David Gian Maillu

Biography

The first book Comb Books brought out, in 1972, was called “Kĩ Kyambonie: Kĩkamba nthimo”. It was a collection of poems in Kikamba, and as far as the available information goes, no one before Maillu had printed poetry in that language. The book sold poorly: the market was too small.

Maillu was born in Kilungu Location in what was then Kenya Colony. His parents were poor and illiterate, and the exact date of his birth was never recorded; he fixed 19 October 1939 himself, from what his mother told him and by numerological reckoning. The name Maillu comes from a Kikamba word meaning “black” or “dark”: by his own description, he was born an unusually dark child. He taught himself to read and write, and from 1951 attended Machakos Technical School. In 1955 he obtained the Cambridge School Certificate, studying by correspondence with the British Tutorial College. He considered enrolling in literature at the University College of Nairobi but changed his mind when he learned that the syllabus contained only Western authors; his interest lay with Kenyan writers, among them Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In 1964 he joined the radio station Voice of Kenya as a graphic designer. He soon grew dissatisfied with the job but stayed until early 1974, since he could not afford to leave. His writing first appeared in the Geneva magazine “Risk” and in “Ghala”, the magazine of the East African Publishing House.

After Kikamba he turned to English. Success came in 1973 with the novella “Unfit for Human Consumption” and the long poem “My Dear Bottle”. They appeared as “Comb Mini Novels”, measuring 3.5 by 5 inches and priced at five East African shillings. In 1974 came the poem “After 4.30”, about a single mother driven into prostitution by need. In 1975 and 1976 he published the three-volume verse epic “The Kommon Man”, about an ordinary Kenyan trying to survive hard times; the first print run was 10,000 copies, and a questionnaire of twenty questions was inserted in the book to find out what readers were interested in. In 1976 two more epistolary novels followed, “Dear Monika” and “Dear Daughter”. By then Comb Books had seven or eight full-time staff, had bought computerised typesetting equipment, and was discussing offices in Europe and West Africa. But the boldness of many early books, which were sexually explicit, led to a ban: in June 1976 some of them were banned in Tanzania. Academic circles did not take him seriously. In 1977 no books appeared, in 1978 only two, under the pseudonym Vigad Mulila, and in the same year the firm went bankrupt.

Maillu almost immediately founded a new one, under his own name. Its first book, in 1979, was “Kadosa”, which he considered his favourite: it blends a love story, adventure, science fiction, metaphysical speculation and nightmares. In the 1980s Macmillan and other publishers began to print him. There were the Benni Kamba 009 books, the novel “For Mbatha and Rabeka” (1983), the book “Our Kind of Polygamy” (1988), and “Without Kiinua Mgongo” (“Without a Bribe”, 1989), written in a mixture of languages. “Broken Drum” (1991), at 1,121 pages, is regarded as his most ambitious novel; it won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize in 1992. More than thirty of his books are for children.

In 2007 Maillu founded a political party and stood as a candidate for the presidency of Kenya.