Binyavanga Wainaina

The author traces the story of his middle-class youth in Kenya, marked by his mother's religious period, family trips, and his love of reading before political changes and a writing award compelled his literary career.

A Memoir

One Day I Will Write About This Place

This trio of sharp-witted essays takes irony to a new level. In How to Write About Africa, Wainaina dissects the African clichÈs and preconceptions dear to western writers and readers with a ruthless precision. In the same fashion, My Clan KC undresses the layers of meaning shrouding the identity of the infamous Kenya Cowboy. And in Power of Love, we start with a bemused recollection of the advent of the celebrities-for-Africa phenomenon, heralded by the mid-eighties hit song We Are The World. Itís a short step from there to the speculation, many years later, that ìa $9-dollar-a-day cow from Japan could very well head a humanitarian NGO in Kenya,î whose ìdollar-a-day peopleî continue to fascinate the ì$5-dollar-a-day, 25-year-old backpackers who came and loved and compassioned and are now the beneficiaries of $5000 a month consulting for the United Nations.î

How to Write about Africa

A trailblazing collection of writing from Binyavanga Wainaina's extraordinary life 'In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions.' Binyavanga Wainaina was a seminal author and activist, remembered as one of the greatest chroniclers of contemporary African life. After his death in 2019, this ground-breaking collection brings together his pioneering writing on the African continent for the first time. A rule-breaker full of wry satire and piercing wisdom, this collection includes many of Binyavanga's most critically acclaimed pieces, including the viral satirical sensation 'How to Write About Africa'. Writing fearlessly across a range of topics - from politics to international aid, cultural heritage and redefining sexuality, this is a remarkable illustration of a writer at the height of his power.

How to Write About Africa

Essays

*A New York Times Notable Book* *A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice* *A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year* Binyavanga Wainaina tumbled through his middle-class Kenyan childhood out of kilter with the world around him. 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. He could fall in with their patterns, but it would take him a while to carve out his own. 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. 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. Throughout, reading is his refuge and his solace. 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. A series of fascinating international reporting assignments follow. 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. 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.

Raz o tomto mieste napíšem

Adrienne Edwards

Wangechi Mutu

Nguva Na Nyoka

Antología. Escritores Africanos Contemporáneos

Kwani? is arguably Africa's most exciting and varied literary initiative of recent years. Describing itself as ?a magazine of ideas, [that] seeks to entertain, provoke and create?, Kwani? commissions and publishes stories, poetry, art and photography ?from all around the African continent and the diaspora'. Rejecting artificial divisions of high and low art and literary snobbery, it is dedicated to the flourishing of literature in Kenya and the of African cultural values. Kwami? 01 is widely available outside Africa for the first time. The volume features the writings of numerous prize-winners. It includes the short story, ?The Weight of Whispers?, by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, which won The Caine Prize for African Writing in 2003. Yvonne Owuor is also a screenplay writer, and Executive Director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival. Other contributions are from Parsilelo Kantai, who was short-listed for the Caine Prize in 2004;drawings from Gaddo, one of East Africa's foremost political cartoonists; photographs from the photo-journalist Marion Kaplan; and interviews with ?ghetto youths? conducted by the editor.

Kwani? 01

En dag ska jag skriva om den här platsen

From the critical and commercial success of Kwani? 01 came the next edition, kwani? 02, in 2004. This edition features contemporary literary Kenyan concerns themed on the question of identity. Building on the first issue, kwani? 02 offers all that kwani? 01 did and mirrors the post-millennial angst of young Kenyan writers, poets, cartoonists and photographers. Once again, kwani? featured in the Caine Prize for African writing 2004 when Parselelo Kantaiís Comrade Lemma and the Black Jerusalem Boys Bandwas runner up. Uwem Akpanís An Xmas Feast has since been re-worked and published in the New Yorker magazine ñ the first time an African writer has been featured in that prestigious magazine.

Kwani? 02

Kwani? is arguably Africa's most exciting and varied literary initiative of recent years. Describing itself as ?a magazine of ideas, [that] seeks to entertain, provoke and create?, Kwani commissions and publishes stories, poetry, art and photography ?from all around the African continent and the diaspora'. Kwani 03 considers itself to be ?by far the most complete issue...published?, declaring that it reflects ?another Kenya growing out of [the] ashes [that] has learnt to need nobody; to be competitive and creative. It speaks Sheng. It is the Kenya we are waiting for'. This volume features the writing of Ed Pavlic, Billy Kahora, Mukoma Ngugi, Charles Mungoshi and M.G. Vassanji. It includes cartoons and photographs, and poetry and interviews in Sheng, a Swahili-based patois spoken in East Africa. Sheng is a rapidly evolving and dynamic language finding particular use among East African hip hop artists, such as Nonini, whose music has inspired the contributors of this volume. Members of the Kalamashaka trio, the pioneers of Swahili rap, also contribute poems to this section.

Kwani?

Billy Kahora

Following and keeping close to the great tradition set by its three predecessors, Kwani? 4 presents a wail of new voices in literary concert with the not so new. The now established talents- Binyavanga Wainaina, Muthoni Garland, Doreen Baingana- share these pages with the fast risers: Billy Kahora, Mukoma wa Ngugi and Shalini Gidoomal. And Kwani? 4 has delved deeper into the all those spaces where the Kenyan story lives: the street corners, the neighbourhood pubs, the in-between semi rural places where the clash of cultures- the traditional versus the modern- continues to redefine the social roles of the individual, dismantle patriarchal constructs and still retain the pithy wit and the devices of ancient orature that time and the ritual of the communal fireside have honed. Still, as though in ridicule of such notions of Africa as being the continent on the lee side of the Digital Divide, Kwani? 4 reaches into the burgeoning realms of the Kenyan blogosphere to bring such politically aware, borderline intellectual and only-two-degrees-shy-of-rebellious voices bringing a fresh look at the old themes of politics, slices of life and religion and placing them alongside such taboo subjects as sex beyond the hetero-normative ideal. Kwani? 4 is established in Africa as the space for cutting-edge new fiction, mind provoking non fiction and photo-essays and witty graphic narratives.

Binyavanga Wainaina

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