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The Muhammad Ali of writing: Beers and sheng poetry in Dandora, words that danced

Saturday June 01 2019
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Binyavanga at the 2015 TEDxEuston. PHOTO COURTESY | TEDx

By TEE NGUGI

I first met Binyavanga Wainaina in 2004. My siblings and I were in Kenya, me from Namibia where I lived, and the others from the US, to attend a court case arising from an assassination attempt on our father, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and stepmother, Njeri wa Ngugi.

I had, of course, read his Caine Prize winning memoir Discovering Home. Before we departed to our various homes across the world, Mukoma introduced us to him. Then, he was much bigger and wore a mane of dreadlocks.

I expected he would take us on a tour of the hot spots in Nairobi. But he bought a crate of beer and drove us to a house in Dandora where we spent the whole afternoon listening to young people he was supporting and mentoring recite poetry and rap in Sheng, a language that had established itself as the lingua franca of the downtrodden masses living on the abandoned side of Nairobi.

The poetry was fast and fresh, and in a country just waking up from the stupor of Nyayoism, surprisingly revolutionary.

The grunge poets debated tribalism and class and nationalism in lines from heaven. They claimed their humanness and dignity in honey-soaked imagery. We danced to the poetry and hip-hop and sent for another crate of beer.

I would meet him again at the 2010 Kwani Litfest, where he did a reading from an MS he was working on.

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Some writers read from their works with a self-conscious dramatic manner. Others read with a grave seriousness as if careful not to spill their words on the floor. Binyavanga read with an effusion of joy, mischief at the edge of his sing-song voice.

The last time I saw him was at a pub in Hurlinghum with his sister, and friends from his high school days. He was quiet and withdrawn.

In Discovering Home, he writes he had “become self-conscious about displaying my dreaminess and absent-mindedness…” and tried to hide it. It seemed to me that he was not always successful in that endeavour.

But when Binyavanga spoke, the sing-song voice once again finding joy , he could wring drama and irony out of the mundane.

He wrote the same way, using his dancing words to smoke out the bees of the mundane to get to the honey of life. Of the reunion of his family members separated by chaos and genocide, he writes: “How amazing life seems when it stands around death.”

Thus Discovering Home, a memoir about his return to Kenya after many years in South Africa, is not just a description of sounds and sights and a chronicle of the events of the return. It is not a second look at landscapes and the hustle of the city and the complexities of family.

In Binyavanga’s rendition, those become signposts in an expedition up and down the hills and valleys of life.

The Chief in Mwingi bubbles with infectious bonhomie and gung-ho. Kariuki emerges from his taciturnity to make insightful observations.

A character like Kipsang fills the one instance he appears with mysterious knowledge that enables them to escape a tricky situation involving Maasai women re-enacting a traditional ritual.

Every character, no matter how minor – the mkokoteni driver, the owner of the pub in Mwingi – has an insight. Every one of them has a perspective on life, and we are left wondering about them, wanting to visit them again and hear the rest of their story.

In his essays, Binyavanga makes political or philosophical statements with the same mischievous tone as in his fiction and creative non-fiction.

He reserves his most caustic observations for the hypocritical Kenyan middle class. The middle class have pretensions learnt from copies of Western life.

In How to Write About Africa, he pokes fun at Western observers of Africa, from the well-meaning to those who propagate a racism in the mould of Shiva Naipaul’s North of South.

In the spirit of early European explorers who imagined Africa south of the Sahara to be full of monsters, today’s explorers, Binyavanga writes, overlook the well-adjusted African to focus on those for whom monkey brain is a delicacy. But as always, his observations bear no malice or anger.

Even those being baited will find much joy in reading the unflattering portrait of themselves. Binyavanga was the Muhammad Ali of writing; he dazzled with his dancing words, devastated with his jabs, and yet all was done without malice, with an ironical twinkle in the eye.

In later years, Binyavanga would begin to lose the humour and mischief in his observations. He was impatient with unflattering reviews of his work.

Instead of poking us gently in the ribs with a finger to reveal our hypocrisy to ourselves, he clubbed us to accept his version of the world.

He compiled a list of “Upright Africans.” The list featured former military dictator Olusegun Obasanjo and other unsavoury characters.

Binyavanga, who in his earlier writing and philosophy eschewed orthodoxy in his thinking and the diktat of the empty, albeit, emotive phrase, seemed to have picked up where the old cultural nationalist and pan-Africanist ideologues had left off.

Whereas before he had, implicitly or explicitly, pointed out corruption and dictatorship as the causes of Africa’s dysfunction, now he discerned the evil hand of imperialism behind the continent’s failure.

And yet what we will always remember of Binyavanga will not be these moments of intolerance and pan-Africanist orthodoxy, but his magnanimity and open-mindedness, his pursuit of truth no matter what it would reveal about Africa, the world, his family and friends, and himself.

He channelled the energy coming out of the combustion chamber of his breast mind telling stories in words that danced and made us all better dancers in the dance of life.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator.

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