how to write about africa by binyavanga wainaina

Loosely-a word he was fond of-he glides from personal to political and then quickly tightens the screws on a commonly lived epoch (“Some say all we do is turn, like rotisserie chicken, on the whims of our imperial presidents, Kenyatta and Moi”). In sets of three adjectives-for instance, his sister Ciru is “small and thin and golden”-he manages to capture the essence of people and places in a way they can never be anything else in the reader’s imagination again. Wainaina follows himself from a childhood in the lakeside town of Nakuru to university in a fermenting South Africa to a teaching job in freezing upstate New York.

It is memoir, travelogue, personal history, all rolled into something mixed and messed-up-like the country of Kenya and the continent of Africa. One Day is wholly original, a type of book I didn’t know people were allowed to write. I read his 2011 book- One Day I Will Write About This Place-in a kind of fever. Inspired, I tipped my hat and borrowed the style for an essay I pitched to an Indian publication about the typical travel feature (“Irrespective of the place you are writing about, sunlight must be dappled, mountains silent and cafés quaint”). The piece had its origins in a rambling email that Wainana, exasperated by clichéd Western writing about the continent, had sent to the journal. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances”). The first thing I read by him was his satirical essay for the literary journal Granta in 2005, How To Write About Africa (“Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. As a child, he played with words in his mouth-rolling them, enunciating them, spitting them out.

He experienced words as a physical sensation, as we do with love (light-headedness) and sorrow (knot in the chest). Reading Binyavanga Wainaina makes one feel that he wrote with his body.

How to write about africa by binyavanga wainaina