The Jive Talker E-Book

Samson Kambalu

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

A bawdy, brilliant and heartbreaking memoir by the award-winning Malawian-born artist. With exuberant prose, a cast of extraordinary characters and a rebellious spirit, Samson Kambalu tells the story of how a little boy obsessed with fashion, football, Nietzsche and Michael Jackson won a free education at the Kamuzu Academy ('The Eton of Africa') and began his long journey to art school, and international artistic and academic success. The son of a philosophising, hard-drinking, poorly paid hospital manager, Kambalu's award-winning conceptual work is now shown in galleries across the world and still evokes that childhood landscape of literary excitement, family chaos and music; post-colonial injustice, poverty and Aids. 'A book filled with wonder, humour and hope. It is a magnificent achievement.' Aminatta Forna, Sunday Telegraph 'Read Kambalu, cry, clap your hands.' Iain Finlayson, The Times 'A truly original book.'Pride Magazine

Leseprobe

Samson Kambalu was born in 1975 in Malawi. He lives and works in Oxford where he is an Associate Professor of Fine Art and Director of Research at the Ruskin School of Art and a fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford University.

An artist and writer working in a variety of media, including site-specific installation, video, performance and literature, Kambalu’s work is autobiographical and approaches art as an arena for critical thought and sovereign activities. It fuses aspects of the Nyau culture of the Chewa, the anti-reification theories of the Situationist movement and the Protestant tradition of inquiry, criticism and dissent.

Kambalu holds a PhD in Fine Art from UAL’s Chelsea School of Art, looking at contemporary art and economies of the gift. He has won research fellowships with Yale University and the Smithsonian Institution. He has exhibited his work around the world including the biennials in Dakar, Liverpool and Venice. His work Antelope will appear on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth from 2022 to 2024.

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First published in paperback in 2022 by September Publishing

Copyright © Samson Kambalu 2008, 2022

The right of Samson Kambalu to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Schistosomiasis (p.72) from The British Medical Association IllustratedMedical Dictionary, edited by Martyn Page (Dorling Kindersley, 2002). Copyright © 2002 Dorling Kindersley Limited, London; Have you not heard … (p. 88) from A Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (Penguin Classics, 1977). Introduction, selection and translation copyright © R.J. Hollingdale; What if some day …(p. 107) from The Gay Science, by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufman © 1974 by Random House, Inc.; Allthe highest forms … (p. 186) from Love, Sex and Tragedy: Why Classics Matter, Simon Goldhill (John Murray, 2004); I’ve turned fullcircle … (p. 205) from The Guitar Handbook, Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of Ralph Denyer Copyright © Ralph Denyer 1982.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder

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Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Hussar Books

ISBN 9781914613180

Ebook ISBN 9781914613197

September Publishing

www.septemberpublishing.org

In memory of Jane and Aaron

Contents

Preface

From Holy Ball Exercises and Exorcisms, Chancellor College, Zomba

Prologue

The Jive Talker

Native

Kasungu

Mulanje

Blantyre

Nkhota-Kota

Arthur’s Nuclear Bunker

Mulanje II

Kamuzu Academy

Sisero

Lilongwe

Johannesburg

Zomba

Europe

Photos

Acknowledgements

If the natives are not elevated by their contacts withEuropeans, they are sure to be deteriorated.

Dr David Livingstone

I am no man,I am dynamite.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Preface

Enthusiasm in art is usually driven by loss. I was driven to write this book when I lost my mother, following my move to the UK in 2001, but strangely she was the one character that was hard to write about.

Mothers are hard to write about. My publisher tells me the filmmaker Jean Renoir directs only one line to his mother’s death in his book Renoir, My Father. He wouldn’t have meant it badly. I think it was because when you write about childhood you are in your mother’s arms looking out, and she is forever very close to you – you have no perspective on her. In childhood mothers can only be felt. That was the approach in The Jive Talker when it came to my mother; I decided to let her be the presence in the book.

When I lost my mother, I could feel her, even hear her. In fact, it was only in the third year of her passing that I felt her loss. It was my father who was missing. When he died in 1995 that was it. I had to find him. I wrote The Jive Talker to bring my parents together in death – to bring our family together in the life that lay ahead of me. It was a labour of love.

This book is shaped like a noose; the end is the middle. When I talk about the death of God that might as well be the end of the book. That should capture the sense of existential loss that I experienced moving to Britain from Malawi in my twenties soon after losing my parents. I had to start over.

All the while I was surprised at how simply life was regarded in Britain. It was a ratchet affair. Humans here were looking for a better life, meaning material wealth offered by capitalism. One was here to ‘consume’. Even my marriage to my Scottish wife Susan was reduced to bare life, necessity and utility. In Britain there was no room or language for humans who simply moved because they had feet. There was no room for a young African wandering the earth driven by love, romance and an existential loss. I gave the book a subtitle and an ironic theme in the local vernacular – How to Get a British Passport.

