African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

logo

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
Politics
Home›African Arguments›Politics›A Review – One Day I Will Write About This Place – By Binyavanga Wainaina

A Review – One Day I Will Write About This Place – By Binyavanga Wainaina

By Uncategorised
October 24, 2011
5171
2

Binyavanga Wainaina - author of One Day I Will Write About This Place, launched at the RAS on Wed 26th Oct

This is How to Write About Africa

Binyavanga Wainaina is most famous for How to write about Africa – an essay published by Granta in 2005 that formed a cynical guide to all the clichés writers generally employ when writing about the continent. A notable instruction in this piece advises:

“˜Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances.’

Wainaina’s new (and first) book One Day I Will Write About This Place is a comic refutation of the premise that this is how you write about Africa. As such, it reads like nothing I have read before, crackling with the energy of a writer who delights in revealing the multi-cultural, multi-national, multi-ethnic world of his middle-class Kenyan upbringing.

In 2002 Wainaina won the Caine Prize  –  the “˜African Booker’ –  for his short story Discovering Home (a section of which is skilfully woven into the narrative of this memoir).  The writing of the former piece is deliciously lampooned in One Day… Wainaina reveals his smart manipulation of the judges’ liberal desires – “˜I mine every sexy African theme I can think of…It is about a young girl (Girl Child, Gender!) who is questioning the world, and her mother’s values (Empowerment).’ I am wary of falling into the same trap as the Africa-entranced Caine Prize judges, but an African writer demonstrating how to manipulate the heartstrings of The West is something that brings joy to a cynical heart.

Wainaina’s book is strictly a memoir, but like all great writers of personalised non-fiction (Bruce Chatwin comes to mind) one feels there must be a fictionalised element. It is also an overtly political work, in the sense that Wainaina means to say something profound about Africa. What he is saying is both “˜this is how you write about Africa!’ and this is what modern Africa is. Wainaina’s life contains enough soap opera-like interest to satisfy the reader’s desire for plot, so we don’t get many high-octane moments of action or instances of intense excitement. Instead, the author presents his musings on what it is to be Kenyan and African through his personal experience of living these complex identities.

The great moments in the history of both Kenya and Africa in the last 20 years are dealt with lightly (much like the manner in which Wainaina deals with his own success – “˜I win the Caine Prize, and cry, bad snotty tears, and come back with some money.’) He is studying in South Africa as the apartheid regime is reaching its end, and his everyday observations of the events at this denouement place political earthquakes within a tangible personal narrative: “˜Chris Hani is dead in his driveway…and blood drips from his head and rolls down South Africa’s smooth tarmac, and you stand, dizzy. You make your way to the campus for the first time in over a month.’

And a few pages later:

“˜Mandela is President…There are now new black people in suits and ties, on television, on the streets…A good chunk of my finance class is in Johannesburg, working for Arthur Anderson.’

The South Africa section of the book is disjointed and unsettling – a story of a young man far from home in an unsettled land, full of booze and the quiet unfulfilled expectation of his gentle parents back in Kenya, carrying on.

From post-apartheid South Africa Wainaina returns to Kenya where politically things are also changing. His father, long-time Director of the Kenya Pyrethrum Board, has now retired, but “˜the new people at Pyrethrum Board have been mismanaging things…The new managing director is from Moi’s tribe. A diplomat with no experience of working with farmers.’ In what seems an almost throwaway line, Wainaina recounts that “˜the 1997 elections were rigged, Moi is back in power and the opposition is broken.’ His father continues to keep things going, travelling frequently to Nairobi playing the kind of conscientious middle class role that Wainaina says is never documented when people write about Africa.

As he delves further into the psyche of his country he grapples with the dark heart of so many half-formed news reports composed by westerners on the “˜problem’ of tribalism, It is alos at this point that we most fully encounter the author’s fascination with language. Post-colonial African states are necessarily multi-lingual places, and the cast of characters that Wainaina documents includes a sophisticated range of languages –   English, Swahili, Gikuyu, Sheng, Kinyarwanda – to name but a few. It is through language – the covert whispering in office corridors in Gikuyu (the language of Kenya’s most dominant Kikuyu tribe) – that Wainaina communicates the strange resurgence of “˜tribal’ affiliation.

