How to write about Africa : collected works
Edition
First edition.
Publication Information
New York : One World, 2022.
Physical Description
x, 347 pages ; 25 cm
Summary
"Binyavanga 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 that exposed the harmfully 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"--
Contents
- The First Story
- Binguni!
- Away in South Africa and England
- A Foreigner in Cape Town
- Food Slut
- Cured of England
- Discovering Home: Essays
- Circumcision
- Discovering Home
- Joga of Mathare Valley
- Hair
- Travels through Kalenjinland
- I Hate Githeri
- Who Invented Truth?
- Inventing a City
- She's Breaking Up
- Writing Kenya: Short Stories
- All things Remaining Equal
- Hell is in Bed with Mrs Peprah
- An Affair to Dismember
- According to Mwangi
- Ships in High Transit
- Out in Africa: Essays
- The Continental Dispatch
- Beyond River Yei
- The Most Authentic, Blackest, Africanest Soccer Team
- A Continent of Satire
- How to be a Dictator
- How to be an African
- The Senegal of the Mind
- How to Write about Africa.