Simon Luyikumu Kikamba (nom de plume, Simão Kikamba) was born on 24 th May
1966 to a Congolese father and an Angolan mother in Mpemba, a small village in
Sacandica near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. Aged 2 and
travelling on his mother’s back, Kikamba immigrated with his parents to DRC, where
his father had found a job as a gardener at the Catholic Mission of Kisantu.
Kikamba’s father, for his story is worth touching on, had been born in DRC after the
mysterious death of his seven siblings, one after the other, in what was believed to
be a curse in the family.
Kikamba’s father’s parents had fled to Angola in an attempt
to save their son before he had turned two, the fated age at which his older siblings
used to die. Kikamba’s father and his younger sister miraculously survived past the
age of two.
Kikamba obtained a B-Ed at the Teacher Training College of Mbanza-Ngungu (DRC)
in 1989, majoring in English and African Culture before working as teacher of English
for three years. In 1992, he returned to Angola, where he worked as a clerk for the
Namibian Embassy in Luanda. In December 1994, four months after being abducted
in front of his pregnant wife by unidentified secret service police, he fled to South
Africa along with his wife and their two-month-old baby and sought asylum. In 2010,
after a 16-year exile he returned to Angola and taught literary studies at the Faculty
of Arts at Agostinho Neto State University.
Kikamba holds a master’s degree cum laude in Theory of Literature from UNISA and
is studying towards a PhD in the same field. He is the author of the award-winning
debut novel Going Home (Kwela Books, 2005), based on the life of a black immigrant
in South Africa. The Briefcase, a collection of short stories being published by
XarraBooks in Johannesburg, is his second book. Kikamba now works and lives in
Kinshasa, DRC