How to Write About Africa

How to Write About Africa

Collected Works

About the Book

From one of Africa’s most influential and eloquent essayists, a posthumous collection that highlights his biting satire and subversive wisdom on topics from travel to cultural identity to sexuality

“A fierce literary talent . . . [Wainaina] shines a light on his continent without cliché.”—The Guardian

“Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. . . . Africa is to be pitied, worshipped, or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.”

Binyavanga Wainaina was a pioneering voice in African literature, an award-winning memoirist and essayist, and a gatherer of literary communities. Before his tragic death in 2019 at the age of forty-seven, he won the Caine Prize for African Writing and was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People. His wildly popular essay “How to Write About Africa,” an incisive and unapologetic piece exposing the harmful and racist ways Western media depicts Africa with implicit bias and subjective clichés, changed the game for African writers and helped set the stage for a new generation of authors, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Yaa Gyasi. When Wainaina published a “lost chapter” of his 2011 memoir as an essay called “I Am a Homosexual, Mum,” which imagines coming out to his mother, he became a voice for the queer African community as well, adding a new layer to how African sexuality is perceived.

How to Write About Africa
collects these powerful pieces in a lively and imaginative set of essays about sexuality, art, history, and contemporary Africa. Wainaina’s writing is playful, robust, generous, and full-bodied. He describes the modern world with sensual, emotional, and psychological detail, giving us a full-color view of a country and continent. These works present a portrait of a giant in African literature who left a tremendous legacy.
Read more
Close

Praise for How to Write About Africa

“It’s beginning to seem like Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay ‘How to Write About Africa’ might be, after the Bible, the most read English-language text on the African continent. . . . This collection of his writing—the first to be published since he died—makes it difficult not to feel the scale of [his] loss. . . . A fierce literary talent . . . [Wainaina] shines a light on his continent without cliché.”The Guardian 
Read more
Close

About the Author

Binyavanga Wainaina
Decorative Carat

About the Author

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, Financial Times, and Zoetrope: All-Story. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Half of a Yellow Sun, which was the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “Winner of Winners” award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck; and the essays We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, both national bestsellers. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria. More by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Decorative Carat