That Guy

Binyavanga Wainaina​ became an African literary celebrity in 2005, when Granta published his instructions for travel writers, journalists and aid workers on ‘how to write about Africa’. ‘Be sure to leave the impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed,’ he wrote. ‘Among your characters you must always include the Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked and waits for the benevolence of the West.’ African characters ‘should be colourful, exotic, larger than life – but empty inside’; animals ‘must be treated as well-rounded, complex characters … elephants are … good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas.’ The essay was both funny and sobering for outsiders who go on the record about Africa. How could they fail to see themselves in the mirror Wainaina held up to their pomposity? Anthropology was the only line of work that he didn’t have time to make fun of before he died in 2019 from the last of a series of strokes, a few years after being diagnosed with HIV. He remains one of the great anglophone satirists of postcolonial Africa.

Wainaina was born in Kenya in 1971 and left for South Africa in 1991 to study for a degree in accounting, which he abandoned before settling in Cape Town. He hustled a meagre living in food journalism and catering (he was an excellent cook), but cut loose from the bitter disputes unfolding in the rainbow nation and by the early 2000s was back in Kenya. He had published in South Africa and was meeting other African writers, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in a flourishing digital commons where novelists, poets and essayists were exchanging drafts. In 2002, he took a shot at the Caine Prize – the African Booker – digging out ‘Discovering Home’, a riotous account of his return to the mother country that had been languishing on an editor’s desk in the US and was eventually printed without the changes on which Wainaina had insisted. He rushed a new version to the online journal G21 and submitted the result to the Caine judges, who nixed it on the grounds that G21 wasn’t a serious – that is, print – publication.

For Wainaina, Caine’s reluctance to accept digital submissions was the final straw, after years of frustration with the African publishing scene. In the 1960s, the editors of Heinemann’s African Writers Series had dreamed of sending books from warehouse to bookshops to readers across the continent but found themselves defeated by logistics. Local African publishers were thin on the ground and the corresponding infrastructure mostly lacking. African cinema was faced with the same difficulty and quickly became a niche affair for American and European audiences in the absence of local funding or a distribution network for Africa’s great directors, who raised money and established their names outside the continent. During the Cold War, it was rare to find a cinema in Africa showing anything other than kung-fu movies or cast-offs from Hollywood and the Soviet bloc. The outstanding success stories of the analogue era were Nollywood’s ‘direct-to-video’ releases, dating from the early 1990s, and the free music (African and non-African) that took off in the 1970s thanks to audio cassette technology, which enabled hand-to-hand transmission, even if it flew in the face of copyright. But Wainaina wasn’t raising a flag for piracy when he challenged the Caine judges’ decision. ‘If in the last twelve months,’ he asked them, ‘not a single collection of writing or short stories has been published in Africa, where do you think you’re going to get submissions from?’

There are grand statements in ‘Discovering Home’ of the sort that appeal to people who give out literary prizes – ‘Kenya’s economy is on the brink of collapse, but we march on like safari ants’ – and lyrical moments: ‘The Kikuyu grass by the side of the road is crying silver tears the colour of remembered light.’ The judges had second thoughts and awarded Wainaina first prize. He invested his winnings in a literary magazine, Kwani? (‘So What?’), based in Nairobi. The magazine led off with a print edition (and stuck to the format). The first issue ran work by the Kenyan writer Muthoni Garland, the Tanzanian cartoonist Gado and a piece by Njabulo Ndebele on the South African singer Brenda Fassie; ‘Weight of Whispers’, a short story by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, won the next year’s Caine Prize.

Wainaina’s Granta essay projected him into the literary firmament as a solo African astronaut. This was a long way from the early postcolonial era, when writers on the continent had been introduced to the rest of the world as Team Africa: Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Bessie Head, Mongo Beti, Es’kia Mphahlele – the list went on. Wainaina himself was modest about his ascent: he saw himself as one of many young writers creating a pan-African literary idiom for the 21st century.

