how to write about africa binyavanga wainaina analysis

This is explored through, firstly, a focus on Wainaina’s engagement with development embedded in his narrative of the IMF-generation, and secondly, through his deconstruction of a humanitarian discourse on Africa anchored in colonising ideologies of the global North and embodied in representatives of the aid industry in Kenya. This article elaborates on how Wainaina reflected this African experience of neoliberal globalisation and the related expansion of Western humanitarianism in his writing. In it, Wainaina used life-writing as a genre to tell what he called the “story of the IMF-generation”, meaning the children of a post-independence African middle class who came massively under pressure due to foreign-imposed structural adjustment in the 1980s and 1990s, and who became a driving force in democratisation movements after 2000. The focus is on his memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place (Granta, 2011). This article looks at Binyavanga Wainaina’s autobiographical and essayistic writing as a site of development theory and criticism. By focusing on the theme of failure and Wainaina’s embedding of oral structures into his text, I suggest Wainaina’s work offers insights and concrete narrative patterns that might become fruitful tools through which educational theory and literary analysis might illuminate each other’s blind spots, specifically in regard to oral skills in education. After detailing this history of literature and literacy in East Africa, I explore the themes and aesthetic devices that Wainaina develops in One Day to reflect on his own role as an educator in the context of his troubled relationship with his own schooling. To address this lacuna, I use Paulo Freire’s theory of Critical Pedagogy to analyze historical debates of curriculum and canonization, as well as Wainaina’s more recent engagement with the Kenyan educational system, in which questions on how to write are intertwined with thoughts on how to teach. I read Wainaina’s texts against the way the literature/literacy duality has been envisioned in historical discourses, arguing that deeper pedagogical questions were largely overlooked in the intersections between the two theoretical fields. In this paper I use the concept of teacherliness to explore the connections between literature and education in Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place and his opinion pieces on education.

How to write about africa binyavanga wainaina analysis