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One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina: book review



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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