‘How to Write about Africa’ set the tone for a weary scepticism about the way non-Africans behave or speak when they arrive on the continent. For the British-Nigerian essayist Dipo Faloyin, humanitarianism is seldom better than the disasters it proposes to address, and often a cover for more pernicious motives. Celebrities are particularly self-serving in this regard. In his essay ‘The Birth of White Saviour Imagery’, Wainaina’s ‘how to’ becomes a caustic ‘how not to’: ‘You should avoid picking up random children you do not know for a photo that you then publish online … no matter how cute or how poor they are.’ In ‘Why Do Western Media Get Africa Wrong?’, the Kenyan writer Nanjala Nyabola argues that the first Western journalist to arrive on the scene and file a story (often a disaster story) is treated as a more reliable voice than local bloggers or reporters. The result, she writes, is often an unwitting description of ‘what the West is not’ – a chaotic world, riven by ethnic tension, poverty and conflict – even though a foreign correspondent from an African country would have no trouble picking out the same faultlines in Europe or the US. There’s not much evidence in contemporary Western journalism for the kinds of parody Wainaina offered in his Granta essay: a survey of French and British media coverage of Africa between 2007 and 2012 found no support for the suggestion that terms such as ‘darkness’ and ‘tribalism’ predominated, or that the continent was presented as a ‘homogenous entity’. But Wainaina was sure that residual attitudes about ‘Africa’ hadn’t disappeared.

His bête blanche was the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, one of Granta’s most eminent contributors in the 1980s and early 1990s and the writer on African subjects most capable, Wainaina explained in a column for the South African Mail and Guardian, of turning him into ‘an Angry Black Man’. He describes a party in New York that Kapuściński, in town for a PEN conference, was supposed to attend where he waited for the chance to confront him. When Kapuściński failed to arrive, Wainaina downed a consolation martini and approached Salman Rushdie. ‘I stood in front of The Rushdie, somewhat nervously. Then I asked him why he had invited the racist writer Kapuściński to come to the PEN conference.’ Rushdie was elusive and wandered off, so Wainaina downed another martini and recapped Kapuściński’s ‘all-time classic lines about Africa’: ‘Let us remember that fear of revenge is deeply rooted in the African mentality’; ‘Africans believe that a mysterious energy circulates through the world’; ‘Africans eat only once a day, in the evening’; ‘Darkness unnerves them, they may flatly refuse to drive after sunset.’ He scorned Kapuściński-land as a ‘left-leaning, Rider Haggard world of strange, voiceless, dark peoples doing strange, voiceless, dark things’.

Wainaina’s target is the racist trope. How to Write about Africa was not a post facto critique of colonialism. It was too late for that, in his view, and you can’t fault him on his knowledge of African class struggles, neo-colonialism or the colonial past. But he was born in 1971, a year before Walter Rodney published How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and still in his teens when Mandela was released from Pollsmoor Prison and ‘multiparty’ became the exhilarating demand in Kenya, after decades of sclerotic one-party rule. Wainaina belonged to a second-wave, post-independence cohort that could put the past – and the Cold War – behind them without feeling they’d lost track of history: it was Africa’s moment and only wan academics and backsliders, to his mind, were still insisting on the legacy of colonialism (he staked out the ground for these arguments in his impressionist memoir of 2011, One Day I Will Write about This Place).

In 2013, interviewed on Al-Jazeera, Wainaina argued that international donors were undermining local initiatives in Kenya and providing cover for corrupt politicians. The interviewer, Folly Bah Thibault, a French-Guinean, shot back: ‘But isn’t corruption a consequence – an effect – of colonialism?’ ‘How?’ Wainaina asked politely. ‘We are now fifty years after colonialism … we are sovereign, self-determined nations dealing with our own fate … so to hark back to [colonialism] is also looking for a kind of victimhood that’s not helpful. Take the person who’s stolen from the till and arrest him.’ He was imagining a Western model of accountability that would transfer fluently to regimes in Africa, where many judicial systems, unlike those in the US or Europe, lacked the resources or the clout to prosecute wayward politicians. He was in his early forties and his generational optimism hadn’t worn thin.

By then, he was repurposing the approach of his Granta essay to make fun of African dictatorships. Rule 1 in ‘How to Be a Dictator’: ‘Be the richest man in your country.’ Rule 11: ‘Do not send all the money you steal to Switzerland and do not give it to your wife.’ Rule 16: ‘Love China.’ In ‘How to Be an African’, he accused the North American diaspora of overblown claims that the African mothership was the origin of civilisation: ‘The Tutsis were ancient Phoenicians and Greeks … Jesus was an African … We invented coffee … every single one of us is descended from kings and queens … Pushkin’s great grandfather was from Cameroon … Everybody say Mamaaaa … Africaaaaaaaaaa.’ By this time, ‘how to’ was a hit-and-miss affair.

The best reboot by far is ‘How to Write about Africa II: The Revenge’. In this short piece, published in Bidoun in 2010, Wainaina explains how the original essay came about. He was enraged, he writes, by the 1994 ‘Africa’ issue of Granta, which he first came across in the early 2000s. He describes it, wonderfully, as a ‘Greatest Hits of Hearts of Fuckedness’: ‘It wasn’t the grimness that got to me, it was the stupidity. There was nothing new, no insight, but lots of “reportage” – Oh, gosh, wow, look, golly ooo – as if Africa and Africans were not part of the conversation, were not indeed living in England across the road from the Granta office.’ He dashed off a ‘rambling email’ to Ian Jack, then editor of Granta, who commissioned him to write a piece for a forthcoming ‘Africa’ issue. Jack assured Wainaina that he would make amends for the earlier issue overseen by his predecessor, Bill Buford. Wainaina agreed, but when he came unstuck with his assignment, Jack suggested instead that ‘we publish your long, crazy email’. Wainaina agreed and as he tells it, became the arbiter of what visitors to African countries could and couldn’t say. ‘I went viral; I became spam … Now I am “that guy”, the conscience of Africa: I will admonish you and give you absolution … Fuck Granta … thanks, Granta.’

In an earlier issue – not the one that infuriated Wainaina – Granta ran a brief piece of reportage I had turned in about the conflict in South Africa’s townships that followed Mandela’s release in 1990. I wouldn’t care to revisit it and I haven’t: I’m sure Wainaina is right that eyewitness accounts such as mine are often the opposite of ‘insight’. Buford wanted his contributors to show without telling, as any teacher in a creative writing class would have asked of their students. This routine aesthetics of ellipsis is Wainaina’s strongest objection to the Granta manner. Within a few years of the killings in the South African townships, the international press corps had moved on to the wars in the former Yugoslavia, which required a lot of telling. In 1995 Michael Holman – a Rhodesian dissident under Ian Smith’s regime who went on to become Africa editor at the Financial Times – confessed privately to a perverse sense of relief that press coverage of ‘ethnic conflict’ was no longer ghettoised in Africa. Wainaina was too young at the time to confer ‘absolution’ on any Western reporter who had filed from Africa, but the best of them, like Holman, were already on the case. And by the mid-1990s, European readers who deplored the ‘barbarism’ in Rwanda were forced to reckon with Srebrenica.

Wainaina​ had long understood that he was gay. He came out in 2014 in an essay for the online journal Africa Is a Country. In the opening passage, he imagines himself by his mother’s deathbed, telling her what he’d wanted to explain since he was a boy. In the next section – ‘the right version of events’ – he is on the point of leaving South Africa to visit her when his uncle calls to tell him he’s too late. ‘I am 29,’ he writes. ‘It is 11 July 2000. I, Binyavanga Wainaina, quite honestly swear I have known I am a homosexual since I was five.’

Wainaina was reluctant to repeat generalities about being gay in Africa. The gloomy stats tell us that of the more than sixty states that still criminalise same-sex activity, nearly half are African. Discrimination against LGBT communities is one of the rare agendas on which citizens of African states and their governments tend to align, with spontaneous homophobic violence on the one hand and harsh legislation on the other. But Wainaina knew that if he went to town on the subject of African homophobia, a new round of Western finger-wagging aimed at ‘backward’ fellow Kenyans (and citizens across the continent) would follow. In an interview for National Public Radio, he joked – in deadly earnest – about the way his decision to come out would be presented: ‘In the heart-of-gay-homophobia-darkness in Africa, Binyavanga writes of peace. Binyavanga explains how homophobia in Africa works … I get the sense that it’s this thing of “My God, you Africans are very homophobic, I’m going to go and report it to the West.”’

