My aim with this year’s project is to get an introduction to Black African literature – ironic if you consider Wainaina’s famous essay, How to Write about Africa (2005), a satire on western writers who:
“treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: 54 countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book.”
Nevertheless, I persist. After all, Wainaina, a Kenyan, was himself director of the Bard College, NY Chinua Achebe Center for African Literature (Achebe, of course, was Nigerian).
The big word in connection with Wainaina is ‘was’. He was born in 1971 and died in 2019, of a series of strokes and while suffering from HIV. One Day I will Write about this Place (2011), a memoir, is his one full length work, but he is a stylish and very polished short-form writer and was founding editor of the influential East African literary magazine Kwani? (Kiswahili for “So what?”).
In an essay I’ve linked to below, a writer who says he frequently drank with Wainaina (and who refers to him as Binyavanga, which made me unsure how I should refer to him myself) says that the Kenyan government found Kwani? subversive, for its ideas rather than its politics, and undermined it by infiltrating the management, and that Wainaina, who was largely apolitical, may have played a part in this.
Binyavanga didn’t have a solidly formed politics away from his socialist tendencies. His was an eternal search for a political home, a pursuit for a set of beliefs that would offer a huge enough tent for him and his wondering and wandering mind. Even what he became a champion for later, standing up for sexual minorities, had simmered within him for a long time before manifesting, understandably so. These could not have been easy burdens for anyone to carry.
One Day I will Write about this Place is Wainaina telling the story of his life. Unless you’re looking at the screen, not recommended while driving, it’s hard to tell how far through an audiobook is, and my initial assumption was that I was listening to another writerly coming of age. But as we went on from high school to university, to the struggle that followed as the budding author attempted to prove himself in South Africa rather than returning home to Kenya, it slowly became clear he was taking us right through to his present, his late thirties.
As the book begins, the author, speaking in the present tense, is 7, playing football in the backyard with his brother and sister, Jimmy, 11 and Ciru, 5. Ciru, who has already been advanced one year, is top of her class. Their home is in Nakuru, Kenya’s third largest city, well inland, northeast of Nairobi, near the Rift Valley. His mother comes from neighbouring Uganda, their father is a well off merchant and farm owner.
Although the family lives an ordinary middle class life, Wainaina conveys a sense of constant ethnic and political tension. Moi, the President, is ever-present. I’m not clear if Moi was Masai, he was born a herdsman in the Rift Valley, but in any case Wainaina is Gikuyu, which leads to him and his sister not getting into one of the top schools. Nevertheless they do well and choose to go to university in South Africa, in Transkei, studying Science and Engineering.
Ciru continues to do well, and I think eventually returns home as a computer engineer. Wainaina drinks heavily, drops out, goes home, persuades his father he can do better, returns to study Commerce, drops out ..
as I fell away from everything and everybody, I moved out of the campus dorms and into a one-room outhouse. . . . My mattress has sunk in the middle. Books, cigarettes, dirty cups, empty chocolate wrappers and magazines are piled around my horizontal torso, on the floor, all within arm’s reach…
.. living in poverty in South Africa as he attempts to become a writer.
And eventually succeeds, with the story of a family journey to Uganda to celebrate his mother’s parent’s 60th wedding anniversary: Discovering Home, winner of the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing (which money Wainaina put towards Kwani? ).
What struck me most as we proceeded through the mostly prosaic details of the author’s life – although it is always fascinating to be in another country, in someone else’s head – was Wainaina’s attention to his writing, not just the descriptions, but the constant care to choose exactly the right word. One Day I will Write about this Place is worth reading for the writing alone.
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Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I will write about this Place, 2011. Audible, read by Ivanno Jeremiah. 10 hr
see also: The Struggle for Kwani?’s Soul, Isaac Otidi Amuke, Brittle Paper, March 12, 2020
My Black Africa read for October is Ancestor Stones, Aminatta Forna (Sierra Leone) and for November is Not My Time to Die, Yolande Mukagasana (Rawanda)