2015 Reading List
I almost gave up on One Day I Will Write About This Place because I wasn't prepared for the author's writing style--which isn't really a style at all--it is his way to capture and describe the thoughts of a dreaming, introspective young boy growing up in Kenya.
One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir by Binyavanga Wainaina
I almost gave up on One Day I Will Write About This Place because I wasn't prepared for the author's writing style--which isn't really a style at all--it is his way to capture and describe the thoughts of a dreaming, introspective young boy growing up in Kenya.
One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir by Binyavanga Wainaina
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Last annotated on February 16, 2015
We are mixed-up people. We have mixed-up ways of naming too: the Anglo-colonial way, the old Gikuyu way, then the distant names from my mother’s land, a place we do not know. When my father’s brothers and sisters first went to colonial schools, they had to produce a surname. They also had to show they were good Christians by adopting a Western name. They adopted my grandfather’s name as a surname. Wainaina. Baba says, in the old days, everybody had many names, for many reasons, a name only for your age-mates, a name as the son of your mother, a new name after you became a man. These days, most times, your name is what is on your birth certificate.Read more at location 336
Congo music, with wayward voices as thick as hot honey. This sound is dangerous; it promises to lift you from where you are and drop you into a hot upside-down place twenty thousand leagues under the sea.Read more at location 499
They are jumping up and down. Up and down. And some of them have rattles, and some have tambourines and they are singing loud and sweating in that gritty dusty Kenyan way—not smooth and happy like American gospel on television. And the manRead more at location 864
Work your metal to the frenzy of your plan and let the heat around grow and grow and soon something gives, your future—on the softer side of town, in the soft melt and grass of your new square stone house in the village. After a day beating metal, you go home and sleep under your galvanized metal roof, and it rains, and no sleep in the world is better than the sleep under the roar of rain on a naked mabati roof. Something gives: of the body and its limits, and you’re in a zone, a stream of molten creative metal. Your labor can beat, bend, melt, harden, shape, aggregate, galvanize. Labor that can defeat tiredness, because dance and song is labor that leaves you exhilarated. This is rumba. Mabati music. Metal music.Read more at location 1186
It is 1984, and there are strange things happening. The drought is the worst since 1870, some say, when the Maasai were broken by rinderpest and civil war. No. The famine is the worst since 1930, when thousands starved after the British had “consolidated” the diversified lands of Gikuyu families. Breakdance: The Movie breaks every record; people queue for hours for morning shows, cut class, and spin and robot.Read more at location 1238
On television, a dirty pale man who has wild eyes and sings for a band called Boomtown Rats is crowned the king of Ethiopia. He is everywhere. Every news broadcast, every song in the whole world. Bob Geldof.Read more at location 1305
She is sitting, her hair askew. Her legs are open now, and she bends to scratch her thighs, the stockings seamed. Gikuyu r’s and l’s tangle and snarl into her English, like a comb on untreated dry hair.Read more at location 1406
Brenda Fassie is Langa in a summer heat wave. She is streams of sunlight on rusty township roofs. She is the cramp of life close: strands of sound twist and turn into a thick rope, in her throat—mbaqanga, gospel, the old musicals, the choral protest songs, gangsters and money; sex for sale; liberation politics; gumboots and grannies spilling in tens of thousands into this cramped township. It is these sounds bending and melting; it is them shouting louder to be heard; it is drunk and beaten jazz saxophonists in shebeens. Roofs start to crack and squeal in the direct sun. She stands and belts—a whole township street of burning silver and rust. Whipping sounds rattle and bang in her head.Read more at location 1453
She had no teeth in her first album. This was a strange fashion at the time in South Africa, among some brassy urban black women. Several front teeth were removed, some said, to give men more pleasure. Then she got false teeth. Those who know her say she has a habit of taking out her false teeth when she is drunk at parties. I want to stop paying attention to her. I can’t stop paying attention to her.Read more at location 1458
We sit in a nightclub called Dazzle, children of the mad rush out of Africa. This is not Africa. We are told that every day by people here. Are you from Africa? South Africa is not Africa.Read more at location 1487
We talk about Brenda Fassie’s new scandals. They are fast and furious now. She was seen playing soccer with young boys on the streets of Hillbrow, Johannesburg, topless. Then she shocks the conservative country by announcing she is a lesbian. Then she is touring in the United States, dancing at a club in Washington, D.C., when one of her breasts pops out. She grabs it and says, “This is Africa!”Read more at location 1539
