The Many Faces of Binyavanga Wainaina

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.

The difficulty in writing about Binyavanga lies in questions about what his legacy is in Kenyan literature. He was one of the founding editors of Kwani?, where he poured a lot of energy in building one of Africa’s pre-eminent literary outfits. He championed the careers of several writers, editing their work, writing recommendations, and introduced some of them to editors and agents. In addition, he was a gay rights activist, and in his coming out, became a beacon to many LGBTQI+ people in Kenya and beyond. He also had a reputation as something of a bully, and had, by the time of his death, fallen out with many of the writers he had started Kwani? with, as well as some of those he had served as a mentor to. His political leanings were suspect, swinging between a blasé sitting-on-the-fence attitude with respect to Kenyan elective politics and a drum-beating support for suspects of war crimes. When a fellow writer was accused of sexual assault, he turned on the accusers, presumably dismissing one of them, Wambui Mwangi, as an alcoholic. And, perhaps more worryingly, after his death there emerged new (at least to some of us) allegations of sexual assault levelled against Binyavanga himself. Binyavanga passing away means we can’t quite put these questions to him in the way we would have had he been alive. Instead, what we have is his writing.

The first story he ever published was in 1996. This was ‘Binguni!’ a fantasy story that involved a protagonist who died and went to African heaven. Even this early, we see the same sparks of craftwork that would litter his later, more mature work. The second part of the story reads a lot like the opening of his memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place. In both, the protagonist’s body is an ephemeral metaphysical existence where, in the memoir, a ‘thousand suns are breathing’ and ‘each piece of the sun is always a complete little sun’, and, in the short story, ‘life thrills and memories concentrated into tiny capsules of pure feeling.’

This story was published when he was studying in South Africa. Back then, Binyavanga dreamt of middle-class normality. He ‘wanted to be a hard-working, middle-class boy from Africa, and earn R16,000 a month as a chartered accountant, buy a sixteen-valve car, pretend to fall in love with a yellow-skinned girl who looked like she lived in an R&B video, and pose cool.’ He never did qualify as an accountant, instead becoming a writer. Neither did he, as far as we are aware, buy a sixteen-valve car. Having abandoned his university education, he moved to Cape Town in the mid-1990s to become a freelance writer whose beat was culinary culture. He only got back to Kenya in 2000 when his mother died, whereby he, as Prabhala tells us, ‘burst into the church where his mother’s funeral was being held, surprising his siblings, who thought he was far away in South Africa.’ A year later he moved back to Kenya permanently, writing ‘for anyone who would have him’, and in 2002, he won the Caine Prize.

There are multiple Binyavangas. The earliest iteration was the food writer, writing very methodical recipes for, among other dishes, Mushy Pea Mukimo, Shingo ya Kondoo na Maziwa Lala (Lamb’s Neck Medallions with Mustard and Amasi), Swahili Braised Chicken, and mutura. Mutura (a type of blood sausage popular in Kenya) was his favourite dish. Mutura has a reputation as dirty street food, but Binyavanga writes, ‘Is it really good for us to be sanitized? Why are we so afraid of real food?’

But he was at his best when he wrote about the intimate spaces he inhabited. In an essay about his circumcision, he describes how he steals another boy’s circumcision story because while his, Binyavanga’s had been done in a hospital, his friend Maina’s circumcision was the real deal, done ‘in the village with booze, earthworms that were eaten, classes on sex, secret names, a dawn ‘dip in an ice-cold mountain stream.’” When writing about personal spaces, or public spaces in which people shared their private lives, we see the full breadth of his wit, for instance when he writes in ‘Discovering Home’, the essay packaged as a short story to win him the Caine Prize, ‘After the soft light and mellow manners of Cape Town, Nairobi is a shot of whisky.’ Or when he described a man in a bar as wielding ‘his potbelly like a sexual magnet.’

