Narrative
Kiki: Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime
Albert Maori Kiki · 1968
Synopsis
The autobiography opens with the author's childhood at Orokolo, among a semi-nomadic people of the Gulf of Papua, where his mother brings him up according to tradition, amid rites, customs and initiation. It then follows his entry into the world of the whites, his studies and his years in Fiji, then his years of struggle, the Buka affair, the rising tensions, the founding of the Pangu Pati and the first elections.
Context
Dictated into a tape recorder, then transcribed and shaped by Ulli Beier, the autobiography appeared in 1968 from F. W. Cheshire. It is regarded as the first major work of Papuan literature published outside a review, two years before the country's first novel, The Crocodile by Vincent Eri. It was praised for its descriptions of traditional culture and for its critique of colonialism, and the anthropologist L. L. Langness reviewed it in the American Anthropologist in 1970.
Who it is for
For reading, from the mouth of a founder of the Pangu Pati, the passage from a tribal childhood to the fight for independence.
Prizes and reception
Langness judged it worth reading, whether or not one is interested in New Guinea and the Pacific.