My friend Trust goes up to them, to ask one of them for a dance. He comes back, sweating. “What is it?” I say, laughing. His eyes are wide open. “They say they are lesbians.” Soon, they are on campus too, girls having all-girl parties, buying their own booze, and smoking in huddled groups in public. Every single one of them has dreadlocks. Liberation is coming. It is all over the radio.Read more at location 1569
Chris Hani is dead in his driveway, he has been shot dead, and blood drips from his head and rolls down South Africa’s smooth tarmac, and you stand, dizzy. You make your way to the campus for the first time in over a month.Read more at location 1644
Kwaito—a South African version of American hip-hop, hard, material, and cynical—is in.Read more at location 1718
Inside those mine dumps, over a hundred years ago, when Joburg was a rough and ready gold city, a Zulu guy called Nongoloza set up a gang of thugs called the Ninevites. They were highly organized. “I laid them under what has since become known as Nineveh law,” he said to his white captors when he was arrested. “I read in the Bible about the great state Nineveh which rebelled against the Lord and I selected that name for my gang as rebels against the government’s laws.” The Ninevites became legends—it was said that they had occupied disused mine shafts, where they had a Scottish bookkeeper, white women, shops and boutiques. It was said they were immune to bullets. Around 1910, the authorities caught up with him. Nongoloza’s fellow gang leaders infiltrated and organized the prison system in South Africa. To this day, gang membersRead more at location 1849
in South Africa’s male prisons trace back their history and ideology and culture to the Ninevites. And Nongoloza remains a cult hero.Read more at location 1855
revving forward, purple lights flashing urgently, to try to catch passengers in a hurry to go home, who discover too late that this urgency is fake: the matatu will wait until it is full, then overfull, then move only when bodies are hanging outside the door, toes barely in the vehicle, songasonga mathe, songasonga.Read more at location 1876
One guy is hanging on to the roof by his fingernails, one toe in the open door, inches away from death, letting both hands go and clapping and whistling at a woman dressed in tight jeans who is walking by the side of the road. This is Nairobi.Read more at location 1885
Urban Kenya is a split personality: authority, trajectory, international citizen in English; national brother in Kiswahili; and content villager or nostalgic urbanite in our mother tongues. It seems so clear to me here and now, after South Africa, which is so different. There, there is a political battle to resolve embattled selves. Every language fights for space in all politics. In this part of town, all three Kenyas live: city people who work in English making their way home; the village and its produce and languages on the streets; and the crowds and crowds of people being gentle to each other in Kiswahili. Kiswahili is where we meet each other with brotherhood.Read more at location 1897
If crystal were water made solid, her voice would be the last splash of water before it set.Read more at location 1943
We have no real spring—we are on the equator. But for me, spring was every morning, dew and soft mists, and the lake still and blue in the distance, sometimes all pink with flamingos rippling with a breeze, and rising like leaves to whirl and circle in the sky. Autumn was September, when the jacaranda trees shed all their purple flowers and the short rains began—and the idea of an autumn, of a spring, was also resident in the imagination of the English settlers who planned this leafy place, and thought of blooms and bees and White Highlands made into a new English countryside.Read more at location 1978
Kenyans love warm beer, even if it is boiling outside. Since I arrived in these parts, I have had concerned barmaids worrying that I will get pneumonia, or that the beer will go completely flat if it is left in the fridge forRead more at location 2068
What a gift charisma is. By eleven, there is a whole table of people, all of us glowing under the chief’s beams of sunlight.Read more at location 2090
Whispered aside: “You bachelors must surely be starving for female company, seeing that you have gone a whole morning without any sex.” We head off to the butcher, who has racks and racks of headless goats.Read more at location 2099
Everybody is doing the dombolo, a Congolese dance in which your hips (and only your hips) are supposed to move like a ball bearing made of mercury. To do it right, you wiggle your pelvis from side to side while your upper body remains as casual as if you were lunching with Nelson Mandela. In any restaurant in Kenya, a sunny-side-up fried egg is called mayai (eggs) dombolo.Read more at location 2127
am afraid. If I write, and fail at it, I cannot see what else I can do. Maybe I will write and people will roll their eyes, because I will talk about thirst, and thirst is something people know already, and what I see is only bad shapes that mean nothing.Read more at location 2183