If only life was that simple!

Paperbacks usually take a few months to come out following publication in hardback, The Jive Talker has taken more than ten years – fourteen years actually! The paperback was dropped by Random House in the recession of 2008. Simon and Schuster followed suit in America. Back then it was easily assumed that an African book wouldn’t sell. As I write this there appears to be a new economic turbulence precipitated by the Covid pandemic. I pray the book is not dropped again! I think there is something about the book that correlates to such times – like a catchy blues tune written in the time of the Great Depression. Economic hardship humanises and to a certain extent aids creativity. There would be no Jive Talker without the economic hardship and the Aids pandemic that befell Africa in my formative years in Malawi towards the end of the twentieth century. But my new publisher Hannah MacDonald has always believed in this book and I am happy to see her eventually rescue it from the dustbin of history back into the light of the day.

Thus, soon after its release in 2008, The Jive Talker began its descent into obscurity in the English-speaking world, despite encouraging reviews. There was enthusiasm from those who came across the few copies in circulation, but I fell into depression. I grew a beard, which gradually cheered me up. I moved on. I moved away from the bohemian life of the Acme Fire Station in Bromley by Bow in east London to the relatively sedate life of Kensal Green, where the large cemetery near my studio on Harrow Road offered me great trippy afternoon strolls among the grey headstones bedecked in artificial flowers and embossed photographs of the deceased, who followed me around the cemetery with their faded eyes. My parents roamed among headstones with me and I communed with them in this terrible silence right in the middle of the hectic London metropolis.

I think I was the first person to reveal the secret burial place of the ashes of one Farrokh Bulsara, i.e. Freddie Mercury, at Kensal Green Cemetery – an old, sinewy gardener with a grizzled white beard in a blue hood showed me where, with a trembling finger. I made a film of the small bronze plaque installed over the spot and posted it on YouTube, which since has had over one million views. I had my poet friend and classicist Ted Jenner from New Zealand who was visiting me play the gardener and read out the plaque signed M., which I believed stood for Mary Austin, Freddie Mercury’s ex-wife:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF FARROKH BULSARA

5 SEPT. 1946 – 24 NOV. 1991

POUR ETRE TOUJOURS

PRES DE TOI

AVEC TOUT MON AMOUR

M.

To be forever near you, with all my love … People started to make a pilgrimage to Kensal Green to see the secret place of Mercury’s burial following that video. The plaque has since been removed and Mary Austin has denied there are any ashes of Freddie Mercury in Kensal Green Cemetery.

This seems like a diversion, but it should capture how idle my life felt at the time, mourning my parents, who like Freddie Mercury had perished in the Aids epidemic of the 1990s.

Penniless and unemployed, I went to the Job Centre at Harlesden and began to sign on. It wasn’t money to live on but it was enough to take you to the off licence down the road, to get a few cans of Red Stripe and make new friends with the veteran unemployed, usually free-spirited British Caribbeans whose lineage in the area dated back to the Windrush, and who in my opinion had gifted everything I thought was beautiful about modern Britain. It was the most elevating assembly of sovereign souls. These men had chosen not to work for the man for years and had grown dreadlocks – some put tattoos on their faces to instil permanent dread in those who would be tempted to employ them and reduce them to the uses of Babylon. When they went to the Job Centre and said they could not find work the unemployment clerks believed them and handed them the money.

I was obviously green. I couldn’t get away with an unemployment allowance for too long. Or maybe I just didn’t know how to fill in the papers properly as time progressed. The shaggy beard and the wrinkled second-hand jacket on my back marked me more as a down-and-out non-classifiable entity rather than a practitioner of true Marronage. Growing dreadlocks and putting tattoos on my face was tempting but I believed I had other equally effective alternative means. The prime minister David Cameron was calling the likes of me and my sovereign company ‘spongers’ in parliament, thus scapegoating us for the plight of the recession. The job centres became hostile. The forms had something to make you trip up and not get the dole hidden under every dotted line and behind every tick box. Eventually a surly mouthed unemployment clerk eyed me down and asked me to accept a job as a door man at some firm in the City or she was going to cut out my Jobseeker’s Allowance. Apparently there was no realistic chance for me to find a lecturing job in London, not even to teach a creative writing course or an art class at a community centre in Harlesden! I reckoned it was because I was an African immigrant and black. I went out of that place furious and disgusted. I headed straight to the corner shop down the road and bought a Red Stripe with the last money I had in my pocket.

My sovereign company gave my rant an empathetic hearing, as they did always. I think most British believe they are better and more able than the immigrant. If they, having been born and reared in Britain, were not teaching in the university themselves but handing out food stamps in the Job Centre, how could an immigrant from Africa do better? After the job as a door man in the City I reckoned they would train me as a taxi driver, or perhaps send me to sell lotions and potions in the bathrooms of some ropy clubs in Soho or Mayfair, as my brother, Elson, had warned me about my prospects in racist Britain. Such would be my miserable career trajectory even when I was a published writer and an accomplished artist with an exceptional classical education. Now, I don’t smoke the herb but that afternoon I took a few hits from my sovereign company, who were more surprised at my reaction than at Babylon and her old tricky ways.

