by JOHN MWAZEMBA
One of the harshest criticisms of the recently launched book One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina came from the international magazine, The Economist.
The not-so-friendly review went thus: “Binyavanga Wainaina, a Kenyan writer, first established himself by winning the Caine prize for African writing in 2002. He co-founded Kwani?, a literary journal based in Nairobi, and was tempted away to America where he made a name for himself teaching at Bard College. Such is Mr Wainaina’s force of personality and his enthusiasm for promoting the arts of Africa that it would be cheering to report that his first book, One Day I Will Write About This Place, is worth the wait.
“It is not. Mr Wainaina should not have been encouraged to write in the form of a memoir. He is not the only one to suffer from this. Too many African writers are co-opted by the American creative-writing scene only to be reduced by prevailing navel-gazing. Separately, much of the African writing culture that remains on the continent, including Kwani?, is propped up with cash from the Western donors that African writers purport to excoriate”.
This could easily be dismissed as racist, especially coming from The Economist, known to be sometimes deeply condescending to the African continent and everything that relates to it.
However, this is the bitter truth.
Without exception
All successful African writers – from Ngugi wa Thiong’o to Binyavanga Wainaina (Kenya); from Chinua Achebe to Wole Soyinka and now Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria); from Dambudzo Marechera to Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe) and many others – all of them, without exception, get their money, fame and livelihood from the West.
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