For an 85-year-old man, David Maillu is surprisingly fit and sprightly. He is not about to retire his famous pen. “Why should I retire when my mind is still overflowing with ideas? If I don’t write, I will die with the knowledge that I have gathered over the years,” saysMaillu.

The more he writes, Maillu avers, the more ideas come flooding in. “This year alone, I have finished writing four books.” 

Mention of the name Maillu elicits knowing glances among Kenyans of a certain generation. Those who grew up in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were weaned a literary menu of Maillu's titillating books. Some of the titles that easily come to mind include After 4.30, My Dear Bottle, Unfit for Human Consumption and The Flesh.

Within polite society, not many people admitted to reading Maillu’s works, but “under the table”, they consumed his books voraciously. A sly smile forms in Maillu’s mouth as he describes how a typical Nairobi household consumed his books. “I knew of households that, at any one time, had three copies of my book,” he says. “The husband had a copy, the wife had a copy and the children had theirs, too. None of the three parties knew the rest had the book.”

Mutinda Munyao, the managing editor of The EastAfrican, says he read After 4.30 “in Standard 5 – under the desk – and giggled all through." He was commenting on a Facebook post announcing that the book has been reprinted and is available in bookstores.

Father of Kenya’s Popular Literature

Maillu is, without a doubt, the father of Kenya’s popular literature. For the moralists, Maillu was simply a “dirty” writer, seeking to corrupt the minds of impressionable Kenyans with his “pornographic” writing. 

Maillu is however not bothered by such moralistic posturing. “As a writer, I simply document what takes place in society; I didn’t invent the things I write about.” His decision to write those books, he adds, was informed by intensive research.

“There has been a longstanding debate on whether Kenyans do read,” he says. “I insist that a writer should write what the people want to read. That way, issues of a poor reading culture do not arise.”

Before he embarked on writing, Maillu, who is by and large self-taught, did research on what Kenyans were most passionate about. “I sat with different categories of people to establish what topics interested them the most. I came up with six topics that people really liked talking about. They were: money, God, politics, sex, marriage and alcohol.” 

“When I combined those topics, my books became a hit,” says Maillu. In 1973, he wrote his first book, Unfit for Human Consumption. “I had an initial print run of 5,000 copies, which sold out in six months. I went back to the printers and ordered a print run of 20,000 copies,” he recalls.

Unfit was followed by My Dear Bottle and After 4.30 in short order, each with a print run of 10,000 copies. It should be recalled that at the time Maillu was writing these books, the Kenyan nation was only ten years old and publishing was not that widespread. Maillu established Comb Books, through which he published his books.

Hard Times

At some point, Comb Books had a staff count of 30 people and Maillu felt the need to expand by purchasing a printing press. “I took a loan, not knowing that this would be the beginning of my troubles,” he recalls. This was in 1977, the same year the East African Community collapsed.

Comb Books had a huge order destined for Tanzania, which he could not deliver as the Kenya/Tanzania border was closed following the collapse of the regional body. Well, the long and short of it was that auctioneers were unleashed on his publishing house and the lending institution recalled its loan. 

“I took the lender to court, a case that dragged on for 35 years and when the ruling was made, I had lost,” says Maillu with a tinge of bitterness.

He adds, without much elaboration, that there was a political motive to his persecution. Details of that experience are contained in a book titled Behind the Presidential Escort, which he wrote in 2008.

The closure of Comb Books did not diminish his passion for writing. “I continued writing and today I have more than 90 titles published by almost all the major publishing houses in Kenya.”

He is especially proud of Broken Drum, a 1,100-paged tome published in conjunction with the Jomo Kenyatta Foundation (JKF) in 1991. He claims that Broken Drum is Africa’s longest novel. It is an epic that traces the story of an African family, in a span of 200 years, from the 1700s before the coming of the white man to the 1970s, ten years after Kenya’s independence.

“There have been conflicting narratives about the effect of colonialism in Africa,” he explains. “While there are those who swear that colonialism broke the fabric of African societies, by introducing alien ways of life; there are those who insist that it brought about civilisation to Africa. These are the issues I have explored in Broken Drum.”

President of African Spirituality

Another notable book in Maillu's repertoire is Ka, the Holy Book of Neter. Maillu co-authored this book with five others—scholars in various fields of theology, divinity, philosophy and African spirituality.

Maillu, who refers to himself as the president of African Spirituality, says that Ka, the Holy Book of Neter, is the African answer to the Bible.

“My formal education stopped at Standard Eight, in 1958. I did my high school studies through correspondence at the London-based British Tutorial College. I was awarded a PhD by the St Clement University, in Australia, based on the strength of my publications,” explains Maillu.

Some of the publications he submitted for assessment included Broken Drum, African Indigenous Political Ideology (Comb) and Our Kind of Polygamy (EAEP).

Apart from the books already published, Maillu says that so far, he has over 130 unpublished manuscripts, which he hopes to get published.

Maillu has also written a number of books in Kiswahili and in his native Kikamba. He claims to have shaped Ngugi wa Thiong'o's decision to write in his mother language.

"In the 1970s, I used to bump into Ngugi at the Kenya National Theatre," narrates Maillu. "Then, he used to teach at the University of Nairobi, while I used to host a show on the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation [then known as the Voice of Kenya], just behind the National Theatre."

In his show, Maillu would recite Kikamba poems from Kikyambonie, a book he had published.

"Ngugi was amazed that I had written in Kikamba. I asked him how effective his writing was if his mother, who did not know English, could not access them," says Maillu.

In their next meeting, Ngugi told Maillu that he was “working on something”. The next thing Maillu heard was that Ngugi had published Ngaahika Ndenda [I will Marry When I Want], a Gikuyu play that precipitated his detention and eventual exile.

When does he plan to publish his memoir? "I finished writing that ten years ago. It only needs to be updated and then published,” he says.

So, what is he currently working on? "A non-fiction book on face reading. I am an expert in reading people's faces."

Mbugua Ngunjiri, a Kenyan art and literary journalist, is the curator of the digital arts and culture platform Maisha Yetu. Email: mbugua5ngunjiri@gmail.com