Okay. I admit it. I ground to a halt halfway through. But hey, I read half of this doorstop. It’s a fascinating view of a forgotten, little-known world: a village in what is now Tanzania (islands in Lake Victoria). Nothing more or less than daily life through the eyes of a married couple. The style is somewhere between oral storytelling and Western novel and each chapter is a little story or event. There is much repetition of phrases or sentences, recalling (at least to me), the ancient storytelling mode. The customs and local “views” are intriguing but after a while, the story palls. I fully expect to pick it up again some day and finish it but for now, several hundred pages were enough. ( )

This book has developed a significant, if modest, reputation, especially in Germany, as a classic of "naive literature", a Things fall apart without the literary underpinnings, and in particular as one of the very few early African novels to be written in a pre-colonial African language.

Aniceti Kitereza (that's him in the cover picture) grew up in the early days of German colonialism on Ukerewe, a large island in Lake Victoria (somewhere between Anglesey and the Isle of Wight in size), in the north of what is now Tanzania. Partly because he belonged to the family of the traditional ruler of Ukerewe, he was educated in a mission school and then studied at a Roman Catholic seminary, but he seems to have decided not to enter the priesthood, and worked in the rice business in Mwanza for some years. On the outbreak of WWII, he returned to Ukerewe where he worked for the rest of his life as a lay staff member of the Catholic mission.

Kitereza wrote Mr Myombekere in 1945, primarily for the benefit of the Wakerewe people, whom he saw losing touch with their traditional culture through the effects of colonialism. It's really a primer in the practices of daily life in Ukerewe, wrapped up in the form of a long and rambling story set in an unspecified pre-colonial period, in which nothing in particular happens except for the normal events of family life - courtship, marriage, birth, death, sickness, minor disputes, the work of cooking, butchering, hunting, farming, fishing and craftsmanship, the brewing (and consumption!) of banana beer, religious rites, healing, etc., etc., etc. (yes, definitely a three etc. book - two would be inadequate to describe it). It's directionless, repetitive, inconsistently paced, totally lacking in suspense and drama, and should be a disaster of a book, but there's just so much detail that it becomes crazily fascinating. You can't help wanting to know more about a society in which men were not supposed to be able to see their mothers-in-law, or in which the resumption of marital relations after childbirth was marked symbolically by husband and wife both urinating into a cow's horn.

The mood is very much that of oral storytelling, full of digressions and verbatim repetitions of long speeches, and it is something that is best read slowly, a chapter or two at a time, adapting yourself to an "African pace". Given his educational background, Kitereza must have been well aware of the biblical and classical Greek foundations of western culture, but quite unlike Achebe, he chose to shut them out of his story and structure it in a way that would speak first and foremost to African readers. If Europeans wanted to read it for some strange reason, well, they would have to learn Kikerewe first.

Not surprisingly, Kitereza had no luck finding a publisher for an endlessly long novel written in a language that at the time had fewer than 50 000 native speakers. The manuscript hung around for decades unpublished. Kitereza was initially reluctant to translate it, because he felt that so many of the cultural concepts he talks about were so local to Ukerewe, but he agreed to produce a Kiswahili translation in the late 60s, which was eventually published in Tanzania just after his death in 1981.

The book finally came to the attention of European readers in 1990, when a German translation (from the Kiswahili version) by Wilhelm Möhlig was published under the odd and rather Edgar-Wallace-sounding title Kinder der Regenmacher. Tanzanian novelist Gabriel Ruhumbika, who is an Mkerewe himself, eventually produced a pedantic and heavily-annotated English translation in 2002. He takes care that we can trace all the culturally-specific terms back to Kikerewe words, so this would be a useful text for anyone who is reading the book with a serious linguistic or anthropological interest, but it can be a little frustrating when - for example - the endnote gives us no more information about a bird referred to only by its Kikerewe name than that it eats snakes (which we already know from the context...). Ruhumbika also seems to have worn out the endurance of his Tanzanian typesetters - the frequency of minor errors gets higher and higher as you advance through the book, until you get to the back-cover blurb which is almost unintelligible.

It was fun, and it's definitely recommended for those with more time than sense - others might want to reflect carefully and check for vacant shelf-space before seeking out a copy. ( )