One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina

Binyavanga Wainaina grew up in Kenya, but his mother was Ugandan, and this makes a difference that most European readers wouldn’t assume at first. But he’s willing to educate the reader, and you may learn much from this memoir. Wainaina wrote Granta magazine’s most-requested piece ever, How To Write About Africa, a provocative guide to the clichés and pitfalls of such writing. And now he writes about his own life in such a way as to lead by example, producing a funny, wise memoir, that, importantly, is stylishly written as well. Wainaina’s life, then, is probably different to the sort of thing British readers are used to seeing come from Africa. Wainaina was middle-class, which is unexpected (but why? It’s worth asking yourself) to begin with, and he makes all sorts of non-African cultural references, to Michael Jackson, or to Tupac Shakur, that he probably, sadly, wouldn’t have been expected to make. But this is not a sad book, and though Waiaina sometimes finds the political situation to be bleak, he remains inspiringly hopeful. He now runs a literary magazine, Kwani?, and with that, and with this book, he’s positioned himself at the forefront of African, and maybe world, writing. [Richard Robeson]