But, as they say, the darkest hour usually comes before dawn. I did not have to pick a job as a doorman in the City or work in the toilet in Mayfair and Soho. The Jive Talker was taken up in German in 2010 by Unionsverlag and it did much better than I anticipated. I joked with my German translator Marlies Ruß that perhaps she was a better writer than me!

I soon found that in Europe there was more faith in art and philosophy, and less cultural cynicism. I toured with The Jive Talker for four years in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, in literature houses, cafes and universities. Eventually I ended up at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, the birthplace of Dada, an art movement, along with Surrealism and Situationism, that offered me an entry point into modern art as an African student of Western art at Kamuzu Academy and the University of Malawi. I took my first conceptual work of art, Holy Ball, with me – a gleaming white football plastered in pages of the Bible. I would read from my book and end the reading by ‘exercising and exorcising’ with my audiences with the Holy Ball. We kicked the ball about. The world for us was a field of play where the centre was everywhere, and the end was to be found nowhere. There is no topic in continental philosophy or theology from Hegel to Žižek that the Holy Ball would not touch on. For me this disarmingly simple work of art, Holy Ball, was the Kingdom Come.

I made Holy Ball when I was a young associate lecturer in Fine Art at Chancellor College, Zomba, from 1999 to 2002. I was busy painting at the time – Cubist-inspired figurative paintings exploring African myths and traditional everyday life. They were popular with tourists and ‘expats’ (a euphemism for the European immigrant in Africa), but I was searching for a voice too. Often enough I was painting. My flat in Chirunga at the foot of Zomba plateau resembled a salon in the evening, when young scholars from around the world, in residence at Chancellor College, would gather, look at my paintings and have a drink.

One day, taking a break from painting and kicking a ball about in my studio, discussing philosophy and religion with my sister Chikondi, I saw the ball plastered in pages of the Bible and that’s what I did. I pulled pages of the terrible KJV Bible and used PVA glue to plaster the soft pages nicely around the ball, stretching them along the contours so the pages did not crease. When the ball dried it glowed in my hand. It was my moment of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus – I dropped painting right away and became a conceptual artist and an ‘African Artist’.

The Holy Ball became a personal symbol for my new approach to art as an arena of critical thought and sovereign activities. For years I had been trained in the Western mimetic tradition in painting and soapstone sculpture. Holy Ball took me beyond mimesis into the idea of art not merely as representation, as the Greeks had proposed, but art as the practice of everyday life as the Situationists led by Guy Debord had proposed, in the 1950s, after the failure of Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary tropes against reification in late modernity. Where painting appeared to separate me from the people and the everyday life, reducing me to the world of things, now art connected me with the people and the larger schemes of things.

I took Holy Ball with me to the marketplace at Zomba. Christians and non-Christians came to partake in the work with me. It was a uniting element, but it could also divide and inspire heated discussions and debates about the nature of God, religion and what it meant to be alive in a post-Christian world.

The Holy Ball exhibition I had at Chancellor College in Zomba was probably the first exhibition of conceptual art in Malawi, not because there is no art in Malawi but because in Malawi art is already the practice of the everyday life, a radical democracy orchestrated in play by Nyau masking structures, the Gule Wamkulu (the Great Play), which date back to pre-historic times. The Gule Wamkulu employ nyau (excess) to call into question forms of power and received ideas to make room for new ways of looking at the world, and as a means of maintaining human dignity. I have argued in my work and elsewhere that new forms of Nyau can be found within modern media, such as photography and film, which have been adapted by Africans for their own socialised aesthetic needs. Holy Ball was more for the world that lay ahead of me.

When the ball appears in my childhood in The Jive Talker it’s with a lot of poetic licence. Who is the Jive Talker? One thing for sure my father kept a lot of books, and Jive Talked, that is, philosophised, with a bottle of beer in hand. He never kept many children’s books in the house so growing up in the remotest part of Africa, where he was managing health clinics, I read Freud and Nietzsche instead of Roald Dahl or Enid Blyton. For my father education through books was everything – reading for him was essentially a sovereign activity. Those who couldn’t read he called ‘natives’, a word he was entitled to, being a native himself. I never saw him read a book but he spoke like he had read every book.

In 2000, soon after I made Holy Ball as a performative work of art, I moved to Holland for a residency at Thami Mnyele, originally to study painting, but when my mentor the great Marlene Dumas saw how I connected with people via the Holy Ball, even here, a supposedly secular and post-Christian Europe, she encouraged me to stay on the conceptual route. And that’s what I did, from that residency to my MA in fine art at Nottingham Trent University in 2002, to eventually moving to a five-year artist residency at the Acme Fire Station in London from 2005 to 2010. There, with a small Arts Council grant, I sat in the studio for three years to write The Jive Talker.

