Discovering Home: Essays

in July 2000 Binyavanga Wainaina went home, to Kenya. He did not return quietly; instead, he burst into the church where his mother's funeral was being held, surprising his siblings, who thought he was far away in South Africa. Once home, however, there was no going back – he had overstayed his visa by years, making it difficult to return, and he was warmed by the prospect of being with his family. His bereaved father had only recently built the family's permanent home in Nakuru, and his sister June had just given birth to a son. The house was a busy one, the garden offered many immersive delights, and there was enough space for him to skulk, play music loudly and write.

                  One year later, he shifted to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, seduced by the heaving, changing metropolis. Binyavanga had returned home a new man, but to a home that was remaking itself too. He embraced it. He plunged head first into street culture, into the very things his previous self, the conservative, cautious, prim young man from ten years ago, would have rejected.

                  He wrote for anyone who would have him, and especially Rod Amis, the African-American editor of G21, a pioneering online magazine of world culture, which was based in New Orleans. Amis ran a threadbare operation, but he unfailingly paid Binyavanga a hundred dollars for every piece he published. Every Sunday, once the money had been cashed at Western Union, Binyavanga would celebrate. Sometimes, he booked the sixty-minute package at a Somali-run Internet café to talk to new friends from new online writing communities, such as a then unknown writer from Nigeria called Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

In 2002 he heard about the recently instituted Caine Prize for African Writing. He scrambled to get an essay published in time to qualify, and decided to go with Amis and G21. The Caine Prize organizers immediately rejected his entry. It was an online magazine, they said, and they could only accept entries published in ‘real’ magazines. Binyavanga wrote back a scorching rejoinder, and they folded. He was in. A few months later, he won the award for his essay, ‘Discovering Home’, arguably becoming its most famous – and notorious – recipient ever. He used the money from the award to set up a magazine of new writing in Kenya, and called it Kwani?, which means ‘So what?’

It was the beginning of an era.