The Many Faces of Binyavanga Wainaina The Important Truths in How to Write About Africa

The late Kenyan writer, Binyavanga Wainaina, made a career out of collecting and creating certain truths, whether of Africa, or of food, or of colonialism, or of racism, or of any of the other things that excited him intellectually. In a new posthumous collection of essays collected by Achal Prabhala, the truths most important to him are presented to us.

There is a moment in ‘Beyond River Yei’, one of the essays in How to Write About Africa, Binyavanga Wainaina’s posthumous collection of writing, when a lean young man with a rifle on his shoulder calls out to Binyavanga, who’s being driven around in a large Land Cruiser. ‘Kawaja!’ he shouts, and in that instant, Binyavanga writes, ‘his fat sleek self has been granted a promotion.’ He is now a white man. In this essay we see Binyavanga at his strongest—the cynicism that pockmarked much of his writing, the humour that flashed throughout his work, and the ease with which he inserted himself into domestic scenes foreign to him and wrote about them with the liminality of an insider-outsider. 

How To Write About Africa, named for the famous Granta essay that supercharged his career as a writer, is a collection of work—both essays and short fiction—by the deceased Kenyan writer, collected and edited by Achal Prabhala, the Indian writer and researcher who was his friend and confidante. The collection encompasses both Binyavanga’s early writing, some of which was lost before Prabhala’s intervention, to his later work, stretching between ‘Binguni!’ in 1996 to his column for Mail & Guardian between 2006 and 2009...