LoveReading Says
In The Jive Talker, artist, author and academic Samson Kambalu has created an illuminating memoir that follows his journey from a Malawi-born boy who loved philosophy, football and fashion, to a globally-acclaimed artist, associate professor of fine art at Ruskin College and fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Amidst the exuberance and turmoil of childhood in Malawi, Kambalu is clear that he “began to regard myself as an artist when I was seven years old, a few days after I started school at Chitawira Full Primary. We were learning how to read clock faces. In one arithmetic exercise, my answers were all wrong but my teacher still gave me ten out of ten because my clock faces looked good. She said I was an artist.”
This artist’s eye permeates the entire book, with splendidly descriptive writing showcasing Kambalu’s artistic verve. Heart-breaking on the loss of his father, with the preface highlighting how his deceased mother’s presence permeates the book, The Jive Talker dances with wit — this is autobiography at its immersive, illuminating best.
Joanne Owen
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The Jive Talker Synopsis
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.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780224081061 |
| Publication date: |
3rd July 2008 |
| Author: |
Samson Kambalu |
| Publisher: |
Jonathan Cape an imprint of Random House |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| Pagination: |
320 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Biographies & Autobiographies
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| Other Genres: |
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