Book description
Samson Kambalu's father wore three-piece, London-made suits from the
Sixties. He'd planned to be a doctor but settled for hospital
administration and a peripatetic lifestyle with his ever expanding
family in tow. He is 'the Jive Talker' of this extraordinary memoir -
a man of thwarted ambition, boundless optimism and manic
philosophising, he died of AIDS in 1995, bequeathing his son 'the
Diptych' - an eclectic library of science, philosophy and English
language classics  a passion for words and a boundless imagination.
In this completely original, often subversive, book, Samson Kambalu
writes of his childhood in Malawi, a country few are able to pinpoint
on a map. As the family moves from feast to real poverty and
deprivation, and back to plenty again, depending on their father's
professional fortunes, we are introduced to life in a country in which
no dissent is tolerated, where political opponents are 'disappeared'
and a portrait of Life President Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda is always
guaranteed to be watching. But this is also a country in which a
little boy obsessed with books, girls, Nietzsche, fashion, football
and Michael Jackson wins a free education at the Kamuzu Academy ('The
Eton of Africa') and grows up to be one of England's most promising
young conceptual artists. With dazzling prose, wicked humour and not a
little bit of artistic licence, The Jive Talker opens the door
to an Africa that is rarely written about.
SAMSON KAMBALU was born in Malawi in 1975. He holds degrees in Fine
Art and Ethnomusicology and is the recipient of several awards for his
work 'Holy Ball Exercises and Exorcisms'. He has exhibited as widely as
the Liverpool Biennale and the World Cup. He lives with his wife in
London.
