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 & shy; 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.
| ISBN | 0224081063 | | Pages | 336 | | ISBN13 | 9780224081061
(What's this?) | | Weight (grammes) | 470 | | Publisher | Vintage | | Published in | London | | Imprint | Jonathan Cape Ltd | | Height (mm) | 223 | | Format | Hardback | | Width (mm) | 144 | | Publication date | 03 Jul 2008 | | Spine width (mm) | 28 | | DEWEY | 968.9704092 | | Academic level | General | | DEWEY edition | DC22 | |
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| | | The Jive Talker | | 1 |
| | | Native | | 7 |
| | | Kasungu | | 15 |
| | | Mulanje | | 25 |
| | | Blantyre | | 33 |
| | | Nkhota-Kota | | 67 |
| | | Arthur's Nuclear Bunker | | 107 |
| | | Mulanje II | | 145 |
| | | Kamuzu Academy | | 177 |
| | | Sisero | | 229 |
| | | Lilongwe | | 259 |
| | | Johannesburg | | 275 |
| | | Zomba | | 295 |
| | | Europe | | 315 |
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