After reading How To Write About Africa, I picked up one of Binyavanga Wainaina’s short stories. It’s hard to describe his writing style accurately, without butchering it. But, here’s an attempt: Each sentence is thick, pungent. After reading the story, you leave feeling full of words, descriptions, realities that you would prefer to ignore.
There is something about them that Matano dislikes. A closed-in completeness he has noticed in many liberals. So sure they are right, they have the moral force. So ignorant of their power, how their angst-ridden treatments and exposes are always such clear pictures of the badness of other men, bold, ugly colours on their silent white background. Neutral. They never see this, that they have turned themselves into the World’s ceteris paribus, the invisible objectivity.
He puts on a tape. Tina Turner: Burn, baby burn . . .
“Looking for something real,” they keep saying.
Twenty years he has been in this job, ever since he took it on as a young philosophy graduate, dreaming of earning enough to do a Masters and teach somewhere where people fly on the wings of ideas. But it proved impossible: he was seduced by the tips, by the endless ways that dollars found their way into his pockets, and out again.
He has seen them all. He has driven Feminist Female Genital Mutilation crusaders, cow-eyed Nature freaks, Cutting Edge Correspondents, Root-Seeking African Americans, Peace Corps workers, and hordes of NGO-folk: foreigners who speak African languages, and wear hemp or khaki. Dadaab chic.
Not one of them has ever been able to see him for what is presented before them. He is, to them, a symbol of something. One or two have even made it to his house, and eaten everything before them politely—then turned and started to probe: so is this a cultural thing or what? What do you think about Democracy? And Homosexual rights? And Equal Rights?
Trying to Understand Your Culture, as if your culture is a thing hidden beneath your skin, and what you are, what you present, is not authentic. Often he has felt such a force from them to separate and break him apart—to move away the ordinary things that make him human—and then they zero in on the exotic, the things that make him separate from them. Then they are free to like him: he is no longer a threat. They can say, “Oh I envy you having such a strong culture,” or, “We in the West, we aren’t grounded like you . . . such good energy. . . . This is so real.”