how to write about africa binyavanga wainaina analysis

It was the best thing about him, but also the worst. You would meet him for five minutes and feel as though you had known him your whole life because of the way he opened himself up to people, the way he had no filter.

What was up with that?īinya apologised and hugged me with an exuberance of one who had known me for a long time. I wanted to get published in Kenya I had communicated with them the year before and sent them my debut novel. I immediately took the Kwani team to task. The two had studied in South Africa, loved the country and thought of it fondly. Among the people with him was his sister, June, who I became quick friends with. He had come with his team from Africa’s then most visible and favourite publishing house, Kwani, which Binyavanga had started with some of his winnings from the Caine Prize for African Writing. Two years after first encountering Binyavanga through his essay, I would meet him for the first time in Accra, Ghana, as part of a delegation of South African writers attending the first Pan African Literary Forum. I continued reading Binyavanga’s work through his writing in this publication. That aside, the essay still remains perhaps one of the greatest critiques of the Global North’s engagement with the Global South in general and Africa in particular. I no longer agree entirely with the essay because I question how my pan-African position can have a problem with Africa as a country. So, too, with me, about How to Write about Africa. Over time, as one grows, one changes one’s mind about certain works of art. Here were my jumbled thoughts turned into perfect words.

“In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country.” An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. “Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won a Nobel Prize.

READ MORE: Binyavanga Wainaina dies, aged 48

It was in meeting Binyavanga Wainaina through his seminal essay, How to Write About Africa, that I found the words of everything I had hoped, but failed, to say. Among my reasons for leaving was disillusionment with the sector. In 2006, I had just left my job at a civil society organisation in Johannesburg, where our key purpose was to push governments to make poverty history. (Simon Maina/AFP) Obituary (1971 – 2019) Binyavanga Wainaina He died earlier this week, at the age of 48. Pan-African: Binyavanga Wainaina, one of Kenyas most acclaimed writers and a founding editor of the Nairobi-based journal Kwani?, was a champion of imaginative writing.

How to write about africa binyavanga wainaina analysis