The Chameleon Sees What It Cannot Say — Of Chameleons and Gods

Title: Of Chameleons and Gods Author: Jack Mapanje Creation Date: 1981 Location: London, United Kingdom (Heinemann) Collection: One Book Per Country

Brief

Of Chameleons and Gods was published by Heinemann's African Writers Series in 1981 and is the first and most important poetry collection by Jack Mapanje, born in 1944 in Kadango, Malawi, then the British protectorate of Nyasaland. Mapanje was trained as a linguist — his doctoral research was on Chewa oral poetry — and he taught at the University of Malawi's Chancellor College on the Zomba plateau while developing a poetic voice rooted in the metaphor, proverb, and spirit-world imagery of the Chewa people.

The collection is organised around indirection. Hastings Kamuzu Banda had ruled Malawi since independence in 1964 with a system of censorship and surveillance that made direct political criticism suicidal. Mapanje's poems carry their critique through the cultural codes of Chewa oral tradition — the chameleon as a figure for survival through adaptation, the hyena as greed, the proverbs that compress centuries of wisdom about power into forms the censors could not quite parse.

In 1987, six years after publication, Mapanje was arrested without charge and imprisoned in Mikuyu Prison for three years and seven months — held initially without books, writing materials, or contact with his family. The international campaign for his release involved Amnesty International, PEN, and writers worldwide. He was released in 1991 and left for exile in the United Kingdom. The imprisonment proved what the poems contained: the censors who had missed the critique in 1981 had simply been wrong, and the government that eventually imprisoned him understood what it had been reading.

The National Voice

Of Chameleons and Gods captures Malawian experience through the method the dictatorship itself made necessary: indirection. The poems do not say what they mean directly — directness under Banda was a form of suicide — but they carry their meaning in the specific images, rhythms, and cultural references of Chewa oral tradition, which serves as both aesthetic form and political camouflage. The chameleon of the title is the perfect figure: the creature that survives by appearing to be something other than what it is, whose power lies in the gap between surface and substance.

The Malawi that emerges is a country of lakes and villages, of tobacco estates and fishing boats, of the particular landscape of the south-central plateau where the Chewa live — the red earth, the baobab trees with their grotesque trunks, the maize patches, the mangoes ripening in the hot season. Mapanje renders this landscape with the warmth of someone who loves it and the precision of someone who knows it is being used as an instrument of power. Banda claimed the traditional authority of the Chewa chief — styling himself Ngwazi, the Conqueror — while suppressing the very traditions from which he drew legitimacy.

The Chewa cultural references structuring the poems — the chameleon as spirit-world figure, the Gule Wamkulu masked dance, the proverbs encoding accumulated wisdom about power — are not decorative but functional. They carry meaning available to readers who share the cultural context and opaque to those who do not. This opacity was a survival strategy: a way of speaking to Malawians in the presence of censors who could read English but not Chewa cultural code. The nation recognises itself in these poems precisely because the recognition requires shared knowledge that no outsider fully possesses.

The Historical Ground

Malawi's postcolonial history is dominated by Hastings Kamuzu Banda, who led the country to independence in 1964 and ruled as Life President until 1994 — thirty years of one-party rule that reshaped political culture, education, cultural production, and daily life. The Malawi Congress Party was the sole legal party, the press was controlled, the Malawi Censorship Board scrutinised all publications, and the security apparatus — centred on the Young Pioneers paramilitary and Special Branch police — monitored and punished dissent.

Banda had been invited back from decades of medical practice in Britain and Ghana to lead the independence movement. Within two years of independence, a 1964 cabinet crisis — in which several ministers challenged his authoritarian tendencies — resulted in the dismissal, exile, and eventual killing of dissenters. The pattern was set: total personal control, enforced through a combination of traditional authority, Cold War diplomacy (Banda maintained relations with apartheid South Africa, earning Western tolerance), and systematic repression.

The Censorship Board, established in 1968, examined all publications for content deemed subversive or immoral. Writers working in Malawi operated under constant surveillance. Self-censorship was as effective as formal censorship. Of Chameleons and Gods was published in London precisely because the Heinemann imprint gave it international visibility that may have delayed — though did not ultimately prevent — the regime's response. The six-year gap between publication and Mapanje's arrest measures not the regime's tolerance but the time it took the censors to understand what the chameleon had been carrying.

The Literary Landscape

Malawian literature in English is a small but significant tradition, emerging from the mission-education system established under British colonial rule. The mission schools — Church of Scotland, Catholic, Anglican — created the educated class from which Malawi's writers emerged, and the tension between mission Christianity and indigenous cultural practice runs through the tradition.

The first generation includes Legson Kayira, whose autobiography I Will Try (1965) — the story of his walk from Nyasaland to the United States to attend university — was an international success, and David Rubadiri, whose poem "Stanley Meets Mutesa" (1962) was anthologised in every major collection of African poetry. Rubadiri's novel No Bride Price (1967) addresses post-independence tensions. Both left Malawi — a pattern Banda's dictatorship made virtually inevitable for ambitious writers.

Mapanje represents the generation that stayed and attempted to produce literature within the regime's constraints. His university position gave him an institutional base; his linguistic training gave him the deep knowledge of Chewa tradition that the poems deploy. Frank Chipasula, Steve Chimombo, and Felix Mnthali form the cohort of poets who, like Mapanje, attempted coded dissent within or at the margins of the Malawian system. Of Chameleons and Gods is chosen over their work because it most completely realises the method that the Malawian political situation demanded — the art of saying everything while appearing to say nothing — and because its subsequent confirmation by the regime's violence gave it a historical authority no other Malawian work possesses.

The Reading

Glory be to Chingwe's Hole

Glory be to Chingwe's Hole. The title is the ambush. Chingwe's Hole — a real place, a deep cleft on the Zomba plateau where, in the older traditions, chiefs disposed of prisoners by hurling them into the dark — becomes in Mapanje's hands the figure for what an authoritarian state does to the people who oppose it. The poem's mock-doxology, its mimicry of liturgy, is the precise technique the collection has been training the reader for: praise that is curse, prayer that is indictment, a voice that can be read past censors who know how to look for opposition but have not yet learned to look for irony. The hole devours. The hole has always devoured. The hole, in 1981, is still devouring, and the praise is a way of naming the devouring without ever quite saying the names of the devoured.

The lake is always there. Lake Malawi, the great body of fresh water defining the country's eastern border — deeper than the politics, older than any government, indifferent to whoever claims to rule its shores. The fishermen cast their nets at dawn, pulling chambo and kampango from the dark water in patterns learned from their fathers who learned from theirs. The women dry the fish on wooden racks along the lakeshore, the smell of it carrying across the sand in the hot season, the children swimming in the shallows while their mothers beat clothes against the rocks. The lake feeds and drowns without discrimination. It does not care about the Malawi Congress Party. It has been here longer than any human arrangement and will be here after every human arrangement has failed.

The Plateau

The Zomba plateau rises from the hot lowlands — the flat-topped mountain where Chancellor College sits, where the old colonial capital decays gracefully in its English gardens, where the mist forests make the light uncertain. The air is cooler there, the vegetation different, the quality of the days slower and more deliberate. On the plateau, thinking happens — but it happens under observation. The university is one of the few spaces where intellectual life continues in something approaching proper form, though the surveillance is constant: what is taught, what is discussed, who meets with whom. The Special Branch men are known by name. They attend lectures. They sit in the common room drinking tea. Their presence is so ordinary it has become the weather of academic life — something you dress for and work around but do not discuss.

A poem about the marketplace: the sound of women's voices bargaining over salt, over cloth, the quality of this season's beans, the cost of paraffin. The voices carry the accents of the region — Chichewa inflected with the particular vowels of the lakeshore, of the south, of the Shire highlands — and their ordinariness is itself a form of resistance. To record ordinary Malawian life with precision and love is, in a state that has decided ordinary life is not the proper subject of art, already an act of defiance. The market women do not know they are being political. They are buying salt. But the poem that renders their voices accurately is carrying what the censors have forbidden: the reality of Malawian experience, unmediated by the state's narrative of what Malawi is and means.

The Chameleon

The chameleon moves along its branch with the deliberation of a creature that knows exactly where it is going and exactly what it must look like while it goes there. Each foot placed with infinite care. Each eye rotating independently — one watching where the next step falls, the other scanning for the predator. The colour changing as the branch changes, as the light changes, as the observer changes. The chameleon is not dishonest; it is alive. Dishonesty implies a fixed self that is being hidden. The chameleon's self is the act of adaptation itself — the continuous, moment-by-moment assessment of what the environment requires and the continuous, moment-by-moment response that keeps it alive on the branch while the hawks circle overhead.

In Chewa cosmology the chameleon is ambiguous. It moves between worlds. It is associated with the spirit Chauta and with the capacity to see what is hidden from ordinary eyes. The chameleon brought death to the world, in the old story — sent as a messenger by God with news of mortality, it moved too slowly, and by the time it arrived the message had already been superseded. The creature that carries messages but arrives too late; the creature that sees everything but cannot speak; the creature whose survival depends on appearing to be something other than what it is. For a poet in Banda's Malawi, the identification is complete.

The gods of the title are not the gods of the spirit world. They are the gods of the state — Banda and his circle, who have taken upon themselves the power to determine what can be said and thought and written in the country they control. They are gods because they exercise the divine prerogative of life and death over expression. The chameleon exists in their presence: it sees them, it knows what they are, it cannot say what it knows without dying. So it changes colour. It moves slowly along its branch. It watches with its independently rotating eyes. And it survives.

The Dance

The Gule Wamkulu — the great masked dance of the Chewa Nyau secret society, performed at funerals and initiations — moves through the poems as one of the most powerful figures. The dancers wear masks of spirits and animals, their bodies covered in banana leaves and raffia, and they perform the communication between living and dead that ordinary speech cannot carry. The mask says what the face cannot. The dance performs what words cannot articulate. The meaning is carried by the body in motion — and the audience understands because they share the knowledge that makes the performance legible.

The poems themselves are verbal masks. They present one face to the uninitiated reader — the censor, the regime, the foreigner who reads English but not Chewa cultural code — and another face to the reader who knows how to see through the mask to the dance beneath. A poem about young men dancing is, for the Malawian reader, a poem about the Young Pioneers: the uniformed enforcers whose boots on the road carried a specific menace that no foreigner could hear in the rhythm of the verse. A poem about rain is a poem about waiting for change. A poem about the baobab tree is a poem about the kind of survival that does not require beauty — the ugly, stubborn, centuries-long survival that outlasts whatever storms arrive.

The tobacco estates of the central region — vast commercial farms where seasonal workers laboured under conditions the rhetoric of African independence carefully obscured — enter the poems as economic understructure. The workers, many of them migrants from Mozambique and Zambia, lived in a form of exploitation that the word barely describes. The poems that touch the estates carry this knowledge: that Malawi's economy was built on labour extraction that the political narrative of dignity and sovereignty was designed to hide.

The Waiting

The rain. The annual rains that determine whether Malawi eats or starves, arriving in November if they arrive at all, transforming the landscape from brown dust to green abundance in the space of weeks. Every Malawian waits for the rain regardless of region or ethnicity — the farmer watching the sky, the woman carrying water from a well that drops lower each dry-season day, the child who remembers last year's hunger and watches the clouds with the same quality of attention. The waiting for rain is the figure for the other waiting — the waiting for political change, for the end of the regime, for the possibility that organises the consciousness of everyone who lives under it without ever quite arriving.

The Shire River flowing south from the lake through the lowlands toward the Zambezi — carrying what is given to it, arriving at the sea regardless of who rules the country through which it passes. The river is philosophical: it does not stop for governments; it does not ask permission; it simply moves, century after century, wearing away whatever stands in its path with the patience of water that has infinite time. The conviction beneath all the poems is here: that Malawi's current condition is temporary, that the forces flowing through the country — its people, its culture, its relationship to the land — are larger and more enduring than any political arrangement.

We wondered about the mellow peaches. The poem of that title is the technique at its quietest: a domestic still life — fruit on a sill, an afternoon, a question that sounds like nothing — into which the whole apparatus of patronage and fear has been folded so carefully that an ordinary reader could miss it and a careful one cannot. The peaches are too perfect. Someone has arranged them. Someone is watching how they are received. The poem does not say what it means. It does not need to. The Malawian reader, who has spent a lifetime decoding precisely this register, hears the sermon inside the salutation, the warning inside the gift. Censorship produces a literature trained to compress meaning into objects the censor cannot prosecute, and Mapanje, the linguist of Chewa oral tradition, knows that this compression is also a return to something older — the proverb, the riddle, the parable in which everything important is carried by what is not said.

The Carnival Closes

When this carnival finally closes — when the performance of the regime ends, the stadium rallies with Banda in his homburg hat and dark suit, the compulsory displays of loyalty by the women's league, the youth marches, the songs composed in praise of the Life President — what will remain? The question is political prophecy and existential inquiry simultaneously. The rallies are theatrical productions of state power — performances, costumes, scripts, audiences — and the poem uses the language of theatre to describe them because theatre is what they are: not governance but spectacle, not authority but display.

What remains when the performance ends? Something of the people must remain, because people are not only what their governments make of them. The women who grew the food, raised the children, maintained the social networks, kept the rituals alive — they were invisible in the political narrative while being essential to the reality beneath it. The poems about women are acts of recognition: they see the people doing the work of keeping Malawi alive while the men in uniform patrol the streets.

The collection does not resolve. Its final poems carry a quality of exhaustion that is also persistence — the exhaustion of a mind that has been watching carefully for a long time and knows the watching must continue because there is no one else to do it. The chameleon holds its position on the branch. Still watching. Still changing colour. Still alive. That it is still alive is the final statement: the survival of the seeing eye in conditions designed to blind it is itself the achievement. The poems are the proof that survival was not merely physical but intellectual, moral, artistic — the preservation of everything the gods wanted to destroy.

This post is part of the One Book Per Country series — 195 countries, one defining book each, working through the literary map of the world.

The Heinemann African Writers Series edition remains the standard for the original collection. For readers wanting a broader selection of Mapanje's work — including the prison poems — the Bloodaxe New and Selected is the essential companion volume.