there is a courtesy every Kenyan practices, it is that we don’t question each other’s contradictions; we all have them, and destroying someone’s face is sacrilege. If South Africans seek to fill the holes in their reality through building a strong political foundation, we spend a lot of time pretending our contradictions do not exist. To be a new thing in South Africa is normal. We know we sit on top of a rotting edifice; we are terrified of questioning anything deeply. There is nothing wrong with being what you are not in Kenya; just be it successfully. Almost all Kenyan jokes are about people who thought they had mastered a new persona and ended up ridiculous. Suzannah knows her faces well. We chat the whole lazy afternoon.Read more at location 2301
Uganda is different. This is a country that has not only reached the bottom of the hole countries sometimes fall into, it has scratched through that bottom and free-fallen again and again, and now it has rebuilt itself and swept away the hate. This country gives me hope that this continent is not, finally, incontinent.Read more at location 2337
Nothing is said; the service motors on. Everybody stands up to sing. Somebody whispers to my aunt Rosaria. She turns and gasps soundlessly. Others turn. We all sit down. Aunt Rosaria and Aunt Christine start to cry. Granddad is crying; he looks like he will break. He is ninety-five. Mum is crying. Uncle Henry is trying not to. Aunt Rosaria’s mouth opens and closes in disbelief. Soon we are all crying. The priest motors on, fluently, unaware. One day, I will write about this place.Read more at location 2493
He is quiet, for a long time. Then I am called to a meeting. His supervisor is in town, from Brussels. The EU is very jittery about the book. They say that EU policy says there is only one Sudan, but my story says South Sudan! They are also concerned about language… some… improper… unseemly…Read more at location 2870
language. Many things are not in line with EU policy. They have a proposition. Scrap the book. Keep the money. What they can do is fund an awareness-raising photo exhibition. And for the exhibition, I can write a few paragraphs—within the parameters of EU policy on Sudan, of course. You keep your full fat fee, of course. I tell them to fuck off in seemly language. I raise the money elsewhere, and Kwani? publishes the book. I start to understand why so little good literature is produced in Kenya. The talent is wasted writing donor-funded edutainment and awareness-raising brochures for seven thousand dollars a job. Do not complicate things, and you will be paid very well.Read more at location 2872
Until a few weeks ago, Moi was every policeman, the photo on every wall; he was all the cash in the bank, the constitution. We wanted him gone; we were afraid of life without him. Voting day was probably the quietest day in Kenya’s history. From Nairobi, I took a matatu to my hometown. There was virtually no traffic; all the streets were empty. The tin-shack cities were ghost towns, as were the pyrethrum plots at the fog-dark, freezing height of the escarpment. I looked down and saw little patches of green and brown, tea and coffee and pyrethrum and cattle: fields of dreams. A few days later, the largest crowd in Kenya’s history gathers, in Uhuru Park, to inaugurate a new president. Moi’s car is pelted with mud. When he stands up to speak, he is booed, and mud is thrown at him. If, before this, we had wondered whether we could easily become a noncountry if we challenged the status quo, this fear died that day. We began to become something resolute and possible. We started to want again. But wanting, too, brings its own risks. There is a stake now, and people are passionate.Read more at location 2890
Here in Kenya, where only our interactions keep us together. Now that the state is failing, we are held together by small grace, by interpersonal relationships, by trusting body language.Read more at location 2948
Everything around me is a memory of water. The dry riverbeds, the millions of dried petrified trees, the camels. Hot dry wind. Water-carved gullies and channels.Read more at location 2974
“All those big men’s wives… they come to the gym… and if you say no… they finish you, and if you say yes, the big men will finish you. Abuja gyms are very difficult.”Read more at location 3089
We keep passing nightclubs. People dressed to the nines, music thump-thumping from large buildings. But sometimes there are families with children. I ask my friend, “You mean you guys go to nightclubs with children?” He laughs. “That is not a nightclub. Those are all night churches.”Read more at location 3124
would work wonderfully if we had an overt policy to develop people according to their tribal abilities. Positive tribalism, he called it. The Luhya are strong, and they make good laborers. They also speak English very well, he conceded. The Luo are very artistic and creative. They are good tailors. The Kamba make good soldiers because they are loyal. The man went around the pizza called Kenya, naming every slice and according it grace. It completely escaped him that every skill coincided nearly perfectly with the first acts of labor division introduced by the British, that he was, in fact, affirming exactly how we were defined and given roles to play in colonial Kenya. These identities were, in his mind, our permanent tribal personality. I asked him, so what will the Gikuyu do in this utopian Kenya? He was surprised, and frowned. It had not occurred to him. The Gikuyu just were, and everybody else was ethnic.Read more at location 3184
