and EVAN MWANGI

Stirring controversies is Taban lo Liyong's second nature. His behaviour borders on the maverick, and his style of writing is unconventional. This is the Taban we saw when he visited Nairobi last week, a Taban who was still spoiling for a fight with Kenyan intellectuals.

"My bag is drunk!" he exclaimed when he called on us at the Nation Centre. We asked him to elaborate what he had just said about the bag he was carrying. He repeated: "I said I don't know what to do because my bag is very drunk."

As we pressed on, he volunteered that while he was travelling to Nairobi from South Africa, a bottle of brandy that he was carrying broke and his whole bag and the contents "got drunk".

It was obvious from the conversation we had with the prolific Southern Sudanese author later at the Stanley Hotel that his sense of humour and use of ephemera are still very much part of him. Taban was in Kenya as a participant in "The Future Search for Children in Sudan" conference organised by Unicef.

He says of the struggle in Southern Sudan: "If there is one point I would like to restate, it's this: The Sudan is not yet independent. It was part of the Turkish-Egyptian empire; it was Anglo-Egyptian; at independence it was supposed to unite with Egypt; over the years it has tried to unite with Egypt and Libya."

He believes Sudan should be divided into two countries. "There is no way there will ever be peace in Sudan as long as there is one government led by the Northerners. We can never cope. Let us have two different governments. The kind of mistreatment that the present government is subjecting the Southerners to is unbelievable. It was so even in Numeiri's time.

"This they are doing because they know we can never be together. They don't want to let Southern Sudan go Ð that is the richest part of the country. These things are being documented. My book, Reconstituting The Sudanese, tells all my feelings about what should be done in Sudan".

He had come on a peace mission, but raising controversy is Taban lo Liyong's way of life. Even though this was clearly not the purpose of his latest visit to Kenya, Taban said he was angry with his former students who are now the movers and shakers in university literature departments and the publishing world. Thanks to their wrong priorities, he says, the East African region is a literary desert.

"These intellectual children of mine have betrayed me and Kenyan literature," Taban, whose name means trouble, fumed, his ultra-dark face becoming darker. "I have given up hope on them; I'll target my grand-children because there could be some hope in the younger generation."

He charges that literature departments in the universities have killed art in the country with too much emphasis on Karl Marx and Aristotle. "It is time we had more [Charles] Manguas and Sons of Women," he said referring to the controversial popular novel. "We want literature that teaches, but we also need art that just entertains."

He said Aristotle, the darling of local literary scholars, got it all wrong in saying that the plot of a work of art should have a beginning, a climax, and a resolution. "No. A work of art does not follow the rules and procedures of love-making. Foreplay, climax, then whatever," says Taban, who needs little prompting to utter a string of taboo words. "A work of art is a continuous wave, pleasurable, moving smoothly."

One of the few Kenyans he thinks favourably about is Prof Simon Gikandi, currently teaching in the United States. "He is very, very sharp," he said. "I am also happy with novelist Asaneth Bole Odaga. Most of the rest of my students are doing nothing apart from writing newspaper articles which say nothing."

Taban, a pronounced polygamist, married Lucy Apiyo in 1964 and they have two children. He married Janet Khemisa Michael in 1978, with whom they have four children and three dependants whom he prefers to call his children. And his latest addition, is a Japanese.

His first wife lives in the US while he lives with Janet in South Africa.

The humorous writer, who loves to talk about his polygamous style in a light-hearted way says he has dedicated his Words That Melt a Mountain, a collection of poems published in 1996, to his Japanese wife whom he met in the corridors of the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, where he was working as a visiting research professor.

"She was a secretary there. We used to steal glances at each other and I thought she was a beautiful woman – she liked me also and I told my other wives what I had found and they had no objection. And I said: Why don't we make it official? And that was it!" Taban says.

Taban says that unlike many African men who meet another woman and chase away the first one, "I love them all equally and treat them equally and they know it. And that is why they accept my polygamous status."

He says wise African men should practise modern polygamy which means you take good care of all wives and the children.

He gives Malawian poet and diplomat David Rubadiri as the best role model for polygamists. "He was doing very well in Kampala. He had one wife staying in the university house, the other in his house in town," narrates Taban.

"On Friday after classes, one wife would come and collect all the children and take them to the university house and return them on Monday morning. And then the other wife would repeat the act the following weekend. So the children grew up as brothers and sisters but with two mothers."

He says it is wrong to leave a woman with whom you have exchanged beautiful words at some point because you have found another one.

"Women should also not insist on their husbands to throw out the one they find," Taban advises. "If you do this, it will also happen to you. Just believe that this man is "our husband", not my husband and if he is not in my house, he is in yours so that if something happens we know how to handle it."

Taban says he is "officially" a grandfather of one - the daughter of one of his children in the US. But he complains, "I think I should have been a grandfather long time a go - I think someone somewhere refused to tell me that I became a grandfather....how can I just have one grandchild?"

We asked him whether seven children are not too few from three wives. He told us about how elusive his wives are: "You know, I was conned by my wives - you know women have the power over how many children to have. I asked them, 'Why ain't we having any more children?' They answered, 'We stopped' and that was it - they just stopped."

In the era of sexual harassment in the universities, Taban would be in trouble if he was still teaching in Kenya. He admits that he used to have a bed in his office while lecturing at the University of Nairobi in the 70s. "It was a piece of art. I never did anything bad in it with my female students," he said.

"I just used to rest on it when tired. I was once caught by a librarian sleeping as I held a book in my hands. I liked cat-napping in the office because I work late into the night."

Now a crusader for gender-responsive culture, Taban could not remember having said in Another Last Word (1990): "For Africa to fulfil her world destiny, our leaders have to be taught that power is man's destiny, a beggar even of foreign aid is a woman."