Then there was the political Binyavanga. Here, his cynicism came to the fore and it, mixed with the other things he had picked up from writing about food and about intimate spaces, became a portent weapon where, to quote him, ‘phrases swell, becoming bigger than their context and speak to us as truth.’ One of his truths was a double hit on both the UK and his beloved South Africa, where he described the idea of multiculturalism in the UK as tasting ‘like Rainbow Nation, a line of bullshit to disguise much grit.’ This Binyavanga’s favourite target was the class of colonial writers who had made careers out of writing caricatures of Africa, in particular the Polish writer and fabulist Ryszard Kapuściński. He writes:

One of the stories in the collection is a short story called ‘All Things Remaining Equal’. In the short story, a Kenyan woman gets the upper-class mobility she’s been desiring by getting romantically involved with a white NGO worker called Gordon. Gordon is obsessed with black bodies, and he, a Leakey facsimile, collects black Kenyan men he calls ‘indigenous peoples’ Maasais, Pokots, Turkanas.’ He says, ‘Man has lived here maybe longer than anywhere else. The Turkana who live not far from here have been found to be the oldest society of humans so far to be traced by DNA tests. It is here that man evolved. We know these landscapes in our bones.’ More to the point, Gordon loves Kapuściński. His models of Africa and of Africans are from Kapuściński. He says to his lover’s daughter Milka, ‘Ah! Kapuściński. Fucking amazing. Did you read The Emperor?’ Milka doesn’t answer, and he fills in the silence by bragging about everyone who knows who personally knows the Polish writer.

Now, as a writer, Binyavanga had a certain opacity in the politics of his writing (rather like late-stage Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o). And one of the things that appeared most frequently was his disdain for Kapuściński. His famous essay ‘How to Write about Africa’ was prompted by a take-down by John Ryle of the Polish writer where Ryle pointed out Kapuściński’s habits of making up events and facts, and by the fact that, despite this, Granta had included an essay by Kapuściński in their ‘Africa’ issue. And now here in this short story was Gordon, the Africa expert who loves Kapuściński.

Once, Binyavanga and his good friend Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (who, in 2018, he told me he had once been engaged to in the time before he came out) crashed a party in New York where they hoped to heckle Kapuściński. ‘Soon, Chimamanda was whisked away by a warm and fruit cloud of Important People in Publishing,’ and Binyavanga was left on his own. However, Adichie returned to introduce him to the Booker-winning and fatwa-receiving British-Indian writer, Salman Rushdie, and when Binyavanga asked Rushdie why he had invited a racist writer—Kapuściński—to speak at a PEN conference, Rushdie denied that Kapuściński was racist.

There is a certain kind of foreign visitor to Africa who loves Kapuściński, whether it’s an NGO saviour type like Gordon, or a foreign correspondent, or the white settlers in Kenya and Zimbabwe. In another short story in the collection—‘Ships in High Transit’, first published in Virginia Quarterly Review in 2005—a character is described as ‘A sexy fraud if he is one. He hangs out with Peter Beard at his ranch in Nairobi. I saw it in Vogue. He drinks with Kapuściński.’ People like these, who drink with Kapuściński, or worship his writing, are attracted to the Polish fabulist because he backs up a tinted image they already have of Africa, and because of the way he made himself the hero of his quests—the white saviour here to save the poor Africans from their misery by his writing. In the same story, Binyavanga provides us with a list of white saviours here to save the Africans: ‘Feminist Female Genital Mutilation crusaders, cow-eyed Nature freaks, Cutting-edge Correspondents, Root-Seeking African Americans, Peace Corps workers and hordes of NGO folk: foreigners who speak African languages and wear hemp or khaki. Daadab chic.’

The thing Kapuściński understood was that what his readers (and intelligence minders) desired was an image. The truth of the image did not matter. The Kenyan writer Dalle Abraham, in an essay about a Google Arts and Culture Project about Kenyan heroes, observed that:

In the same way, Binyavanga presents us with a character in the business of collapsing several myths into one in order to come up with an Africa that appeals to the Western voyeur. ‘When the Maa-saa-i-a Empire fell apart, after a great war with the Phoenicians over trade in frankincense and myrrh, the remaining Maa scattered to the winds.’, he writes, ‘Some left for the south and formed the great Zulu nation; others remained in East Africa, impoverished but noble. Others fought with Prester John, and others became gladiators in Rome.’ Or, he presents us with a character called Otieno who is known to tourists as Ole Lenana. Otieno is a pretend Maasai. To the Western Kapuściński-loving/Blixen-loving/Peter-Beard-loving visitor to Kenya, Maasais (Ole Lenana) are sexy. Non-Maasais (Otieno) are not. So we all don red Maasai shukas and jump and say ‘ero’ and make up stories about lions.

Other myths: Kibera, ‘a place they had built themselves in that wondrous, Swishy-Light-in-Dubai way that white people built things[…] This Kibera had choppy verbs: Flying Toilets, Death by Machete, AIDS, a whirlpool. Slumlords. A thriller.’ And Kenya: ‘The Kenyan’s smile is the friendliest in the world. He will tell you “Jambo” and serve you dawa cocktails.’