Following is my review of One Day I Will Write About This Place, by
Binyavanga Wainaina,Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, 2011
This unconventional memoir starts with unconventional art on
the cover. Written by a Kenyan
intellectual, literati, political activist and academic, the book has much to
recommend it. However, it requires
patience in order to mine the kernels within.
Binyavanga Wainaina, son of an Ugandan (Tutsi) mother (hence
his first name) and a Kikuyu father was raised in Nakuru in the modern era.
Although from a prominent upwardly mobile family, Binyavanga was a moody child,
a bookworm, often lost in his private world.
He began to come to terms with himself in secondary school, but lost it
again during the ostensible university years that he spent in South Africa. There
he descended into alcoholism and listlessness, but gradually worked his way
back to a more balanced approach to life. Writing was apparently his salvation
and he is now a professor of that subject.
Even so, his style takes concentration. He narrates well,
but slips in and out of train of consciousness. His story jerks forward and aft
even though it does have a certain chronology.
What makes the book valuable and worth reading are the marvelously
described insights into current Kenya. Through
Binyavanga’s eyes the reader discovers what it was like to grow up privileged,
part of the new elite. Yet he was always the outsider, a puzzle to his
family. He remembers schools, religious cults, Nakuru
town, brother and sisters, friends and neighbors. He speaks eloquently from the very beginning
about tribalism – about who is favored and who is not – and why.
His South African years fade into a haze of booze, and the
struggle to survive in what for him was a foreign land. However, people step forward to his aid time
and again, both to enable his addictions as well as to help him conquer
demons. Finally, Binyavanga gets a
better grip and returns to Kenya. His
haunting recounting of a family reunion on his mother’s side in far
southwestern Uganda was perhaps the genus of the whole memoir. However, he goes on to bisect Kenyan society
of the 1990s, the role of tribalism, the plight of the cities, the burden of
the rich and the foibles of all. He takes several jobs via family connections
(they looked after him no matter what).
He hadn’t much ambition, but writes amusingly about how to sell goats –
get the chief drunk – or grow wheat on lands hoodwinked from the Maasi.
Although, Wainaina’s anti-establishment politics can easily be inferred, he does
not beat any political drums in this book.
Indeed overall the book is an excellent social history of Kenya today.
Binyavanga Wainaina can write lyrically, both in
describing situations as well as putting dialogue into the scenes. Those sorts of passages alone make the book
worthwhile. Beyond that, however, this
book is unique. I know of no other that
peers so penetratingly into modern Kenya