"I believe men and women should live in harmony and help one another solve the problems of the world," he now says. "If men and women do not play complementary roles just because there is a new thing called feminism, the end of Africa is well-nigh."

Taban, who confesses that his only fear is death and senility, seems shy to attack the dead. He had questioned the appropriateness of the translation of the late Ugandan writer Okot p'Bitek's Wer pa Lawino (Song of Lawino), but now wants to render another translation of the Acholi poem without stepping on the late Okot's toes.

"Okot was not just a colleague; he was a great friend," says Taban. "Ahh! that one was a great friend of mine, and he was very sharp."

He says he wants to carry on from where Okot left. "If there is a colleague who influenced me and if there is a war of a colleague which I have to perpetuate, its Okot p'Bitek's war.

"I have even translated his Wer pa Lawino from Acholi to English to help with the renaissance of Africa which should be out by the end of the year because I believe South Africans deserve to read it".

Okot was also Taban's teacher in secondary school. "Originally, I was accused of criticising him but at that time, I was more interested in development - I said - this is an educated comment from an educated ignorance. That was my first impression which has since changed, " Taban said.

But controversy is an important raw material in the Tabanic industry. He does not spare the late Tanzanian President, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, from knocks on the face.

"Nyerere did a very bad thing to African traditional heritage," says Taban. "He slaughtered Tanzanian languages in favour of Kiswahili. Local languages should be allowed to thrive because we cannot ignore our heritage in the pursuit of elusive unity."

Taban's real name is Mokotiyang Rekenet. Rekenet was the name of his grandfather after whom he was named according to the customs. He is called Mokotiyang because "I was born at night - bumokotiyang - you get this name before the actual naming after four days."

It is his mother, Liyong, who gave him the name he now uses. Taban actually means problems. "Linguistically, I am the troubles of Liyong. As the third wife, she had many of them."

Taban still looks the same as he did when he was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi with the exception of his grey hairs. So what's the secret of his "youthfulness"?

"My second wife is the secret. She is a nurse and a midwife though she is not working now as her papers were misplaced somewhere but she is crazy about nutrition. She has turned our flower gardens at the university into vegetable gardens which she ensures are flourishing all year round. We even have sukuma wiki from Kenya which she ensures we consume every so often.

"We also eat whole meal bread instead of white bread; she does not encourage frying of food but boiled, steamed or grilled. She also reminds us about how many Africans go to functions and eat, eat, eat just because the food is there. That's bad for our health, she says, adding that you should also eat early so that the food is digested."

He says that his medical friends tell him that when they do postmortems on people who died after having dinner the previous night, the food is still in their stomachs. "When you eat late at night and then in the morning you add breakfast - you will be slumbering the whole day in the office or classroom."

The controversial author was also in Nairobi to launch two books, Women in Folktales and Short Stories of Africa and Reconstituting The Sudanese: My Blueprint for the Sudan(s) after this War. In the former, the traditional and contemporary stories from diverse sources give insights into the roles women have played historically throughout Africa, and into the attitudes towards women in these and other relationships in society.

Currently, Taban holds two positions at the University of Venda in South Africa - Professor and Head, Centre for African Studies and professor of literature.

He has also lectured at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, has been chair and senior lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea, public relations officer and professor of literature University of Juba in Southern Sudan.

He was a visiting research professor at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, and visiting research fellow at Curtin University of Technology, Australia among other places.

In South Africa, he is also involved in the new modular system of education that is being introduced into the university system "that will see the country move from the British type of system where one studies for a whole year and has examinations at the end of the year and is expected to remember everything including the interruptions and strikes. The system known as Outcome Based Education will be job oriented to give skills and proficiency to cater for the large joblessness in the country."

Taban's utterances and behaviour have for a long time been controversial. For instance, when between 1982-85 he was a Member of Parliament for Kajo Kaji and an assistant minister and acting deputy speaker under former Sudanese President Gaffar Numeiry, many saw his position as a betrayal of his Southern Sudanese people.

"I did not betray my people. When you work under a government, your allegiance is to both the government Ð and at the time Sudan was a one-party state – and your people. I believe I balanced both to the best of my ability but there were instances when we were powerless. Decisions were made in Khartoum and there were things we just couldn't stop Numeiry from doing."

His favourite books? "They have not been published yet," he says. These are Re-Africanising the African, currently being considered for publication by the East African Educational Publishers of Nairobi.

"It is based on making the Africanised African think like an African. Many Africans are mentally White. They need to think and act like Africans because we have a lot of potential," he says.

"The other is a collection of short stories which I am calling Telling them Our Way (in the light of rival ideologies). "When I read it, I laugh a lot," he says.

Taban works back his birthday to between 1938 and 1939, some 60 years ago. He is the third born of the third wife after two sisters.

He has had more than 20 of his books published, the most famous of these being The Last Word published in 1969.

He grew up and was educated in Uganda up to teacher training level before going to Howard University in Washington, United States, in 1962, where he not only studied journalism and literature for his Bachelor of Arts degree, but also met and married his first wife, Lucy Apiyo. He later joined the University of Iowa where he graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts in 1968.

The last time he visited Kenya in 1995, he ruffled intellectual feathers when he declared his former students at the University of Nairobi as lacking the "ability to understand serious discourse".

He was in turn called names, the most scathing of which were from Prof William Ochieng', the immediate former principal of Maseno University College and now a Permanent Secretary in the Office of the President. Prof Ochieng', a top historian, called Taban an outdated intellectual bully, a loud mouth, "who can only be doted on as a museum piece".

In the late 1960s, Taban shocked fellow intellectuals when he declared East Africa a literary desert in his oft-quoted The Last Word.