One Day I Will Write About This Place
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All people have dignity. There’s nobody who was born without a soul and a spirit.
~Binyavanga Wainaina, author of ‘One Day I Will Write About This Place‘
There are times when the world seems to stop and nothing makes sense anymore. This week, we learnt about the death of yet another illustrious and brilliant mind.
Binyavanga Wainaina, an award-winning Kenyan writer and LGBT activist, passed away on May 21st, 2019 at the age of 48. His work was groundbreaking and influential in many ways and dealt with the issues of racial and sexual stereotypes in a courageous and incisive way.
My initial reaction to his demise was shock, even though I knew that he had been ill for some time. Later, a dull and intense pain settled in my heart and had to be hummed away for hours.
QUIZ: How Well Do You Know African Writers?
Two weeks ago, when I was looking for information to make the above quiz for our series of articles on African writers, I stumbled upon Binyavanga’s Twitter page and noticed that he had last updated it in October 2018. Later on, I learnt that he was ill and was heavily saddened by the news. I hoped he would be fine and wished him all the best.
It was thus a huge shock when I saw the announcement of his death on BBC Africa Twitter feed. Suddenly people from all walks of life started paying tributes to this talented writer gone too soon and I could not help to think of the fragility of life and time.
Sometimes we do not understand why we are heartbroken at the loss of somebody whom we barely knew. I did not meet this writer in real life but his writing hugely affected me. He loved to play with words. People and places came to life under his artful gaze. He was like a big, literary brother and his presence and wit will forever be remembered.
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Let’s read an extract from One Day I Will Write About This Place, which was first published in 2011. The full excerpt can be read here.
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My colleague Kariuki and I are on the way to Mwingi town in a new, zippy Nissan pickup. The road to Masinga Dam is monotonous, and my mind has been taken over by the bubblegum music playing on the radio, chewing away, trying to digest a vacuum.
I donever reallywanna KillTheDragon . . .
It zips around my mind like some demented fly, always a bit too fast to catch and smash. I try to start a conversation, but Kariuki is not talkative. He sits hunched over the steering wheel of the car, his body tense, his face twisted into a grimace. When he isn’t driving he is usually quite relaxed, but cars seem to bring out some demon in him.
To be honest, Mwingi is not a place I want to visit. It is a new district, semi-arid, and there is nothing there that I have heard is worth seeing or doing. Except eating goat. According to the unofficial National Goat Meat Quality Charts, Mwingi goat is second only to Siakago goat in flavour. I am told some enterprising fellow from Texas started a goat ranch to service the 10,000 Kenyans living there. He is making a killing.
Over the years I spent living in South Africa, I drove past goats that stared at me with arrogance, chewing nonchalantly, and daring me to wield my knife.
It is payback time.
This is why we set out at six in the morning, in the hope that we will be through with all possible bureaucracies by midday, after which we can get down to drinking beer and eating lots and lots of goat.
I have invested in a few sachets of Andrews Liver Salts.
I doze, and the sun is shining by the time I wake. We are thirty kilometres from Mwingi town. There is a sign on one of the dusty roads that branches off the highway, a beautifully drawn picture of a skinny red bird and a notice with an arrow: Gruyere.
I am curious, and decide we should investigate. After all, I think to myself, it would be good to see what the Cotton Growing Situation is on the ground before going to the District Agricultural Office.
It takes us about twenty minutes on the dusty road to get to Gruyere. This part of Ukambani is dry, a landscape of hardy bushes and dust. Here, unlike most places in Kenya, people live far away from the roads, so one has the illusion that the area is sparsely populated. We are in a tiny village centre. Three shops on each side, and a large quadrangle of beaten-down dust in the middle on which three giant woodcarvings of giraffes sit, waiting for transport to the curio markets of Nairobi. There doesn’t seem to be anybody about. We get out of the car and enter Gruyere, which turns out to be a pub.
It looks about as Swiss as anything could be in Ukambani. A simply built structure with a concrete floor and basic furnishings. I notice an ingenious drinks cooler: a little cavern worked into the cement floor, where beer and sodas are cooled in water. The owner walks in, wearing a kikoi and nothing else. His skin is sunburned tomato red. He welcomes us and I introduce myself and start to chat, but soon discover that he doesn’t speak English or Kiswahili. He is Swiss, and speaks only French and Kamba.
My French is rusty, but it manages to get me a cold beer, served by his wife. She has skin the colour of bitter chocolate and is beautiful in the way only Kamba women can be, with baby-soft skin, wide-apart eyes and an arrangement of features that seems permanently on the precipice of mischief.
When I ask her what brought her husband to Mwingi, she laughs. ‘You know mzungus always have strange ideas! He is a mKamba now, he doesn’t want anything to do with Europe.’
I can see a bicycle coming in the distance, an impossibly large man weaving his way towards us, his short legs pedalling furiously.
Enter the jolliest man I have ever seen, plump as a steaming mound of fresh ugali, glowing with bonhomie and wiping streams of sweat from his face. Gruyere’s wife tells me he is the local chief. I stand up and greet him, then invite him to join us. He sits down and orders a round of beer.
‘Ah! You can’t be drinking tea here! This is a bar!’
He beams again, and I swear that somewhere a whole shamba of flowers is blooming. I try to glide into the subject of cotton, but it is brushed aside.
‘So,’ he says, ‘you go to South Africa with my daughter? She’s just sitting at home, can’t get a job – Kambas make good wives, you know, you Kikuyu know nothing about having a good time.’
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Binyavanga Wainaina was a free and loving spirit. He fought for the rights of homosexual people in Africa, risking his reputation and safety. He took young writers under his protective wing with the foundation of Kwani?. He aimed to speak the truth and never wavered in this task. He was a literary genius and a benchmark for all aspiring writers and speakers in Africa and across the world.
You can buy Binyavanga’s book “One Day I Will Write about this Place” here.
Further Exploration: (One Day I Will Write About This Place)
Read:
- One Day I Will Write About This Place, Binyavanga Wainaina, Full Extract, Granta
- How to Write About Africa, Binyavanga Wainaina, Essay, Granta
More about African Writers:
- African Fiction: Lesson 1-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Fearless and Influential Writer
- African Fiction: Lesson 2-Chigozie Obioma, between Modernity and Tradition
- African Fiction: Lesson 3-NoViolet Bulawayo, a Literary Darling
- African Fiction: Lesson 4-Tsitsi Dangarembga, the Mother of Zimbabwean Literature
- African Fiction: Lesson 5-Chinua Achebe, the Baobab Tree
Watch:
A thorough, enthusiastic and refreshing book review on One Day I Will Write About This Place by Africana Literati