This is self-consciously a book about Africa that, breaking from the guidance of his earlier essay, focuses on the doctors and lawyers, teachers, civil servants, students – a profile of confused modern Africa – of Tupac Shakur and Michael Jackson, Jay-Z and MTV. The people are Kenyans, but they inhabit a cultural world with which we are all familiar. It is thus doubly affecting when Wainaina talks of political strife in his own country. What he is saying is: ‘this is a mundane thing’, a struggle for power within a modern state. It is no atavistic impulse from pre-modern people. The individuals who planned the much documented 2007 post-election violence wore suites and inhabited the corridors of a modern government within a country where multinational companies operate and broadband internet and pizza are available.

However, it is within this multi-lingual space that Wainaina also sees Kenya’s salvation. In, for example, the taxi tout who can speak both Gikuyu and Kalenjin fluently, and moderates the language in which he operates according to the origin of his passengers. Kiswahili is a language “˜used to handling diverse people…perfect for revealing unreason’ and symbolic of natural brotherhood in its manner of communication. Kiswahili as Kenya’s lingua franca is a symbol that disparate tribal peoples throughout the country have, over many years, developed ways of living together. Political strife is a base anomaly when placed next to the intricate manners of the shared national language.

“˜Words carry such pungent worldviews’ says Wainaina as slowly he appreciates his talent for shaping them, ultimately drawing an utterly convincing and radically original portrait of 21st century Africa.

Magnus Taylor is Managing Editor of African Arguments Online

Previous Article

Libya After Gadaffi: 3 Scenarios – By ...

Next Article

Cote d’Ivoire: construction and transportation opportunities as ...

Uncategorised

2 comments

  1. hydroclorizine 14 August, 2021 at 22:45

    hydroxychloroquine 200 mg tab https://plaquenilx.com/# hydroxychloroquine dangers

  2. Anatomia 24 August, 2021 at 00:12

    A fantastic blogpost, I just given this onto a student who was doing a little analysis on that. And he in fact bought me breakfast because I discovered it for him. :).. So let me reword that: Thanks for the treat! But yeah Thanks for taking the time to discuss this, I feel strongly about it and enjoy learning more on this topic. If possible, as you gain expertise, would you mind updating your blog with more details? It is very helpful for me. Big thumb up for this post! http://www.piano.m106.com

Leave a reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Politics

    Sudanese Politics of Rage, Politics of Change

  • Politics

    Abyei and South Kordofan contested areas – a pattern of political interdependence

  • Politics

    Watch Kordofan

Subscribe to our newsletter

Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and never miss a thing!

  • 81.7K+
    Followers

Find us on Facebook

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Recent Posts

  • Crisis in Lasanod: Border Disputes, Escalating Insecurity and the Future of Somaliland
  • Oligarchs, Oil and Obi-dients: The battle for the soul of Nigeria
  • Of cobblers, colonialism, and choices
  • Blackness, Pan-African Consciousness and Women’s Political Organising through the Magazine AWA
  • “People want to be rich overnight”: Nigeria logging abounds despite ban

Editor’s Picks

Editor's PicksSocietySudan

We Muslim girls know how it feels to be Noura. Now we must fight for ...

A Sudanese teenager faces the death penalty after killing her rapist in self-defence. Like for many of us, home was not a safe place for her. When I was 18, ...
  • African climate protesters at COP26 in Glasgow, UK.

    2022 is Africa’s year to lead the world on climate change

    By Mohamed Adow
    January 12, 2022
  • Mwai Kibaki shakes hands with opposition leader Raila Odinga during peace talks mediated by Kofi Annan in Kenya, January 2008. Credit: Boniface Mwangi/IRIN.

    The (un)surprising effectiveness of African mediation efforts

    By Allard Duursma
    July 2, 2020
  • Refugees from Ukraine at the Polish border on 27 February 2022. Credit: Alexander Somto (Nze) Orah.

    “Only Ukrainians, not Blacks”: Fleeing African students face racism

    By Ope Adetayo
    March 3, 2022
  • Truck drivers have continued to pour soil to fill up wetland areas in Nsambya, Kampala, Uganda. Credit: Nangayi Guyson.

    “The rich are untouchable”: Uganda’s struggles to protect its wetlands

    By Nangayi Guyson
    September 1, 2022

Brought to you by


Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • en English
    am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
By continuing to browse this site, you agree to our use of cookies.
en English
am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu