When your main character is in a desert of jungle living with indigenous peoples (anybody short) it is okay to mention that Africa has been severely depopulated by Aids and War (use caps). Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Durum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’.

I read from it at the launch of our 40th-Birthday Special at Shakespeare and Company in Paris the other week, and remembered Binya:Īlways use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. It’s our most widely read piece ever – we have published nothing that has been as influential or successful.

God bless Africa’.īinyavanga’s ‘How to Write about Africa’ is a satire on objectifying platitudes, subtle, powerful, and mordantly funny. I have that issue in front of me now – it’s mostly white voices, and ends with a piece by Nelson Mandela, filled with the sincerity of the time, Mandela’s particular tone, defining the moment of liberation: ‘Thus must we build on the common victory of the total emancipation of Africa to obtain new successes for our contintent as a whole and prevail over the currents that originate from the past, and ensure that the interregnum of humiliation symbolized by, among other things, the destruction of Carthage, is indeed consigned to the past, never to return. populated by every literary bogeyman that any African has ever known’. This started as a letter to the editor, protesting about Granta’s 1994 issue on Africa, which, he wrote, was ‘. We had already published his memoir, which I loved, One Day I will Write about this Place (2011), and, among others, a satirical piece for the magazine, ‘How to Write about Africa’ (2005). No-one had ever asked me that before, and I was moved by the implicit intimacy of his request. We talked for a while, and then, laughing ironically, he asked me to sign the latest issue of Granta. Was it yellow, in part, and maybe purple? I can’t quite remember, but I do remember his warm dry hand, and his direct, complicit, gaze. He came to the Granta office, hair shaved and dyed.

How to write about africa wainaina