After my residency in Amsterdam I had won a place to study at the Slade in London but I’d had to give it up because it was expensive. I had permanent leave to remain in the UK through my marriage to Susan in 2001, but for four years to come I was still to be regarded as a foreign student. I think my life would have been easier if I had come to Britain on a scholarship – I was always intelligent enough for that. A marriage visa is designed to put pressure on your relationship in the first few years. It’s a miracle Susan and I survived as such measures left our relationship not as well balanced as it had been in Malawi. I know so many mixed marriages that ended up in failure in those first ten years because of power imbalances imposed by the Home Office on foreign partners. A foreign partner could only work a limited number of hours a week for a significantly long period of time – and during that time the only jobs guaranteed to them were either menial or part-time, no matter their level of skill or education. Susan and I moved to Nottingham so I could do a cheaper MA degree as a foreign student, but even that was super expensive and left us in a lot of debt for years.

I worked as a part-time teacher across schools in the Midlands to supplement our income as I studied – the kids seldom did any work for me but I was young enough and black enough to keep their perpetual intrigue. ‘Can you rap, sir? Which football team do you support? Are you married?’ I could rap a bit – I was into Nas’s Illmatic, by then knew it by heart; I supported the golden days of Chelsea starring Zola and Hasselbaink; I was married – to a Scot. My wife taught religious education at Swanwick Hall School in Derbyshire. I was a ‘wicked’ teacher from the feedback I got, but one day I came home and told Susan I would not be working any more. I had made my bed as an artist and I had to lie in it. It was one of the wisest decisions I have ever made for my career as an artist.

Now when I teach art I tell my students never work if you can help it. Live off your mum and dad, or partner, for as long as you can to develop your work. Apply for a grant, don’t take rejections personally. If you wanted to be a long-distance runner or a good musician, would you not practise for hours every day? How could your craft improve if you were working all the time and only had one tired hour at the end of the day for your own work? You would not compete with full-time sovereigns on the corner, honing their thoughts and craft for hours on end. If you look at history, all great artists have supportive partners or patrons. The artist Pierre Bonnard said a professional artist is simply a man who has found a wife to support him! Picasso was supported by his partners before he made it in Paris. If your partner is a philistine dump them quickly. A good partner or a patron knows what art is worth.

Shortly after I posted my manuscript for The Jive Talker to several literary agents from Angel in Islington, London, I had an agent, Laetitia Rutherford at Toby Eady Associates, and a top publisher, Jonathan Cape at Random House. Laetitia got offers within a week of her sending out the manuscript. Contrary to what I had been told: that it was almost impossible to publish an unsolicited manuscript.

Why did I post the manuscript at Angel? – well, I thought it was my lucky spot, as one evening coming out of a cinema there I bumped into my teenage pin-up, the singer Sade. She was alone, incognito. She hid her hair in a baseball cap, wore a white T-shirt, blue jeans and white trainers. She looked sprightly, chewing gum, looking like a boy, an unlit cigarette in her hand – then bump! into me. I looked at her speckled face in the half light of the red corridor and whispered to her a sure, ‘Sade!’ She fully revealed her face to me with that enigmatic smile as I handed her my notebook. She signed ‘Sade X’ and bounced away into the night and nobody knew who she was. On stage there was the sexiest woman I had seen as teenager, in real life she looked like a young black man who could survive anywhere on the streets of London.

The publisher of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at Harper Collins made an offer for my book – Adichie was then the hottest African ticket in literature – but I turned them down looking at the big names I admired on the Jonathan Cape list – Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth … Who would say no to such a list? Looking back I sometimes regretted it. I couldn’t have registered at all in such a list.

I did not lose hope. Perhaps it’s true what Hegel said, that what’s ‘good’ appears. Sade had appeared to me at Angel all the same, all for an audience of one – just me.

In 2010 I had a German publisher and was beginning a new European journey. In Switzerland I connected with anthroposophists, the followers of the Swiss mystic Rudolf Steiner, who took me away from London into the wilds of the Swiss mountains and back to Africa, metaphorically. Anthroposophists taught me to regard African culture as far more superior to the consumerist culture of Pop Idol, Big Brother and soap operas that I was wallowing in at the time. They took me to African concerts – West African griots and Kola players, etc., which I surprisingly really loved. I had originally resisted them fearing they were exoticising me, but then I had also studied ethnomusicology as an undergraduate in Malawi and the cultural philistinism attitude towards all things ‘exotic’, which I had taken up in my early days in Britain, quickly deserted me.

