ByOtieno Amisi
The Link Newspaper June 11, 2004
4(a) East Africa”s most published writer David Maillu just wants to be remembered as a builder and a researcher, not the chronicler of the sensual novellas and free verse that catapulted him into fame in the 1970s.
4(b) This comes out very clearly the day authors Marjorie OIudhe Mc Goye, Dorothy Holi, Dana Seidenberg and I arrive for a writers” conference at his home in Kola, Machakos. Maillu”s pen always makes heads turn. Whether he is describing Nairobi”s night life in After 4.30 or championing a return to African values in African Indigenous Political ideology, the 60year old author of Broken Drum, Africa”s longest novel – and some of the shortest, sexiest novels ever witten, has a penchant for controversy.
4(c) But few books have generated as much interest as Ka- The Holy Book of Neter, Maillu”s latest fusion of lilting poetry, devious fiction, religious scholarship and historical research. The near 600 page title, which the author calls “Africa”s answer to the Christian Bible,” has continued to attract spirited responses from scholars and fans from as far as America, Europe, Australia and Canada long before its launch.
4(d) The book is a response to such nagging questions in African scholarship as: Is there an African religion? Was Jesus black? What is the place of Africa in world religion?
4(e) Complete with a black leather cover and divided into chapters and verses, Maillu” s most ambitious undertaking to date is almost a mockery of the Christian Bible. It reads, in alternate parts, like a fusion of Basil Davidson, Khalil Gibran and John Mbiti sprinkled with Okot p”Bitek and Chancellor Williams and spiced up with some of Martin Luther King and Walter Rodney.
4(f) Song of Slaves” is a recreation of the wailings of black slaves on their sojourn across the Atlantic, some African oral narratives are recaptured in the Book of Parables, while the filler details of little known Ethiopian, West African and South African history is neatly tucked up in the Book of Kings and Queens. 777 proverbs derived from different African communities complete the book of proverbs, while the Biblical ten commandments are replaced with 57 “Principal Laws”. Others are The Book of Prayers, The Book of Initiation, The Book of the Beginning, The Book of Parables. and The Book of Prophecies.
4(g) The authors take European scholars by the horn for distorting the history and religion of Africa and portraying the continent as a bedrock of countless tribal religions characterized by animism and superstition. The African Bible questions the Christian concept o original sin, the chronology of time in the Biblical creation history and finally attributes continued subjugation of women to the Christian faith.
4(h) Espousing what Dr Maillu calls Neterianism (read African religion), the book reject the Old testament myth of a fallible, short sighted son of a creator who condemns all human beings as sinners on account of being born to the wayward Adam and Eve.
4(i) “Won”t another “holy” book simply add to the religious confusion already threatening to divide our world?” asks one Jakson Simatey, a kenyan scholar living in the US and adds in a bitter Internet message,. “It is a pity that the likes of Maillu still want to mislead people. Maillu and his group should rather document on our former practices of worship than indulge in the unending saga of Christianity.”
4(j) But another scholar, Wandia wa Tutu, does not agree. “It”s a book no one can ignore,” he writes, in a local daily. “Dr. Maillu”s book is the foundation of what we advocate as the base of African reform. It falls squarely in the realm of Thabo Mbeki (South Africa”s president)”s call for African renaissance,” he adds. “What Dr. Maillu has done is the kind of stuff our foreign economic masters would want us to shred and throw into the ocean.” Says Dr Dana Siedenberg, author of Mercantile Adventures: The World of East African Asians.””We shouldn”t let this dream die.”
4(k) “Since time immemorial we have been waiting for our black scripture. Lack of a written reference has been the bane of African culture and religion and our undoing,” says Ajos Wuod Atinga, editor of a US based internet chat outfit called Jaluo dot Corn. “Now that Maillu and his team have” given us one, African religion will be on the move.”
4(l) Constitution of Kenya Review Commission Secretary Dr Patrick Lumumba avers that years of subjugation and mis-education under Arab and European slavery, followed by colonialism and neo colonialism have ruined African self confidence. The eloquent advocate, who gave a keynote address during the opening of a new cultural centre in Kisumu recently, says historical events have made a laughing stock of African culture and religion, causing Africans to lose faith and pride in their culture and history. Though he admits he has not read the African Bible, Dr Lumumba describes it as “a welcome attempt to restore hope in the African. .. a statement of faith that the besieged continent will one day triumph over its present maladies.”
