Opinion, Criticism and Satire

 

A review of How to Write About Africa – Collected Works by Binyavanga Wainaina, One World, New York, 2022.

 

Kenyan writer Wainaina is a puzzle. Outspoken, even outrageous, his métier is criticism and sarcasm. This is shown both in his fiction and his essays, which share this tome.  Wainaina spares no quarter in portraying excess human foibles, including greed or misplaced humanitarianism.  His satire bites deep and certainly reflects an obsession with pointing out erroneous western perceptions about Africa and Africans.  The title of the book comes from an early essay to that effect. Yet, Wainaina is an equal opportunity critic in that he also diatribes against the motivations of fellow Africans in playing to western stereotypes or in their relations with each other.  He delights in showing warts and all.  His characters are very human.

The fiction pieces allow the author to develop realistic but purposely overdrawn characters. I liked Ships in High Transit about tourists at the coast being bamboozled by folks pretending to be Maasai. Real truths about both sides emerge.  Equally entertaining is An Affair to Disremember. It is sort of a sad story about lives and expectations gone awry. 

Most telling of the essays is Beyond River Yei which is a report of a sojourn in South Sudan as part of an effort to eradicate sleeping sickness. In that piece Wainaina demonstrates legitimate chops as a feature writer.

Readers won’t want to miss key satires of How to Be a Dictator and the title piece How to Write about Africa.

Throughout the collection there is plenty for a reader to think about, muddle over, agree with, reject, or object to. That, in fact, is the author’s goal.  And, it is well accomplished.  

Coda: Nakuru born son of a Kikuyu father and a Ugandan Tutsi mother, after secondary school Binyavanga fled to South Africa where he began his writing career, and came out. Subsequently, he returned to Kenya to rattle cages there via Kiwani?, a magazine he published. Sadly, Wainaina died young in 2019.

Folly in Accra

 

Turquoise – Three Years in Ghana: A Peace Corps Memoir by Lawrence Grobel, HMH Press, 2022.

This is a candid memoir. I was offput by revelations of sex and drugs in initial chapters but reading on found that the totality of the chapters – not really chapters but sequential anecdotes or observations – began to build a comprehensive picture of the Ghana that Grobel experienced.  It was indeed a place that operated by its own set of confusing cultural constraints. Some were legacies of traditional village life, but others were mechanisms that modern Ghanaians developed to cope with each other within a corrupt system where getting ahead was the principal objective.  Sex, graft, nepotism, fatalism, humor, relationships, obligations, misunderstandings, all got mixed up in the quests of Grobel’s subjects: first to survive and then to thrive.

Author Grobel was a full participant in the scene around him and acute observer of it. His sketches of life and people in his life in Accra are trenchant. Some chapters are connected in a desultory manner, others stand alone.  Grobel was acutely aware of his foreignness and how that figured into how people saw and dealt with him and how he dealt with them.  He was generally sympathetic to Ghanaians but scathing regarding diplomats and outside do-gooders.  During his years in Ghana Grobel developed lasting friendships; one with a young man named Atar and another with girlfriend Akua. The saga of their interactions tracks throughout the book.

The overall impact of the memoir is to paint Ghana and Ghanaians in unvarnished terms. Despite Grobel’s cynicism, a genuine affection for Ghana and its people shines through.