In the center of the city, buildings are imposing, unfriendly, and impractical. Paint has faded; plastic fittings look bleached and brittle. I have seen buildings like this before—in South African homeland capitals, in Chad and Budapest. These are buildings that international contractors build for countries eager to show how “modern” they are. They are usually described as “ultramodern”—and when they are new, they shine like the mirrored sunglasses of a presidential bodyguard. Within months, they rust and peel and crumble. I see one called Centre des Cheques Postaux, another Centre National de Perfectionnement Professionnel. There are International Bureaus of Many Incredibly Important Things, and International Centers of Even More Important Things. I count fourteen buildings that have the word développement on their walls. There are International Bureaus of Many Incredibly Important Things, and International Centers of Even More Important Things. I count fourteen buildings that have the word développement on their walls. In Accra, signs are warm, quirky, and humorous: Happy Day Shop, Do Life Yourself, Diplomatic Haircut.Read more at location 3300
International correspondents with their long Dictaphones, and dirty jeans, and five hundred words before whiskey, are slouched over the red velvet chairs, in the VIP section in the front, looking for the Story: the Most Macheteing Deathest, Most Treasury Corruptest, Most Entrail-Eating Civil Warest, Most Crocodile-Grinning Dictatorest, Most Heart-Wrenching and Genociding Pulitzerest, Most Black Big-Eyed Oxfam Child Starvingest, Most Wild African Savages Having AIDS-Ridden Sexest with Genetically Mutilatedest Girls…Read more at location 3524
The Most Authentic Real Black Africanest story they can find for Reuters or AP or Agence France.Read more at location 3528
The man is old enough to be my father. My face immediately becomes solemn and I greet him in as good and respectful Kiswahili as I can manage. It sounds all wrong and stilted. He hoists my bags onto his shoulders from the cart, smiling and bowing. I am not sure what to do. I continue to speak respectfully. My respect is instinctive; his very accent demands it. This is not even a class thing, or guilt. Kiswahili is just a tool for me, as it is for most Kenyans. An inherited language that a hundred million Africans mutilate. Lamu, this small island, is the home of the original dialect of Kiswahili, and of the Swahili civilization.Read more at location 3613
Lamu has always had a reputation as a libertarian town. People spend most of their time indoors, and even individual houses are built with the idea of public and private, with increasing layers of intimate space the farther away from the door you are. The doors are thick, tall, and elaborately carved from wood; just outside are benches built into the wings of the main door. It is here that guests are received. There is a heavy metal knocker near the bottom of the door. You knock and sit and wait. Most people don’t get to enter the home. In the old days, traders would come in from India and from the Middle and Far East. As soon as you enter most traders’ homes, you will see a small staircase that leads you to the room where foreign traders were hosted sumptuously, but still distant from family. Guests were treated well. They were sprinkled with rose water. Orchards in courtyards had lemon, lime, and banana trees and rose apples. When Ibn Batutta spent time among the Swahili in Mogadishu and Kilwa, he was fed with stews of chicken, meat, fish, and vegetables served on beds of rice and cooked with ghee. He ate green bananas in fresh milk, pickled lemon, ginger, and mangoes. Lamu became a place of pilgrimage for hippies and gay men in the 1970s. Outside the thick walls, and mostly in the evening, people put on their dutiful appearances: mother, elder, imam, tourist.Read more at location 3633
You will all sit stunned and watch as your nation—which has broadband and a well-ironed army and a brand-new private school that looks exactly like Hogwarts castle in Harry Potter—is taken over by young men with sharpened machetes and poisoned bows and arrows. As you sit in your living rooms, they will take over your main highway, pull people out of cars and cut their heads off. In Nairobi, they will lift up your railway, the original spine, and start to dismantle it. For days there is no news. We are told the generals are about to take it all over. That Raila has the army and Kibaki has the police and the air force. Television news has been silenced. Our president is silent. He is afraid, we hear. There is a joke that he is under his blankets, in Marks & Spencer pajamas, reading P. G. Wodehouse with a torch, and every few minutes his head pokes out and he asks, “Is it over?
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