I ate better, having been taught selective food shopping, to avoid junk food and how to cook. In the evening I played my guitar, improving my chops in Delta blues playing alongside Son House, Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, and drank some good wine instead of retiring in front of a TV with a beer to watch the latest football highlights. I watched art house films rather than Hollywood junk – Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Rainer Werner Fassbinder … from Africa, Sembene and Djibril Diop Mambéty were favourites, various early film directors, Murnau, Méliès … I watched every German expressionist film I could come across … every film from UFA studios. I read Rainer Maria Rilke and Robert Walser. I read Tom Gunning on ‘cinema of attractions’.

I exercised a lot. In Switzerland I took to long-distance running round the farms near Basle. I swam in the Rhine whenever I could brave it.

As they say, you are what you eat – the quality of my life improved living among anthroposophists. In Britain my only pastime had been the pub. It appeared that’s all most British do for their leisure. Drink lots of beer quickly until you get sick as the pubs close early … But Rudolf Steiner had some questionable ideas on race which only confirmed to me he was all too human to be taken at face value.

Anthroposophy decries a disenchanted universe in modernity and Rudolf Steiner’s musing on the nature of God and spirituality are meant to restore this magic once more. It’s a holistic philosophy grounded in spiritual transcendence within nature. For me it’s his delirious writings themselves that fascinated. And I am sure it was the same for the self-styled ‘shaman’ German performance artist Joseph Beuys who was inspired by his work – an artist who intrigued me.

Thus during 2010 and 2011 I spent a lot of time in Basle, trying to write my difficult second book. I formed a friendship with a harpist, Aite Tinga, a former student of literature and philosophy at the University of Basle, who became my guide and muse through that anthroposophy world. I made a pilgrimage to Goetheanum with her. She would compose new music on her harp and use me as a sounding board, which I did not mind. She was a great musician but I found her charisma, beauty and sensuality drowned out her sophisticated music. Aite enchanted the whole room even when she played out of key. I never gave her this feedback directly, but she could tell that’s what I thought and she worked hard to improve her craft. She got better every day, channelling her gifts into one spellbinding musicianship.

Aite and I would go for long walks in nature but our reaction to nature was different. I think her interpretation of Steiner was Heideggerian with aspects of New Age. She fancied herself a hippie some days and walked around barefoot with flowers in her thick golden hair, her distant eyes a muddy green like the river Rhine in midsummer. I was from the Nyau masking culture of Malawi and the Nietzsche side. While Aite regarded nature in awe and wanted to be part of nature, I regarded myself already a part of nature. She meditated before the trees, even hugged them, I swayed with the trees, and jumped over the fallen logs like an antelope. Aite thought nature was sublime, I thought I was what was sublime in nature. I felt like superman. Nature transformed before my imagination. Aite wanted to attend to nature, I wanted to flee from nature, like that part of nature that falls to the ground and was trampled on by her soft ivory feet. At night I flew across the stars while down below Aite held the stars and the fairies on her fingertips with the fascination of a child lost in play. A chasm of misunderstanding opened up between us in time. Aite found my approach dreadful, and distracting, and our friendship ended in tears.

Thus, I did not become an anthroposophist, but in the Swiss mountains everything I had repressed in The Jive Talker came back to me. Where I had trained as a painter for years I confirmed myself a conceptual artist – like The Jive Talker, or even Rudolf Steiner and Joseph Beuys, a performative philosopher of sorts – a gule, a mask animated by a radical generosity – Nyau. For me man is not only a part of nature but the ‘end’ of nature. I think that’s what the Nyau masking of the Chewa people of my tribe means. There is something in humans that refuses to become part of nature but flees from it, and then falls to the ground. Humanity does not transcend nature, but humanity is precisely what cuts through nature. If God is dead he must walk like a man. I think that’s what the crucifixion means, and Žižek and Badiou would confirm. Jesus, a wretched man of sorrows, was a Chewa – a gule.

As a staunch feminist Aite did not think God could walk like a man. I couldn’t argue with her on that. Walking with Aite I often felt like the spirit of my mother had taken over her body to walk with me during a difficult time.

I started making slapstick laced film vignettes, in which I featured myself as various characters, on found film sets, in cities and the woods – psychogeographical, fragmented and non-linear inspired by early film, the broken down film by itinerant projectionists I watched as a child in the markets in Malawi, and Nyau masking in the remote villages that oddly offered me great relief in my bereavement and alienation. In my imagination through the magical medium of film I found myself walking on water, going through walls. I set down rules for the films I made which I called Nyau Cinema:

Nyau Cinema: The Rules

1. Nyau film must be conceived as a clip no longer than a minute.

2. Performance should be spontaneous and site/ specific to found architecture, landscape or object.

3. There must always be a conversation between performance and the medium of film.

5. Costume must be from everyday life.

6. Acting must be subtle but otherworldly, transgressive and playful.

7. Editing must be limited to the aesthetics of primitive film and silent cinema.

8. Audio must be used sparingly, otherwise it must be performed live at film screenings.

9. Screening of a Nyau film must be in specially designed cinema booths or improvised cinema installations that complement the spirit of the film.

