Binyavanga stood shoulders above his peers and wrote ahead of his time

The late Binyavanga Wainaina. [FILE]

No one among the pantheon of Kenya's 21st-Century literary greats is more easily recognisable than the late Binyavanga Wainaina.

Born Kenneth Binyavanga Wainaina in now-Nakuru City on January 18, 1971, he was variously a memoirist, short-story writer and journalist venerated by Time Magazine, in its annual Time 100 series, as “one of the most influential people in the world”, credentials even he himself impugned.

Binyavanga, who died from stroke at the Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi on May 21, 2019, aged just 48, is most notably remembered for using his prize money (£10,000), a pecuniary concomitant of the now-AKO Caine Prize for African Writing award, which he won for his short story Discovering Home in 2002, to found Kwani? Trust, a charitable project whose raison d'etre was the promotion of young literary talent in Kenya and Africa.

The scion of a middle-class family, the late Binyavanga attended Moi Primary School in Nakuru, before joining Mang'u High School and later Lenana School. He would, later in 1991, enrol at the University of Transkei (now Walter Sisulu University) in South Africa, where he studied Commerce.

Upon graduation, he freelanced as a food and travel writer in the South African city of Cape Town, before returning home in 2000. In 2010, he completed an MPhil in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and, aside from the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing award above, was recognised and honoured for his singular devotion to both local and international literature, including by the Kenya Publishers Association.

Beyond Africa, the legend of his renown and distinction as a literary practitioner earned him a stint, in 2007, as a writer-in-residence at Union College in Schenectady, New York, and, in 2008, at Williams College, Massachusetts, in the United States, where he also became director of the Chinua Achebe Centre for African Writers and Artists at Bard College.

And he wrote for various media outlets, including The EastAfrican, National Geographic, the Sunday Times of South Africa, the New York Times, the Chimurenga Magazine (a publication of arts, culture and politics from and around Africa and its diaspora, launched in 2002 and based in Cape Town, South Africa), as well as The Guardian.

His only book-length offering, One Day I Will Write about this Place: A Memoir, was published in 2011. And the rest of his literary oeuvre includes the satirical essay How to Write about Africa (2006), Discovering Home (2003), Beyond the River Yei (2004), Nguva ya Nyoka (co-authored with Adrienne Edwards and Wangechi Mutu, 2016), Kwani? 1 (2003) and Kwani? 2 (2005). His Kwani? Trust project above helped launch fellow writers' literary careers, including that of Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (winner of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing, 2003).

So novel was Binyavanga's approach to literature and literary style that Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, then-AKO Caine Prize for African Writing chair and former series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project, a one-off literary award for published African fiction (2013), recognised that his unique way with words guaranteed that there was always a buzz to his writing, and that “he made us ‘see’ what English could look like when it was an African language!”

And in 2014, “Africa39”, a promotional project initiated by the Hay Festival to identify 39 of the most promising writers under the age of 40 with the talent to define trends in the development of literature from Sub-Saharan Africa and the diaspora, was heavily reliant upon submissions researched by him. 

Alongside Nigeria's Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, fellow Kenyans Tony Mochama, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Adipo Sidang’ and Kinyanjui Kombani, Zimbabwe's No-Violet Bulawayo, and Uganda's Monica Arac de Nyeko, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi and Stella Nyanzi, among others, the late Binyavanga represented a new generation of African writers minded to effect a complete volte-face from the thematic fetish of older-generation writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Wole Soyinka, which, in the main, rehashed tales of colonial-era cultural and material denudation.

Always alive to the single-perspective representation of Africa by outside watchers, Binyavanga—and writers of his generation—sought to revolutionise literary (and thematic) concerns by African artists with a view to shaping relations between Africa and the rest of the world in light of modern political and cultural realities.

Rather than be tethered thematically to the villainy and infamy of colonial-era Africa, the late Binyavanga and Co. sought to represent, not only the good that outsiders preferred to shut their eyes and ears to, but also the anachronistic and equally infernal (political and cultural) practices and improprieties that defined post-colonial Africa. His peerless dedication to literature, and especially the evolution of thematic novelty, marks him out for special reverence among his fellow writers—and consumers of modern African literature alike—nearly seven years since his untimely death.