The wobbly giraffes doing the splits next to my bed reveal my recent bedtime narrative. Subconsciously and adrift, I appear to have amassed a week long collection of literary conquests, scampering around on my bookshelf. So, after placing them apologetically back on their communal bed — their shelf — I unpacked the delivery of Binyavanga […]
By Caitlin Chandler How do you write about a place that occupies a mythic place in the imagination of outsiders? And how do you write about national and personal identity when identity does not obey the neat idea of nation states and borders? American novelist William Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional Southern community, wrapping […]
From its inception as a one-off experiment in Cape Town more than 10 years ago, Chimurenga Magazine, founded by Jean Noel Ntone Edjabe, has evolved into arguably the most creative, incisive political arts and literary publication produced on the African continent, or anywhere for that matter. Over the years, with its highly original content and design, Chimurenga, which is also edited by Stacy Hardy, has adroitly demonstrated to its readers how to question (mis)representations of African people and politics. This week their new issue, the Chronic, launches worldwide.
The first time I met Chinua Achebe I had just started teaching at Bard College, where I had been hired as Director of Africana Studies. I saw Chinua one evening at a campus event and nervously approached to introduce myself. I did not expect his humor or his humility. Instead of exchanging a quick word […]
Flying back from Dakar and Bamako to my home near “Little Senegal,” I snatched up Courrier International’s special issue “Afrique 3.0″ while passing through Paris. Tom made a quick survey of it just as it hit the newstands. Now that we’ve had a little more time to spend with it, what to make of it? […]
The Kenyan people have voted. The Kenyan elections have come and not quite gone. The foreign press offered its readers a veritable smorgasbord of dreadfully decontextualized representations, and now that the actual polling has passed, you can just about taste the collective disappointment at the absence of spectacular violence. As the local Kenyan press noted, […]
The multi-named thumb piano is quite an important foundational instrument for contemporary music all over the world, although it’s perhaps not always recognized as such. In Congo, colonial era missionaries banned the instrument from their services, saying that its association with traditional spiritual practices sullied the sacredness of the choral music they were adopting to […]
A couple of years ago, the Beninoise actor Djimon Hounsou collaborated with Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina to put the latter’s then provocative and now legendary essay “How to write about Africa” (which first appeared in Granta Magazine) on Youtube. In the essay, Binyavanga, who has since revisited the original essay, lampooned Western journalism and Hollywood’s […]
I wasn’t pleased with the selection of short stories listed for the Caine Prize this year. That list made African writing look bad. Truth be told, the problem associated with such collections is hardly applicable to the Caine committee alone. Lists like that makes it seem like African writing remains subpar, and is simply being […]
If you are to ask me what are the greatest issues in Africa, I would say it is that people love, people fuck, people kiss, people speak. Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina talking to The Guardian Book Podcast.
