Binyavanga: I have found no reason to get married just yet

Binyavanga Wainaina. Photo/FILE

What you need to know:

  • Kenya’s education system is that of obedience and unquestioning respect. But I rebel when I am given a formula to follow. I mean as early as standards Four and Five, I was reading a lot and had made up my mind about pursuing literature.

Icon. Iconoclast. Provocateur. Literary gangster. These are some of the adjectives that have been used to describe Binyavanga Wainaina, winner of the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing and the founding editor of Kwani? Is this the successor of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Francis Imbuga or he is just a rebel without a cause, ranting and raving at anybody and anything that conforms with tradition?
Q. The other day, you joined Egara Kabaji on a radio show and you were the picture of the best of friends, yet he has been leading the onslaught against your brainchild even calling you and other Kwani?-ists literary gangsters. Does this signal the narrowing of your differences?

A. There has been no debate really. What you have been hearing is one-sided sloganeering. I have not presented my view. It has not been an engagement of ideas, but protection of territories.

The legacy of the academia in Kenya after the 1970s has been that of protection of turf, which has been characterised by hostility towards those who dare to be different. Whenever you do something, there is the rush to ask who your godfather is. It started when there were 10 novels on the continent and it goes on as if there has been nothing new ever since.

When some time back I wrote something suggesting the banishing of this mindset, we were run out of town with such remarks as ‘these are young hedonistic radicals who have no respect for Chinua Achebe.’ Yet during the celebrations to mark 50 years of the late novelist’s writings, he told off this group kneeling before him in worship clinging onto his every word. “We have done our bit; let these young people say something,” he told them.

Q. Koigi wa Wamwere shaved his dreadlocks because President Moi had left power. Why did you shave yours?

I had worn them as a defence mechanism, to protect myself from all the pressure and expectations, but recently I felt I wanted to change. I was just tired.

Q. You got a ‘D’ in literature.

Yes, I got a ‘D’ in literature, but if I wanted to write a marking scheme and give the examiners what I knew they wanted, I would have scored differently.

You see, I have always been rebellious against established order where they make you feel there is a gate you have to pass through to be admitted.

Kenya’s education system is that of obedience and unquestioning respect. But I rebel when I am given a formula to follow. I mean as early as standards Four and Five, I was reading a lot and had made up my mind about pursuing literature.

I also had mentors like my aunt Rebecca Njau, but I had to be myself. My rebelliousness has been very costly, though, and by the time I was 31, I had no payslip. I would have loved to go through the experiences of a normal child, but I still had to be myself.

Q. You have been a Bard Fellow and the director of the Chinua Achebe Centre for African Literature and Languages at Bard College. Why are you here?

I didn’t choose to have a restless mind. But I now think I have an idea of where my physical home should be. My heart is on the African continent. For the last four months, I have been in River Road (in downtown Nairobi) fantasising about setting up an institution, which will be a hub of performance and publishing.

I know I have taken quite a while, but I am like a bulldozer. I feel my way first for some time, but open for me a small window and I will do somersaults. For the last seven years, I have established a vast network of people and institutions, which can donate resources to enable us do this. Already, the success of such people as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for her debut novel Purple Hibiscus) and myself is owed to such networks.

There is not a single quality art school on the continent, yet we have a booming film, musical and writing industry. The most lucrative commodity in the world is not oil, but content. The county systems provide the most ample environment for this.

Q. Recently, there was a huge debate in the literary scene over the selection of Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider as set book with some calling for its withdrawal because of the author’s well-known sexual orientation.

Your children will be your children, but denying reality has never brought about anything good. It only brings about madness.

This is part of the ancient madness when witches were being burnt in the 15th century.

That hate is no different from the bomb from Osama. A child growing up in this country will meet a homo-sexual, but you can’t maintain purity by shutting out everything you don’t agree with.

Africa is a poor continent which needs to open up. Africa’s culture has always been that of a quest for diversity and openness.

Some of the most unsuccessful countries in the world are those with repressive anti-homosexual laws. Look at Uganda and North Korea. This is neither to support nor to denounce homosexuality, though.

Q. Who of the older generation of Kenyan writers come close to your liking?

I am an admirer of Charles Mangua. I believe he is the most emotionally honest male writer in Kenya. He captures the difficulties of young people.

His Kanina and I is a great novel and I have read it more than 10 times. It digests the turbulent emotional time in the history of our people.

Q. What of the younger crop?
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (winner of 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story ‘Weight of Whispers’).  Her first novel comes out next year.

It is a huge novel and I think it will cause shockwaves across the world. It is about the pain and pleasures of the contract of Kenya.

The other is Billy Kahura of The Application, a novel. It is extraordinary and very original. There is a lot of poetry, too, but I am not much into it, and so I am not really qualified to evaluate it.

Q. Further a field?

Kojo Laing of Ghana. He has written a novel called Search Sweet Country, which I believe is the greatest novel anywhere any time. It has everything inside me.

It is an original, new form of the urban novel. It employs magical realism in the mould of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Laing opened a new frontier of thinking, a completely dedicated writer.

Q. What are you working on now?

I am finalising a novel, which will have the moral police very worried. It is about badly behaving women who refuse to do what they are told.

It should be coming out before the end of the year.

Q. You have come back to Kenya when hate in the blogosphere is at its height with some calling it post-election violence of unprecedented levels.

I agree. As a Kikuyu, I want to have no part with a country where people from certain communities have to apologise or seek permission because “they” lost an election. If the present vitriol is not checked our children could kill each other.

Q. You wrote in the Guardian that the recently concluded election was about security. Elaborate.

What I meant as somebody who has lived in the Rift Valley is that half the country wanted a closure of stalemate.

Nobody believes, for example, that the International Criminal Court is serious enough, strong enough or material enough to the political reality in Kenya to make much of a difference.

People wanted to move on because there was an election. We are not, and have never been, a CNN African country, held together by western pins and glue, pity, bananas and paternal concern.

Q. In your essays like ‘How to Write About Africa’ and in your articles in the media such as An open letter to Madonna, which recently appeared in the Guardian, you have adopted the satirical mode. Do you think it is an effective way of communicating?

The satirical polemic exaggerates things to make them visible and it is effective.

Q. In previous interviews, you said you were not marrying or settling down yet. Now at 42, what is the answer to that question?
I have no wife. I have not found reason to marry yet. But I am a good uncle to a niece and a nephew.