Africa has never been short of avant-garde, maverick and daring writers – one of them is a Kenyan Binyavanga Wainaina. In contemporary literary circles, Wainaina is respected for his eloquence, wit and love for the continent. It was for the same reasons he drew a full house at the auditorium of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), in Johannesburg. It turned out to be a bizarre winter evening with the writer and gay activist.
It was awkward and excruciating to listen to Wainaina, who struggled to speak without breaking mid-sentence. Sitting there, in front of his loyal admirers, he was a shadow of himself. Wainaina, with a clean-shaven head, in black kaftan adorned with an elegant necklace, sipped beer between sentences in this hour-long conversation with Wits literature lecturer Danai Mupotsa and Indian writer Achal Prabhala. Wainaina was the guest at the event titled ‘How To Write About Everything’, which echoed his essay How To Write About Africa.
In 2015, at the age of 44, Wainaina suffered a series of minor strokes that impaired his speech. I don’t know how many beers he had, but sitting in the second row, I noticed his head lolling at times.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/sometime-in-africa/2017/08/15/bees-knees-honey/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">It&#8217;s The Bees&#8217; Knees, Honey</a>
Like many in the audience, I had admired his work since childhood. We could have walked the same streets when I was growing up in Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, where he lived for nine years. He stayed in Mthatha, the small town where Nelson Mandela was born, while studying accounting. He dropped out and earned a living copywriting on his way of becoming a renowned essayist.
In 2014, Wainaina was named as one of TIME’s 100 most influential people but he refused to attend the function. Similarly, in 2007, the World Economic Forum acknowledged him as a young global leader but he declined again. He said the organizers should have asked him first before publishing his name.
At the time of writing his memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, Kenya was going through violent elections and Wainaina was home during his recess at Union College, in the United States. He said the book made it difficult for him to return to the college.
“This affected the book very immensely because it was supposed to be personal. I must tell you, many African writers face the same thing, where you say, ‘I believe in art for art’s sake, I believe I am supposed to just write this book about my life’, and then shit happens that politicizes the thing. And that is beautiful, but it doesn’t feel like that at the time,” said Wainaina.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/sometime-in-africa/2017/07/14/gliding-grace-flies-without-flap/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Gliding Grace That Flies Without A Flap</a>
Wainaina is well known for his scathing reviews of fellow writers but has also fostered talent all over the world.
“…He has a kind of yearning for utopia, an Africa utopia. It’s because of his glorious heart, his capacity for love. Once we had a fight and I was in the wrong but I didn’t acknowledge it then. He taught me with grace what real friendship means and for that I will always be grateful. I love him, I respect him, I admire him, and I am glad he finally listened to me about the cut of his kaftans,” said Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in her message.
Wainaina knew at the age of 10 that he was gay but he refused to talk about it until Chimamanda asked.
“Of course, I said no. But she liberated something in me, already, just by asking me. Because normally the skies will fall if you say yes,” says Wainaina, overwhelmed with emotions in a continent that often misunderstood him.
Chimamanda’s question led him to pen his popular essay I Am a Homosexual, Mum, which was published on his birthday.
“It’s hard to describe the kind of effect it has had. It sort of stopped the world in a little while in a great way. Binyavanga, ironically, was very keen to produce this essay as a conversation he wanted to have on the African continent with people that he felt close to, rather than be published in the New Yorker, which he could have an easy access to do. Ironically, of course, the New Yorker had a headline Binyavanga Comes Out a week later. Binyavanga had to deal with the world press. There’s not a single publication anywhere in the world that didn’t cover this event,” says Prabhala.
Wainaina, and his bizarre, bombastic world, is likely to write more headlines yet.

An Awesome, Awkward, African Night

So goes Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina’s searing satirical piece, entitled ‘How to Write About Africa’, which appeared in Granta magazine in 2005 and subsequently went viral.
The article offered comic relief to many Africans who had bottled up resentment to the centuries-old narratives about the ‘Dark Continent’, which were more often than not shaped by non-Africans.
In recent years, many more Africans have joined Wainaina’s ranks – evangelists trampling these stereotypes and spreading the gospel of ‘Africa rising’.
As part of this new narrative, the news media constantly reminds us that Africa is home to six of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies. This year, The Economist declared Africa “the world’s fastest-growing continent”, while Time noted Africa is “the world’s next economic powerhouse”. A few years back, a McKinsey &amp; Co report described our economies as “lions on the move”.
Indeed these lions have newfound assertiveness, thanks to a period of relative political stability, a decade-long economic surge, changing geo-political relations on the back of China’s growth, and access to social media platforms.
In this mission to redefine the long-battered image of Africa, Kenya offers an interesting case study. Much of the country’s confidence comes from its status as a regional economic hub, political heavyweight and technology leader.
Kenya is also, arguably, leading the African pushback against Western media’s tendency to cover mostly coups, wars, famine, hunger and diseases on the continent.
“These are the images that we must aggressively seek to banish from the global media space and sphere about Africa. Not because they do not exist, rather, that they will belong to a past, an inglorious past, that we seek forever to consign to the annals of history,” Kenyan leader Uhuru Kenyatta declared on World Press Freedom Day earlier this year.
With Kenyans at the forefront of Africa’s tech movement, it’s no surprise that the younger generation is using social media to challenge stereotypical images. In the lead-up to the March general elections, KoTs (Kenyans on Twitter) were increasingly vocal about which stories Western media chose to cover.
KoTs used #someonetellCNN to force the broadcast giant to apologize. An international correspondent had allegedly stage-managed  a report showing some Rift Valley residents planning retribution attacks for the 2007/8 post-election violence.
Not only are Kenyans challenging Western narratives, they are also producing their own. For many Kenyans, one of the lasting images of the media coverage of the election is that of NTV anchor Larry Madowo’s ‘helicopter journalism’. On election day, Madowo started off with a live report from a polling station in Nairobi. A short while later, he was reporting from Garissa Town, then Lamu, then Tana River County.
Another example came after the poll. Kenyan student Waringa Kamau, who is studying at the Washington and Lee University in the United States, wanted to find out if KoTs’ concerns that Western media deliberately portrays Africa in a negative light extended beyond her fellow Kenyans. Her documentary, Africa in Western Media, shows that the students she interviewed agreed with KoTs.
With the growing optimism, there is also an increasing concern that the news media is under pressure to downplay any negative accounts. Kenyan media has been criticized by Kenyans themselves for trivializing some of the violence and irregularities that occurred during the run-up to the elections.
Even the broader ‘Africa rising’ narrative has been condemned. It is accused of implicitly concealing the fragility of Africa’s economic growth and the various challenges that could hold the continent back from genuine, inclusive development. Some of these are ongoing aid dependence, governance issues and the fact that the economic surge is largely driven by the extractive industry, as Rick Rowden points out in his Foreign Policy article, ‘The Myth of Africa’s Rise’.
So, while a shift from the ‘hopeless Africa’ narrative is long overdue, Kenyans and their African sisters and sisters may need to move into a new paradigm, where happenings on the ground are examined more closely.
We need to find the balance when telling our own stories, otherwise the image of Africa rising will not hold and the journey to inclusive development may be stalled before it starts.

Tag: Binyavanga Wainaina

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

An Awesome, Awkward, African Night

A new story about