10. Nyau cinema must encourage active participation from audience.

Samson Kambalu 26.8.13

There is no rule number four. That’s my gift to the beholder of these rules. I posted Nyau films on social media and YouTube. A year after posting the rules I was contacted by Joost Bosland of Stevenson Gallery in South Africa who gave me a solo show of Nyau films in Johannesburg, Sepia Rain. The great Nigerian Okwui Enwezor, curator then director of the Venice Biennale 2015, saw the films on his research trip in South Africa and invited me to Venice.

Okwui commissioned three projects from me: The Last Judgement, which was four hundred footballs plastered in pages of the Bible installed at the Garden of the Virgins; Nyau Cinema – Hysteresis at Giardini, which was made up of psychogeographical film vignettes filmed in Europe, America and Russia; and Sanguinetti Breakout Area at Arsenale, which consisted of my playful detournement, documented in photographs, of the archive of the Italian Situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti, which had been sold in controversial circumstances to Yale University. I have shown my work around the world ever since.

Much to the dismay of my patient literary agent Laetitia, now at Watson Little, my difficult second book turned out to be a practice-led PhD at the Chelsea School of Art in London! – looking at the aporia of the gift and how it relates to contemporary African art. I am from Africa, the so-called Third World, and my work was surely inspired by the economies of the gift that have been practised in the region for millennia, rather than the new experimental economy of hoarders, capitalism. I wanted to know the soul of my specific approach to art as praxis. I teamed up with a talented professor and artist, Neil Cummings, and we had a wildly productive few years applying various concepts of the gift in philosophy and anthropology, from Maus to Derrida via Achille Mbembe to my socialised art practice and its African contexts. I spent three years in America for my post-doctoral research, at Yale, the Smithsonian Institution and San Francisco.

Having understood a bit more about the gift I think I have come to understand The Jive Talker was inevitable. In the economy of the gift, the mother is what’s real, the father is the illusion. The more discerning scholars of the economy of gift, such as Derrida, have written that the gift that’s seen is no gift at all as this can only lead to obligation and a counter gift – and eventually to alienating economies of exchange such as capitalism. Real giving is indifferent – like a mother’s love it does not demand a return. It is not quite like charity which is aimed and directed. If one’s gift is truly to be received it can only be given in secret, and as Nietzsche states in Thus Spake Zarathustra true giving takes tremendous skill. Where a real gift has been given there will always be a secret masquerading as gule wamkulu, the great play – the dance of the universe. Nyau masking collectives, dambwes, are called secret societies not because there is a secret to be kept but because these societies are in pursuit of the art of true giving taking the larger society along with them in this quest. In Nyau masking the principal mask, Kasiya Maliro, a womb, disguises as an antelope.

I was already signed by three more galleries, Kate MacGarry in London, Galerie Nordenhake in Stockholm and Goodman Gallery in South Africa, by the time I was invited to apply for and took up a professorship at the Ruskin School of Art and became a fellow at Magdalen College in Oxford in 2017.

Oxford is still steeped in imperial legacy and often feels a bit like a time warp. There is a lot to be done at the university to bring it to modern times in terms of social relations. Oxford remains a difficult place for people of colour, although there has been a slight respite since the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of George Floyd. White people underestimate the racial plight faced by black peoples in their everyday life and at work. This is even more true at Oxford as many there have very little contact with black people. They forget while they might interact with a black person every now and then, where they will exercise a microaggression to assert their privilege, the black person faces such microaggression every day. It can be draining, if not at once, then bit by bit. In the end the black person has no choice but to flee back to big cities such as London for racial respite among diversity.

I teach next to Oriel College where Rhodes – a known racist with low regard for black people – towers over the building, over Jesus, queens and kings, lords, bishops and fellows. Apparently, he paid a lot of money for that privilege and cannot be taken down to accommodate the psychological wellbeing of people of colour.

Oxford is a place where if a person of colour complains of harassment it’s a mere complaint to be addressed with formula anti-racist measures, but if a white colleague complains against a black colleague an inquisition-style formal inquiry is immediately launched. There are tutors at Oxford who say appointments based on diversity will only degrade academic quality at the university. Others believe that appointments to senior positions should make ‘business sense’. For those who don’t know what that means, fee-paying students expect to come to Oxford and study under a white professor, preferably male, as is the tradition.

Where the imperfections of white people are tolerated, their foibles celebrated, as is seen with the Oxford alumnus the Prime Minister Boris Johnson, absolute perfection in manners and intellect is expected in black peoples before they can be accommodated or tolerated. Even then it’s not enough. There are many good and accommodating people at Oxford, and I have made friends and acquaintances with many world-class academics, but you don’t need many prejudiced people in positions of power with such irrational attitudes to keep the university resolutely white and colonial for a millennium.