4(m) Maillu himself contends that besides years of deliberate destruction of African history and culture by colonialists and slave traders, skewed scholarship and lack of a written tradition are to blame for the decline of African culture. Maillu strikes me as a latter day pro-African scholar in the mould of Prof. Thairu Kihumbu, Dr Kwame Nkrumah who hurled spears at a fleeing elephant.
4(n) Take it or leave it, the book will take the Afrocentric debate to the tables of globalization. In aillu’s own words, “Africa is full of spiritual orphans, without an identity and lacking in spiritual models. This book will give back the African his soul.”
4(o) Author David Maillu established a near cult following after he published a series of sexually explicit novels and poems in the 1970s. Thirty years later, the controversial author is back with yet another cult. He has just completed work on what may well be the first earth-shaking book on African religion – KA, Holy Book of Neter -or “The African Bible.”
4(p) Maillu says the idea of the African Bible struck him about thirteen years ago, but it was not until recently that he managed to get together a team of scholars to help him compile the book, after what he calls “deep soul searching and considerable academic research” on his own part.
4(q) Hurtling between free verse and African story telling techniques, the book is a crafty mixture of creative devilry and determined scholarship. Above all, it is a forceful, bold acknowledgement of Africa”s presence in world history, sometimes deep, wistful and thought provoking, at other times, merely the restless, self-educated Maillu, at his creative best.
4(r) The story begins in Egypt, the cradle of religious monotheism and the center of world culture and power at the beginning of time. Neter – the creator, spirit or life force in charge of all destiny, appears in life forms everywhere, to anyone any time, not to a select few. The first man is without a shade of doubt, black. Then historians and Bible scholars begin to feel Maillu”s rage against distorting African history, planting the seeds of sexual discrimination, and portraying God as an emotional force that is all knowing yet unable to foresee and forestall the tragedies that befall mankind.
4(s) The authors acknowledge the presence of a Supreme Being assisted by smaller gods in African religion, but defy the Mohammedan and Christian concept of a far away creator who resurfaces only occasionally to check on the inhabitants of earth.
4(t) Issues like parenting, love, marriage and courtship, individual and collective responsibility as well as the hereafter, are consistently handled through proverbs and parables, which abound in the text.
4(u) African religion and culture has been at best, inundated with imported symbols, beliefs and foreign mannerisms; at worst wiped out altogether from important political or scholarly debate. Across the continent, traditional religious leaders struggle to find acceptance in government and religious circles in vain. 4(v) Little wonder, then, that religious affairs are crammed in government departments that care more for sports than literature, music or art. The African Bible is intended to change all that, by giving exposure to black man”s religion, encouraging the use of African proverbs, parables, and the history of Africa. This book will undoubtedly spur a critical analysis of the place of religion and culture in development among scholars and leaders alike.
4(w) Maillu says his purpose of writing the Holy Book of Neter is to help define African standards for beauty, development, decency and civilization. A believer in African renaissance, he argues that South Africa”s President Thabo Mbeki and other latter day panAfricanists still have a cause, and that contemporary Africa can be rescued from neo-colonialism if leaders take a conscious effort to restore African religion and culture.
4(x) Maillu is not new to controversy. In 1977, East Africa”s leading literary critic Prof. Chris Wanjala and a group of (Christian) religious leaders took to the podium at Nairobi”s Chester House to condemn his books as dangerous to the moral fabric. Following the outrage, his books were banned in many countries including Tanzania and South Africa.
4(y) Though he would later win the coveted Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature. Maillu”s pages have been turned with itchy, cautious fingers even in university lecture theatres. But the versatile writer trod on.
4(z) Excerpts from “The Holy Book.” On Africa:
When you see a tear in one eye
Don”t ask how I cry’
For I cry, sing and dance
To a bastard tune
Played on the instrument
Of ideological and economic necessity
Born through rape…
They talked about my blackness
Saying a black man is nothing
Because he has done nothing
To un nothing himself
All is no lost
There”s the will to search
The best of the black man
Buried in his physical and spiritual
forest
4(za) On Dancing:
Dancing is the flutter of an excited soul…
Music asks spiritual questions, and
dancing answers them
4(zb) On Sex:
Sex is a river in which too many
people have drowned
In sex, man is equal to woman”‘,
