How to Write About Africa: Collected Works

From one of Africa’s most influential and eloquent essayists, a posthumous collection that highlights his biting satire and subversive wisdom on topics from travel to cultural identity to sexuality\n“A fierce literary talent . . . [Wainaina] shines a light on his continent without cliché.”—The Guardian\n“Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. . . . Africa is to be pitied, worshipped, or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.”\nBinyavanga Wainaina was a pioneering voice in African literature, an award-winning memoirist and essayist, and a gatherer of literary communities. Before his tragic death in 2019 at the age of forty-seven, he won the Caine Prize for African Writing and was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People. His wildly popular essay “How to Write About Africa,” an incisive and unapologetic piece exposing the harmful and racist ways Western media depicts Africa with implicit bias and subjective clichés, changed the game for African writers and helped set the stage for a new generation of authors, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Yaa Gyasi. When Wainaina published a “lost chapter” of his 2011 memoir as an essay called “I Am a Homosexual, Mum,” which imagines coming out to his mother, he became a voice for the queer African community as well, adding a new layer to how African sexuality is perceived.\nHow to Write About Africa collects these powerful pieces in a lively and imaginative set of essays about sexuality, art, history, and contemporary Africa. Wainaina’s writing is playful, robust, generous, and full-bodied. He describes the modern world with sensual, emotional, and psychological detail, giving us a full-color view of a country and continent. These works present a portrait of a giant in African literature who left a tremendous legacy.

History

Wainaina, Binyavanga

Africa

One World

The second in the kwani? series published by Kwani Trust, this journal features works from a range of writers, mainly Kenyan. Parselelo Kantai's Comrade Lemma and the Black Jerusalem Boys Band was runner up at the Caine Prize for African writing, 2004. Fiction, poetry and bold nonfiction pieces, well selected to suit a range of readers and their tastes. The controversial piece by Uwem Akpan, An Xmas Feast, was first published in this journal. A reworked version of it was published in the New Yorker  the first time for an African writer.

Kwani? 02

Literature & Fiction

World Literature

Jovian Books

*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.

One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Graywolf Press

"A Kenyan Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . . . suffused by a love affair with language."―Publishers Weekly, Top Ten Books of 2011
In this vivid and compelling memoir, Binyavanga Wainaina tumbles through his middle-class Kenyan childhood out of kilter with the world around him. In One Day I Will Write About This Place, named a 2011 New York Times notable book, Wainaina brilliantly evokes family, tribe, and nationhood in joyous, ecstatic language.

One Day I Will Write About This Place

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 colourful sounds: the hair dryers at his mother's beauty parlour, black mamba bicycle bells, mechanics in Nairobi, the music of Michael Jackson - all punctuated by the infectious laughter of his brother and sister. 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, Wainaina takes us through his school days, his failed attempt to study in South Africa, 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. Resolutely avoiding stereotype and cliche, Wainaina paints every scene in One Day I Will Write About This Place with a highly distinctive and hugely memorable brush.

One Day I Will Write about This Place

Granta Books

The cinema of Nigeria is often referred to as Nollywood, a term coined in the mid-1990s to describe Nigeria’s vibrant, film industry consisting of movies produced in the country but watched all over Africa and largely by Africans in the diaspora.
This book presents a selection of photographic portraits by Iké Udé depicting some of the major Nigerian actors and actresses, television presenters, directors, and producers. With his ongoing photographic self-portraits, Nigerian-born Iké Udé explores a world of dualities: photographer/performance artist, artist/spectator, mainstream/marginal, African/postnationalist, individual/everyman, and fashion/art. As a Nigerian-born, New York–based artist conversant with the world of fashion and celebrity, Udé gives conceptual aspects of performance and representation a new vitality, melding his own theatrical selves and multiple personae with his art.

Iké Udé: Nollywood Portraits: A Radical Beauty

Arts & Photography

Kan, Toni

Obioma, Chigozie

Akpata, Osahon

Photography & Video

Skira

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 (Kwanini?)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Kwani Trust

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wainaina, Binyavanga. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Wainaina, Binyavanga