Books

LIBRI

Who was Binyavanga Wainaina, his book in italian

17-03-2020 by Freddie del Curatolo

On 21 May 2019 he prematurely left us one of the greatest Kenyan writers and one of the most lucid, passionate and sarcastic explorers of African society. Binyavanga Wainaina's short ironic treatise "How to write about Africa" (How to write about Africa) and many stories, articles, essays and visions about contemporary Kenya and the continent that he has travelled far and wide as a correspondent also for important international magazines and newspapers such as The Guardian and The New York Times.
For those who want to discover who Wainaina really was and know the thoughts of a great Kenyan thinker and at the same time relive with him the history of the last forty years of this country, or at least of the thirty years in which he went from the "regimes" of Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Arap Moi to the parliamentary democracy of Mwai Kibaki, his autobiographical novel "Someday I will write about this place", published in Italian by the small publishing house 66thAnd2nd, is absolutely necessary.
The privileged childhood compared to the great (though dignified) poverty of the rural communities outside Nairobi, parents who barely manage to get him and his two sisters to study, the university in South Africa in the years of the end of Apartheid, the return to a country that was testing democracy but at the same time "liberalizing" corruption and other Western evils. All written with a sharp, scratchy, self-harm and intelligent pen. Binyavanga (a name of Rwandan origin, like his mother, while the surname betrays his father's Kikuyu origins) took seven years to tell just over thirty of his life. "Someday I'll write about this place" is a novel of bourgeois formation, of an Africa of the new generations, far from the reality (but also from stereotypes) of the hungry and of all the global bailamme that marches around us, for better or for worse.
I read novels and observed people," explained the author, who died when he was only 48, "I wrote what I saw in my head and gave shape to reality by putting it into a book. Because life is not only about understanding who you are, but also who you should be". 

TAGS: libri kenyabinyavanga wainainascrittori kenyaletteratura kenyaromanzi kenya

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