The Binj was happy and he was great to be around, he had all these lovely stories and people gravitated towards him as a leader. The festival seemed to be a safe space for creatives and their partners, mocking the binary nature of Nigerian societies’ approach to relationships.
At the conference, participants were guarded by armed police escorts and I would reflect on how privilege protects. It’s a good thing, but as change agents, African writers and other intellectuals have failed to widen that safe space for the less privileged. They don’t seem that interested as long as they are safe.
As for donor funding and largesse, the very institutions that the Binj railed against, he relied heavily upon to find his creative initiatives and lifestyle, to the very end. In the words of The Economist, upon reviewing the book: “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.”
Anyway, read this essay!
“Wainaina had long understood that he was gay. He came out in 2014 in an essay for the online journal Africa Is a Country. In the opening passage, he imagines himself by his mother’s deathbed, telling her what he’d wanted to explain since he was a boy. In the next section – ‘the right version of events’ – he is on the point of leaving South Africa to visit her when his uncle calls to tell him he’s too late. ‘I am 29,’ he writes. ‘It is 11 July 2000. I, Binyavanga Wainaina, quite honestly swear I have known I am a homosexual since I was five.’”
- Jeremy Harding, in the essay, That Guy
READ: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/jeremy-harding/that-guy
By Ikhide R. Ikheloa
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