By Jones Gadama
Malawi is weeping today. The world of books is weeping. Authors are weeping today. UNIMA Scholars are weeping today.
Professor John Alfred Clement Jack Mapanje, one of Malawi’s greatest writer Malawi, has died in exile in York, United Kingdom. Professor Mapanje, died on November 4, 2026 at the age of 82, far away from his home village Kadango in Mangochi where he was born on March 25, 1944 to Nyanja and Yao parents.
Mapanje’s death is a loss that must make every Malawian bow his or head in sorrow mixed with anger, and exasperation.
Mapanje was not an ordinary man. He was a literary colossus (literar giant that is larger than life size), a poet, a linguist, an editor, a human rights defender and a teacher who shaped generations.
He got his BA in Education from the University of Malawi and the University of London, his MPhil in English from the Institute of Education London, and in 1975 he chose to return to Malawi when many were running away, and he became Head of English at Chancellor College in Zomba where he taught and inspired thousands of students who today are professors and writers themselves.
His crime was writing. In 1981 he published his first classic Of Chameleons and Gods, a collection of poems that used proverbs and chameleons and gods to tell the truth about dictatorship. Prof Mapanje attained his PhD in Linguistics from University College London in 1983.
The one party regime of former Life President, Ngwazi Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda under the Malawi Congress Party banned the book in 1985.
Then in September 1987, without any charge, without any warrant, without any trial, just after he had accepted a writer in residence job at the University of Zimbabwe, the Malawi government arrested him and jailed him at Mikuyu Prison in Zomba.
He remained there for 3 years, 7 months and 16 days, until May 1991. While at Mikuyu Professor Mapanje slept on cold floors, writing poems on toilet paper and in some just in his head.
This was the cruelty of that time. A government that punished articulate learned sons and daughters.
The ruling political party at that time, believed Malawians must not think, must not write, must not question. Despite having a very learned and articulate leader for a president, the political party pursued a policy that killed intelligence so that it could rule with fear.
They thought by locking Mapanje they had locked literature. They were wrong.
Because while he was in prison, the world refused to be silent.
In 1988 while still in chains he won the Rotterdam Poetry International Award. In 1990 he won the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award.
The great English PEN led by world giants like Harold Pinter, Wole Soyinka, and Susan Sontag stood every week outside the Malawi High Commission in London reading his poems and demanding Mapanje’s release.
It is because of his suffering that Malawi today has PEN Malawi and freedom of association for writers, as veteran writers Alfred Msadala and Benedicto Wokomaatani confirmed, when English PEN approached Edison Mpina to form the Malawi centre.
When he was released in 1991, the same cruel system told him to re-apply for his own job as professor.
Broken by his own country, he left for the United Kingdom and lived in York with his wife Mercy and his children, and from there he became even greater.
He became Research Fellow at the University of York, Visiting Professor at Leeds University, poet in residence at the Wordsworth Trust at Dove Cottage in Cumbria, and taught Creative Writing and Literatures of Incarceration at Newcastle University.
Professor Mapanje gave the world more classics like The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison in 1993, Skipping Without Ropes in 1998, The Last of the Sweet Bananas in 2004, Beasts of Nalunga in 2007, Greetings from Grandpa in 2016, and his heartbreaking prison memoir And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night in 2011 which was made into a play, and he edited Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing in 2002.
The world honoured him with honorary doctorates from the University of Stirling in 1996, and University of Bedfordshire in 2015. This year 2026, Professor Jack Mapanje received the Cholmondeley Award for distinguished poets.
Now he has gone to join his ancestors, dying not at home but in exile, because his home rejected him. Malawi has lost a library giant, Malawi has lost a university scholar, Malawi has lost a true son of the soil who loved his country enough to go to prison for it, because of his love for writing.
The world mourns him with dignity, and Malawi mourns him with tears, and historyshall forever record with shame the cruel Malawi Congress Party regime that believed that jailing a professor would kill knowledge.
But, a poet never dies.
His chameleons still change colours, his gods still watch, his wagtails still chatter in the corridors of Mikuyu.
Rest well, gentle giant.
Edited By Janet Karim
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