I will be honest – I think my appointment as a professor at Oxford and my survival there is nothing short of a miracle. The irony is that as I write this we are celebrating the Research Excellence Framework 2021 results (the standard UK-wide assessment of university research), where the Ruskin School of Art is the top research art department in the UK, and a top research department at Oxford University. The top research department at Oxford University is currently led by an immigrant black African, one Professor Samson Kambalu. It’s food for thought.

Thus, even here at Oxford I have been inspired and have been productive whenever the sun shines. Recently I won the prestigious Fourth Plinth commission. My bronze sculpture, Antelope, will feature the Malawian Pan-Africanist John Chilembwe and his friend the English missionary John Chorley. The sculpture is based on a mysterious photograph taken by Chorley’s wife in 1914, at the opening of Chilembwe’s new church, at Providence Industrial Mission at Mbombwe. The two men wear hats and this is the matter of the photograph and my sculpture. In a policy called ‘chotsa chipewa’, it was illegal for the African to wear a hat before white people. If one passed a white person wearing a hat they had to take it off and not put it on again for 500 metres. Failure to do so led to fines and savage police beatings. Some Africans were shot. It’s remarkable how many careers of African politicians fighting colonial rule, such as Masauko Chipembere, were sparked off after beatings by colonial police for wearing a hat before a white person.

Chilembwe anticipated his uprising against colonial injustices in 1914 with this photograph – posing next to his supportive white friend while wearing a hat. He was killed by colonial police months later in 1915. Chilembwe is a Malawian hero for uniting the country beyond tribal lines – the first Pan-Africanist to die fighting colonial injustices in Africa in the twentieth century. He inspired early pioneers of black liberation in America such as Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Dubois, and yet he remains an obscure figure of British colonial history. When the London mayor’s office got in touch that I should propose for the Fourth Plinth, a year before the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, I had Chilembwe as a screen saver on my iPhone. I had discovered the arresting photograph at Weston library when I was writing and editing a book on classics and Malawian political history, A Monument More Lasting Than Bronze, for Harvard University Press. I immediately proposed Chilembwe for the Fourth Plinth. He would be perfect for the equestrian plinth. His name means antelope, but also it can allude to Kasiya Maliro, the Chewa principal mask. In fact I think what makes the photo mysterious is that Chilembwe and Chorley are in performance secretly re-enacting this very antelope mask structure, re-embracing his African cultural heritage even as it’s being moralised by his Western attire and company. Chilembwe’s hat looks oddly like antlers, and that’s because he is surreptitiously wearing his hat sideways for effect. All of Chilembwe’s photographs from that time are enigmas to be deciphered. When I decided to make Chilembwe’s body bigger than Chorley’s, to the size of an antelope, while Chorley’s height remained relative to other figures on Trafalgar Square, such as King George and Generals Napier and Havelock, it was as if Chilembwe was directing me from this photograph. Chilembwe will tower five metres over Trafalgar Square, a sovereign forever representing the dignity of people of colour in the history of the British Empire. I may do other things as an artist, but for me winning this commission is perhaps the most meaningful thing I will ever do as offspring of British colonial history. I have joked with my long-suffering wife Susan that, while she regards herself as British, I am the British Empire.

Samson Kambalu

June 2022

From Holy Ball Exercises and Exorcisms, Chancellor College, Zomba:

Whao! Jesus! Just come down on earth and see this!

Work of an artist.

NUKA 02/08/00 1715HRS

Wonders and puzzles always succeed with free wine.

STEVE

Blasphemy.

ANONYMOUS

Prologue

When my Scottish fiancée and I decided to get married, the consul at the High Commission in Malawi asked me: ‘Are you marrying Susan to get a British passport?’ My reply to that was deliberate. ‘Not really,’ I said. The consul regarded me for a moment and filled in ‘NO’.

‘The answer is NO, OK? The answer is NO,’ he said.

The Jive Talker

1

My father wore three-piece suits that he had ordered from London in the sixties and seventies when he could still afford them. Back then he looked like Nat King Cole, but when I was growing up, he looked like a scarecrow. This was not because his suits were too old (for a good suit can last for ever) but because my mother was obsessive about hygiene. When my father, who was a clinical officer, returned from his weekly round in the hospital wards, she would undress him in the backyard, before he entered the house, and wash his suit to get rid of the tetanus, whooping cough, measles, mumps, TB and other dangerous diseases that she thought she could trace within the familiar scent of aspirin on him. For some reason she did not trust the local dry-cleaners for that kind of job. Her washing machine was the big boulder in the middle of the yard; she would soak the suit in hot water and Sunlight soap and mash it up to a pulp with her strong hands. Thereafter an eerie silence would descend upon the house because the sight of the suit hanging on the line used to scare away all the birds from the surrounding trees.

