One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir (2012) is set
predominantly in Nakuru, Kenya. Famous for its flamingos, Wainaina describes
his birthplace beautifully: ‘’a million flamingos rise, the edges of Lake
Nakuru lift, like pink skirts swollen by petticoats, now showing bits of blue
panties, and God gasps, the skirts blow higher, the whole lake is blue and the
sky is full of circling flamingos.’’
Kenneth Binyavanga Wainaina (KenKen to his mother) begins his memoir in
1978 when he is seven years old. He is playing with his five year old sister
Ciru and 11 year old brother Jimmy. It is the 15th year of Kenya’s
independence from British colonial rule, the year of the death of its first
president, Jomo Kenyatta, and the year that his youngest sister Chiqy is born.
His father works as a managing director of a farmers’ marketing
cooperative and his mother has a hair dressing salon. His mother is from
neighbouring Uganda, under the regime of President Idi Amin. Kenya is an
‘’Island of Peace’’ surrounded by countries in conflict. Peace is predominant
but there are incidents – such as the six hour coup d’etat led by junior soldiers in the Kenyan air force.
At 12 years of age, Wainaina will be ‘’cool and decolonized’’ and
studies in South Africa when ‘’Mandela is free’’ and female ‘’liberation is
coming.’’ In 1992 many Kenyans flee their country due to militia aggression and
in 1995 he leaves South Africa when Nelson Mandela becomes president.
He returns to Kenya where ‘’Urban Kenya is a split personality:
authority, trajectory, international citizen in English, national brother in
Kiswahili; and content villager or nostalgic urbanite in our mother tongues …
Three forked tongues! See how they split and twist and merge.’’ He says of his
return: ‘’Even in Nairobi’s chaos, I am strong, there is a thread, thin and as
certain as silk that makes my legs move forward without doubt … I am certain
that the world of my family is as solid as fiction, and I can relax and move
toward them without panic.’’
After his mother’s death in 2000, he establishes a magazine called
Kwani? (So What?) in Nairobi, and moves to America in 2006. Wainaina ends his
memoir in 2010 with what it means to be Kenyan.
This is a delightful memoir about a young boy coming of age not far
behind the emergence of his country, growing together and growing apart:
seeking unity, seeking independence. Brilliantly written, pivotal in its
politics, with a juxtaposition of development: a nation tied by foreign aid and
development and the development of his own craft – the written word. Dilemmas
of dependence versus independence; colonial universal language versus the local
unknown words of his community; and protest versus peace – all melting and
merging into a mixed identity still forging its own definition of what it means
to be Kenyan.
MARTINA
NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and
the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom
(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest
Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The
Sudan Curse (2009).
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