The Jive Talker - Samson Kambalu

Over the last week, I read a book called The Jive Talker by Samson Kambalu. Kambalu is a conceptual artist who was born and brought up in the east African state of Malawi and the book is his autobiographical account of those early days. Actually, The Jive Talker takes us up to Kambalu's marriage in 2001, but I shall come back to that - or rather, his wife - in a moment.

The Jive Talker of the title is Kambalu's father. He was a senior doctor within the Malawian health service who had a penchant for knowledge - owning a book case called the Diptych which none of his children were allowed to touch; for believing he would become a multimillionaire and for speaking nonsense - jive.

There is a lot of jive in Kambalu's book and not all of it comes from his father. Disease is a form of jive and my goodness is that prevalent. Samson Kambalu is a small man, of slight build, but he must have had the constitution of an ox to survive childhood. Diarrhoea, Malaria and a bizarrely named illness called jiggers all make an unpleasant appearance. As does, most tragically, AIDS. There is a leper in the garden, a mentally ill woman dancing among the trees and all many of sick people waiting to be cured with Kambalu' s own sunshine pills.

Jive also comes in the form of people. Fraudsters and prostitutes in South Africa, Eton in Africa, schoolboys with names like Zinjanthropus, Nimbostratus and Keep Off The Grass. The third of this triptych gained his name from pushing boys onto the grass but goodness knows what the other two mean. Another boy was called The Twelve Caesars - him I would have loved to have met! Schoolboys aside, there is also witch doctors and altogether unfortunate obsessions with elements of Western popular culture.

Jive in The Jive Talker, as it seems to me, anyway, carries a negative connotation, however, the greatest example of jive - beyond the talker - is surely Kambalu's own philosophy: holyballism. Here is its description from his Facebook group:

Holyballism is an expressionist philosophy of life centred around the Holy Ball, a football plastered with the pages of the Bible. Holyballism is History turning a full circle: The founder of monotheism, the first known individual in history, the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten, ‘worshipped’ the sun as the one true God -he learnt from the sun the meaning of life. Holyballism is a return to that attitude through self-expression and the making and the destruction of the Holy Ball through exercises and exorcisms is actually an affirmative enactment of this historical atavism.

Holyballism has four pivotal icons: Akhenaten who conceived God as the sun, Moses who eclipsed the sun with the Word, Christ who perceived the Word as man, and Nietzsche who brought back God -the sun as the meaning of the Word.

We are here to shine, man! That’s what history teaches us.

How To Make A Holy Ball

1. Take a football, loosened
Holy Book Pages and PVA glue.
2. Plaster the pages onto the ball one by one
until completely covered.
3. Allow the Holy Ball to dry before any exercises
and exorcisms.

Selected Bibliography

The Bible
The Complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche
Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud
Solar Ethics by Don Cuppit
Nietzsche and Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze

As I said at the beginning, Samson Kambalu is a conceptual artist. If he really believes in holyballism as a kind of religion / philosophy then I should be amazed, but as an in-joke with a gilt edge (because as an ideal it contains some sound ideas) it is splendid fun. I shall come back to holyballism in a future post, as for The Jive Talker, holyballism is as close to a conclusion as the autobiography gets. However, given its circularity, this only means that either when you find the first reference to it, you finish the book, or go back to the beginning or even jump to the end. The Jive Talker is an episodic book - ideal for jumping in and out of. I hope to do that in the future, although I will admit that I will never be quick to visit the end. The gaity of the book ends there during the days of the decline of Kambalu's father.

As the above indicates, I enjoyed The Jive Talker. Not just a little, but very much. It is a work of extraordinary conviction and silliness. It is set in an Africa that is oh so familiar but individual. There are many, many poor people, but in Kambalu's narrative they have their own voices not mere Oxfam posters.

The strongest recommendation of The Jive Talker that I can give is that I read it straight after an absolutely brilliant book on the Successors of Alexander the Great and during my run of James Bond novels. The Jive Talker was not only not disgraced by its presence among these great books but held its position worthily. This I say with great pleasure because through Ezair I am acquainted with Samson Kambalu's wife, Susan and as she occasionally reads this blog, she might well read this review.