By then, his ‘how to’ gadget could be customised by anyone who fancied their chances. ‘How NOT to write about Queer South Africa’, by the sociologist Zethu Matebeni, catches Wainaina’s manner in its opening paragraph: ‘To help the reader, replace LGBT with gay. In later texts, put the word queer in the title. Like gay, queer does the same work, but sounds better. Don’t worry that most South Africans do not use the word queer, they will all soon catch onto it.’ Matebeni goes on to compile an inventory of clumsy assumptions about LGBT. Some of them are well-intentioned, others are not, but she is ruthlessly impartial: neither hostile homophobes nor the aimless droves of liberal handwringers come out well. The aim of the essay, which plays fair and dirty with allies and enemies alike, is to strike a pre-emptive blow against the kind of Western condescension Wainaina had foreseen.

A few months after he announced that he was gay, Wainaina travelled to Senegal to interview Youssou N’Dour. He had already published superb pieces of reportage from Senegal, South Sudan and Ghana. Many are collected in How to Write about Africa and might be mistaken for a kind of docufiction: Wainaina has the descriptive powers of a novelist and the will to imagine his way inside the people he meets. But we’re not chez Kapuściński, who set out with the piece he had in mind and groomed, or created, his incidental detail to fit. Wainaina’s repertoire of voices is extensive, on occasion puzzling. Beside those of his interlocutors and his own narrative voice, there are extraneous, unnamed speakers – other versions of Wainaina – that emerge from his conversations with himself. They don’t seem to belong in the piece until you see that it couldn’t exist without them.

In his interview with N’Dour this montage is so rich that we could be listening to a DJ set: the Nigerian writer Akin Adesọkan hears Wainaina’s prose as elaborate ‘sampling’ and describes him as a master of the African ‘remix’: agile, multi-layered, fully promiscuous across genres. But when it came to sexual politics, Wainaina was plainspoken. ‘There is nothing that is a priority about being a homosexual and an African,’ he said in a 2015 TedX talk. ‘I am living in plain light; I am not living in a dark continent. I will stand free, as I need to be … and nobody will stop me from going where I will.’

The title of the Youssou N’Dour remix – ‘It’s Only a Matter of Acceleration Now’ – alerts us to the pace Wainaina means to set as he lands in Dakar and reverses with a squeal of tyres into a long story from the 1980s about N’Dour bumping into Neneh Cherry in a Paris airport, or rather crashing into her and helping her up from the ground with a bleeding lip. We can’t tell how far the account is embellished, but we know that N’Dour and Cherry became friends and collaborators: their single ‘7 Seconds’ was a big hit in 1994. Next Wainaina is prepping for his interview with the great man by getting drunk in a night club in Dakar, where he embarrasses himself, he suspects, by twirling his arms over his head on the dancefloor like a tourist from Europe (or perhaps just from Kenya). Remorseful, he swims out from the corniche the following morning and hooks up later with a musicologist for an education in the hybrid genealogy of N’Dour’s music. Here and there he throws in reflections on his hangover and his swimming technique: a lifeguard helps him to work on his breaststroke – ‘kick my legs and propel forward’.

Occasionally he wants to throw up and thinks, if he did, it would be unadulterated gin and tonic – which is pure Gonzo journalism, purged of Kapuściński’s disingenuousness. N’Dour tells Wainaina that musical traditions survive in West Africa ‘precisely because they are not the priority of the political elite and the government’, but that this is ‘also a recipe for frustration’. He goes on to praise the informal sector in Senegal, where a market trader in traditional African dress can arrive at a bank in his Mercedes and make a cash deposit larger than a politician’s. Wainaina lets this pass without comment. In his next paragraph, he’s back in the sea. ‘Five, six, seven strokes and I find a rhythm.’ The piece is framed as a circular journey. It begins with a question, put to Wainaina by his Senegalese chauffeur: ‘Are you prepared for the interview?’ In the final sentence, Wainaina revisits that question and asks himself: ‘Are you ready to interview Youssou N’Dour?’

After Wainaina’s death, ‘It’s Only a Matter of Acceleration Now’ was talked up as a possible title for a posthumous collection, but there’s been no sign of one. In 2023 the American composer Lamin Fofana (West African diaspora, out of Sierra Leone and Guinea) borrowed the title for a short album dedicated to ‘the great Binyavanga Wainaina’. Fofana does his best to catch Wainaina’s exuberance, but it’s all on the page.