But my father did not mind looking like a scarecrow. He said he was a philosopher and walked with his head held high in the sky like a giraffe. His favourite study was the toilet. Apart from the fact that it was the only private space in the house, he believed that it was from the toilet that all great ideas came. It was not a coincidence, he said, that Martin Luther conceived the Reformation in the toilet. Our toilet was therefore usually stuffed with an eclectic mix of books from his huge two-part bookshelf in the living room, which he called the Diptych. Many of the books were by his favourite writer, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. My father said that Nietzsche was the perfect philosopher for the toilet because of his searing aphoristic style and cold truths. He had every book that Nietzsche had ever written among the piles of paperbacks by the side of the toilet: The Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditation, Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, The Gay Science, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Nietzsche vs. Wagner, The Will to Power, Ecce Homo and even the one book he is supposed to have written when he went mad towards the end of his life called My Sister and I.

My father made quotations and notes from his readings and hung them all over the toilet walls until they spilt over to other places around the house. And, since the time in Blantyre when he had been moved from the leafy suburb of Queens to the rough Nkolokosa township in order to make way for a real doctor from England, we had called him the Jive Talker, not because he lied or talked jive, but because he liked to keep us awake on random nights and inflict his Nietzsche and personal affirmations on us in drunken performances, which he called jive, named after his favourite beer, Carlsberg Brown, which he also called jive.

When my mother asked the Jive Talker not to talk to us about Nietzsche because we were too young to understand the blasphemous ravings of syphilitic philosophers, he protested, saying that we were taught about the equally irreverent Christ even before we could read the Bible and yet we understood. And he was right that we understood, or some of us anyway: there I was one morning, in Thyolo District, suffering from diarrhoea and perched on the toilet, a skinny African boy, only eleven years old, and I was hooked on Nietzsche like I had been on the Bible when I was a Born Again. I now wanted to become a philosopher. I was confident that I could do it at that green age because I had read in the Bible that Jesus was already debating the scriptures with the rabbis when he was only twelve years old. My mother also told me the story of Kalikalanje, the wizard boy, who within a year of his birth was conducting profound conversations with grown-ups after he had accidentally fallen into the fireplace and jumped out with the brain of a sage. She thought I was special too: I had been born two months premature, had often fallen from my bed as a baby and had almost drowned in a well when I was three years old. These, she reckoned, were the reasons why the Jive Talker thought I had an eidetic memory, why I always came top at school and why I sounded like I already knew enough jive to invent my own religion in time for my twelfth birthday.

2

I should have washed that piece of fruit first. I had been recovering well from the malaria which I had caught after doing a rain dance in Arthur’s nuclear bunker, when, earlier that morning, my little sister, Linda, gave me a piece of mango to make me feel better; instead, I got from it a bad case of diarrhoea that had me glued to the toilet seat for hours. Luckily enough I was home alone and nobody else needed to use the bathroom.

I had made myself a big sugar-and-salt solution and placed it on the bedside table to make sure I would not die of dehydration, but I very soon forgot about it. The trouble was that when I was off school for whatever reason I always enjoyed being in the toilet, nosing through my father’s books and notes. I could do it for hours and it was no different that day, especially now that I had decided I would become a philosopher. It was like reading nonsense verse of the ‘Jabberwocky’ variety, which I loved: meaningless but meaningful. As I thumbed through Nietzsche that morning, I did not understand most of it but that did not deter me because, thanks to the Jive Talker, I did at least understand what each one of his aphorisms meant: the will to power, just like my father’s personal affirmations.

These were mostly creative visualisations of his professional ambitions and usually began and ended with a mysterious phrase, ‘I am a multimillionaire.’ He would habitually type the affirmations on A4 paper and then carefully fold the paper so it could fit in his wallet. Here are a few examples I found in his bedroom when he died from Aids in 1995:

I am a multimillionaire.

This week brings me a chain of successes. Within a few days from now I will be a great success in the eyes of my superiors. I will have performed my work well. Everyone will admire my work. My superiors will be highly impressed by my work. Stacks and stacks of money both in glittering silver and banknotes are on their way to me! I will ride in beautiful cars. Friends will invite me to parties. I shall be in very splendid health.

I am a multimillionaire.

I am a multimillionaire.

My goal at this time is to open tomorrow’s course for polio vaccinators with ease and enjoyment so that my audience congratulate me! I will be highly congratulated after opening the course.

I am a multimillionaire.

I am a multimillionaire.

I will manage all government hospitals in Malawi.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

My office is at the Ministry of Health Headquarters in the City of Lilongwe.

I am a multimillionaire.

Native

1

In around 100 bc a group of Bantu-speaking peoples armed with iron-tipped spears migrated from the Congo Basin onto the East and Southern African plateaux, displacing the Stone Age pygmies from the area down south into the Kalahari Desert. Among these peoples were the Chewa who settled in what is now the central region of Malawi.