Good news from Africa

Giles Foden enjoys the tales of a clever teenager growing up in Malawi


There are many amusing moments in this memoir of a clever Malawian's journey from resonant backwaters of the developing world - Zomba, Kasungu, Nkhotakhota - to the over-developed world of conceptual art, as practised in London and other metropolises. The best has to be at the end of a paragraph describing crossing from Malawi into Zimbabwe via Mozambique: "There was nobody at the Mozambican immigration office except a boy with one leg selling roasted birds and a sweaty, chubby man who walked on to the bus and collected our passports together with a fee . . . When he was finished with them, we headed to Zimbabwe where we were greeted by a black-and-white portrait of Robert Mugabe and a notice that read, 'If you are not happy with us, wait until you get to Heathrow.'"

The poster legend is a typical Mugabe gambit: the wisecrack of the street thug. Kambalu grew up under a more subtly insidious (and far less bloody) dictator, life president of Malawi, Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda. So did I, until I was 14, and it's a pleasure to have one's memory sparked by so much well-observed detail. It is rare to see it, and the reason why is intimately bound with the repressive culture Kambalu describes.

Malawi seldom features in books. The material covered in The Jive Talker, which charts the ordinary life of a modern Malawian teenager in country and city from his own perspective, has never before been explored. There was a brief efflorescence of Malawian literature in the 1960s through writers such as David Rubadiri, after which genuine culture was smothered by Banda for most of three decades.

The only writer of substance the country has produced is the great Jack Mapanje, but his output was circumscribed by his being imprisoned by Banda for most of the period. Artistic activity was frowned on by the former elder of the Kirk (Banda did his training in Scotland), who only wanted to see graven images of himself, preferably on the printed dresses of the ululating women he liked to have dancing round.

Largely because he was courting Britain and (as it often seemed at the time) its proxy, apartheid South Africa, Banda would never have tolerated such bare-faced cheek at the former colonial power as indicated by the Zimbabwean poster. Kambalu sees the consequences of this political and cultural cringe when he gets a scholarship to the prestigious Kamuzu Academy (the so-called Eton of Africa) but he has to fight hard to get there.

This is in spite of some advantages. His father is a hospital manager and in some of his posts - the more rural ones, where Kambalu senior, aka the Jive Talker, is in charge - this means the family has plenty of food. The jive he talks is a blend of various philosophers, scientists and classics, as held in a large double-fronted bookshelf christened "The Diptych". The scholarship winner and future artist will learn much at this shrine, not least self-confidence, since Nietzsche's collected works bend quite a few shelves of The Diptych.

Kambalu needs to be a young Superman, since the path to Parnassus is a thorny one. He struggles with poverty, his father's drinking, and the rejection of a boy whose main interests are fashion and Michael Jackson, in a country where miniskirts and long hair are banned. His flamboyant attitude and quick tongue lead to difficulties with both boys (not wanted) and girls (wanted but unattainable).

Malawi is beset by a triadic scourge of evangelical Christianity, the Hitler Youth-like "young pioneers" of Banda, and worsening poverty - but all these are as nothing to the scourge of Aids. Misunderstood and misdiagnosed, the pestilence sweeps across the country in the mid-1980s, claiming Kambalu's father, mother and six other family members. The scenes describing the death of his father, the former fount of all knowledge to whom antipathy is later developed, are riven with contradictory passion.

This happens while the son is at Kamuzu, learning Latin and imbibing from expatriate teachers a hobbled sort of great education, which his Nietzschean vigour undercuts. It is through Nietzsche that Kambalu develops the art concept of the Holy Ball - an ordinary football, or sometimes a Malawian rag football, stuck over with pages from the Bible - which he associates with sun worship and freedom from oppressive models of thought and being.

A sense of cleanly freedom - of "exercise" and "exorcise" - permeates this enjoyable book. Football playing and fun are presented as the necessary correctives to Banda's Presbyterian gloom and the grimness of disease. The revolving heart of The Jive Talker, the Holy Ball idea will be Kambalu's passport to Amsterdam and then the London art scene, where he continues to kick charmingly about, the living embodiment of good news from Africa.

· Giles Foden is working on Turbulence, a novel about the D-Day weather forecast.