how to write about africa by binyavanga wainaina

It’s divided into three chapters freedom, rebellion and the war. They still make us the beautiful people we are now who deserve love and whose legacy, at least in part, should be about the freedom brought about from the cages of the mind broken free that once suffocated our human experience. Not only is its rate increasing but people are bottling up their emotions with drugs and social media more and more and people need to see that it’s okay to openly talk about those ‘ugly parts’ of us. Resolutely avoiding stereotype and cliché, Wainaina paints every scene in One Day I Will Write About This Place with a highly distinctive and hugely memorable brush.

Finally he circles back to a Kenya in the throes of postelection violence and finds he is not the only one questioning the old certainties. A series of fascinating international reporting assignments follow. And when, in 2002, a writing prize comes through, the door is opened for him to pursue the career that perhaps had been beckoning all along.

Throughout, reading is his refuge and his solace. The landscape in front of him always claims his main attention, but he also evokes the shifting political scene that unsettles his views on family, tribe, and nationhood. In this vivid and compelling debut memoir, Wainaina takes us through his school days, his mother’s religious period, his failed attempt to study in South Africa as a computer programmer, a moving family reunion in Uganda, and his travels around Kenya. He could fall in with their patterns, but it would take him a while to carve out his own. This world came to him as a chaos of loud and colorful sounds: the hair dryers at his mother’s beauty parlor, black mamba bicycle bells, mechanics in Nairobi, the music of Michael Jackson-all punctuated by the infectious laughter of his brother and sister, Jimmy and Ciru. Binyavanga Wainaina tumbled through his middle-class Kenyan childhood out of kilter with the world around him.

How to write about africa by binyavanga wainaina