We sometimes joke that often when we’re online the only other person who’s consistently awake and on Twitter (no matter where he is in the world) is Binyavanga Wainaina. It’s like, if you blink, you miss out on some pronouncement by him. Though he has been an active social media user for a while now, it was really after he came out on January 18th that he went into overdrive. And you can’t look away. There is no one else addressing Africa, Africans and their relations to the West in such blistering form right now. Take Sunday night when–from a hotel balcony in Dakar where he was sampling some fine cheeses (he was in town on assignment for Chimurenga’s Chronic) –he  went on Twitter to tweet out what amounts to an essay on development workers, Nairobi and Dakar’s middle classes, terrorism, Uhuru Kenyatta and books (with digressions into other stuff, including a memorable recording of a Kenyan “Elvis” performing “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” at the Goat Derby at Ngong Racecourse in Nairobi: “Ngai. Holy Shit! this is great! the goat race! the music!). Because at some point we had to go to bed, we asked if someone could storify the tweets. Aaron Leaf, an Africa is a Country contributor, kindly indulged us, for which we are very grateful. We’ve embedded the tweets below — Binyavanga, from his balcony in Dakar, to the world. Read, enjoy, retweet liberally.