The weight  t of a water pot
On the bald head of the village woman

You will forget
The weight of three bundles of thatch grass
On the sinewy neck of a woman
Whose baby cries on her back
For a blade of grass in its eyes

Sure, if you stay in comfort too long
You will not know the pain
Of child birth without a nurse in white

You will forget
The thirst, the cracked dusty lips
Of the woman in the valley
On her way to the headman who isn’t there

You will forget
The pouring pain of a thorn prick
With a load on the head.
If you stay in comfort too long
You will forget
The wailing in the valley
Of a woman losing her husband in the mines.

You will forget
The rough handshake of course palms
Full of teary sorrow at a funeral

You will forget
The voiceof the season talking to the oxen

This poem may not have the subtlety of a Chameleon by the Malawian poet, K. L. Lapukeni, which we dissected last week but it has all the irony of pain and suffering. It possesses in its power the significance of simplicity in a flurry of images. Each stanza is like a bud of a rose flower about to explode, spilling its sweet nectar to bees and birds. Except that unlike sweet nectar its fluid is mingled with bitterness. Chenjerai takes his material for the poem right from the rural parts of his country inhabited by women and children.
It comes as no surprise at all that  Chenjerai ‘s portrait is a rural woman (who mainly bear the  brunt of suffering) busy with her water pot from a village well, or from the bush with thatch grass to fix a leaking roof of her hut, or cracked lips and the pricks to her feet on her way to -and -from the homestead of an absentee head man seeking, we presume, solace for the many of her troubles, or here and there it may be  sorrow and grief of a loss of a husband in the mines, or a show of tearful course hands to a sympathiser at the funeral.
But this is displayed at one end of a continuum of life while at another the situation is different, which is where Chenjerai pleads the case for this miserable woman: for here, however, it is all comfort and luxury. Those who live comfortable lives whether they are politicians, business men, bureaucrats, teachers, university academicians, women and men in uniform,  lawyers, students, chiefs and  chieftaincies or indeed the clergy— they have overstayed their welcome in their positions of comfort to an extent  that they forget  the misery around them.
In a restrained appeal, Chenjerai sends a message of caution of remembrance fortheir people going through pain and agony. What makes this poem so powerful is the restrained and controlled voice of the craftsman who does not use a hone or trumpet for such a great appeal on behalf of the suffering majority. Admirable art calls for this kind of style and a neat sense of dexterity.Let us consider another remarkable artistic work by a Nigerian poet, Tanure Ojaide. This is a prose-poem utilizing the art of prose and poetry both woven together to tell a story of injustice and corruption by those who have stayed too long in comfort and have no idea of what is going on around them. Tanure call this poem, ‘Launching Our Community Development Fund’.

It was announced in the Daily Times, the ‘New Nigerian’
The television, radio, and other acclaimed megaphones.
Today we launch our Community Development Fund
To complete the project the government abandoned from start
For lack of funds; the Treasury was looted overnight
By those elected to generate national wealth.
Dancers are back again from their holes, gyrating
In front of the Chairman and the Chief Launcher, millionaires.
The booths are painted bright in national colors.
In those days as dancers twisted themselves out of breath
To the applause of the Governor and his vast entourage,
We laid foundation stones with party blocks that dissolved
With the return of the Honorable Guest to the capital—
The budget allocation went with the civic reception.
There was no attempt to build what would outlive the builders,
And this disregard for afterlife was unfortunate for us
Christians and Muslims; heaven could not be gained here.
Today, as before, there are dancers to excite the chiefs
To pledge millions of naira to build their egos.
Always before new lords that rise with the fall of old patrons,
The dancers live eternally digging the ground that swallows
The Very Impotent Personalities. And after this launching,
The proceedings, the names of donors, will be announced
In the Daily Times,the New Nigerian and other acclaimed
Megaphones.

This is quite a mouthful, a poetic phenomenon of a kind. But do not be afraid, dear reader; this is one of the simplest poems I have ever discussed in this column. The rule of the thumb is: take one line at a time, read, and reflect, (and remember to take a breath at every punctuation mark) go on to the next and until you come to the last line. If the meaning is still elusive do not worry, read the poem again. And I am sure after that and with the provided notes you will enjoy it. What we have here is bitter satire, a lampoon over political pronouncements and assumed national development and governance.
If you will, this is what one might call applied art, a journalistic  and propaganda piece of work  as opposed to pure art, but who cares?— to borrow Achebe’s  sarcastic expression.Everything about this poem is cyclic in nature: the reports by the media about the same public event, the constant waste of resources, the same women dancers who emerge from their holes of residence to excite the project funders and Governors, almost always the same personalities (the VIPs or very impotent persons— mark the word ‘impotent’ as opposed to ‘important’) appearing for the event. We begin reading the poem at the beginning of its beginning until we end it at the same beginning of our beginning where the beginning of our beginning began when we began reading it; we have not progressed an inch just as the national development does not seem to go anywhere.
In other words, this is not a new project of our Community Development Fund or CDF. We launched this project last year in the presence of the media and stories hit the headlines, but the party blocks dissolved before the philanthropists reached their glamorous homes and are back again this year. The funds were lost but appear again and a colorful ceremony takes place graced by dancers of last year under new patrons. This is a tragic failed project in national development; the poet makes us laugh at ourselves to help purge our emotions in a very helpless situation, perhaps.
There are so many lessons for our Zambian promising poets in this discussion: the need to take time and write well, the use of devices common to poetry, controlled artistic character of the work even under a burden of pent-up anger.
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