They are from Europe or the US readers anywhere on the African continent would never buy the fairy tales somehow related to their daily experiences writers from the continent never write that way, only in mockery, like Binyavanga Wainaina did. In Binyavanga’s essay he gives ‘advice’ to non-African writers writing for non-African readers. That’s how we should not read about Africa.ĭid you notice something in my lines above? These ‘we, the readers’ are probably not from Africa. Something we as readers can identify with, see people like ourselves as helpers.
They do so because they and their commercial publishers think that this kind of stuff is what readers want to read, something familiar. In his sarcastic masterpiece, written more as an eruption, a cry from the heart, he shows us how we as readers are fooled by journalists and academics from the outside, like myself, how they repeat a set of clichés over and over again, romantic bullshit, and outright lies. That’s where we all should start reading about Africa.
And I hope your mind drifts back to his most famous piece of writing: the essay ‘How to Write About Africa’. That his beautiful face appears in your imagination, his hairdos, his way of talking. How to read about Africa? Well, I hope you immediately think of Binyavanga Wainaina. Guests will focus on two of his brilliant essays: ‘How to Write About Africa’, about the framing of ‘Africa’ in Western media, and ‘I Am a Homosexual, Mom.’Īs a kick-off for that meeting Dutch journalist Wim Bossema, who has been writing on ‘anything African’ since 1980, mainly for the Dutch daily de Volkskrant, shifts his focus from writing to reading. On Thursday 24th October, 2019, a celebration of his life and works will be held at Studio ZAM. On after suffering a stroke, Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina (48) passed away.
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