Aniceti Kitereza

Aniceti Kitereza was born in 1896 on Ukerewe Island in Lake Victoria, the grandson of King Machunda of the Kerewe kingdom. Educated at the Roman Catholic White Fathers seminary in Kagunguli and Rubya, he mastered Latin, Greek, German, and Swahili.

Alarmed that the younger generation was forgetting the language, rituals, agriculture, and wisdom of their ancestors, Kitereza spent twenty-three years compiling a monumental novel in Kikerewe, completing it in 1945. Unable to find a publisher for the Kikerewe original, he translated the colossal 1,000-page manuscript himself into Kiswahili in 1968, published as Bwana Myombekere na Bibi Bugonoka, Ntulanalwo na Bulihwali, now celebrated worldwide as an ethnological literary masterpiece.