General Service radio is easy to find on medium-wave radio. Exactly at 800 using the dial. National Service is somewhere around 200. I know this because I try as much as possible to avoid it and its kimay sounds. I don’t know why that Congo music and that bad Kenyan guitar music so distress me; they just do.
The truth is I am not good at pictures; I am much better at words. Any kissing or touching in any book is very powerful. I don’t feel the same with television or movies. Films are for everybody, they make you feel what the whole watching world feels. To a film, I am an outsider, a witness marveling at the spectacle unfolding in front of me. The novel’s erotic world is not alive on a screen—on glass and plastic and metal. It is not alive on the page either, those are only squiggles cheaply stamped onto dead trees. The whole world of a novel unfolds inside the head, fully entangled with the stinging eyes, the tight chest, the galloping belly. It is fully mine, 100 percent private. When they touch and kiss, the kiss belongs to me, it does not belong to other readers, to the author, to the couple. If it is a well-written kiss, it will be carried in a small, coiled place under the hard bone below my nipples.
I wonder sometimes if there is a third kind of human being. There are real flesh and blood people. There are television and radio people. There are people in books. People in books do not have an actual voice for your ears. You cannot see them. You, the reader, work with a good author to make them move around your head, toss their hair, hate and love, and need things urgently. Russet is an emotion inside me that comes from reading things about horses, and manes, and many hairs tossing, and autumn, a set of impressions, movements, lights. These are my concerns.
It will be years before the dungeons are opened, and we find out the truth. In 1983 every day, several times a day, I play Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” and feel myself brimming in compassion for his sensitivity. We know enough to know things are going on out there, beyond the mist. There are whispers. But there is also Dallas, Dynasty, and Falcon Crest.
Michael Jackson is beautiful. The nose has not yet fallen. He has managed to make himself into a perpetual present tense: no lineage, no history; he is the maximum of sound and movement and nowness. In 1983, while I read novels, Moi is building his Big Dick Building in secret. Every dictator has to have one. His is called Nyayo House. He knows already that to rule Kenya, he is going to have to shed blood. All those years, we thought he was just hapless, that he tortured because he was floundering. Later, we found out that there was an underground chamber, designed by his people, designed for torture with Nikolae Ceauşescu’s help, in that tall tall building. Nobody in the West complains. Moi is a good friend of the West. While we dream shoulder pad dreams, inside those chambers, intellectuals, activists, writers are beaten, waterboarded, testicles are crushed, people are deprived of sleep.
…
It is autumn 2009, as I write this in my bed and breakfast room in Red Hook, New York, near Bard College, where I work. I took a long walk this evening. I walk and step on crushed leaves, watch the first golds and reds in this glorious light. It is such a charismatic season because it looks and feels like the ripening of things—but the leaves are not ripening, they are dying.
It has been a year and a half since Kenya went crazy. During the violence, I refused to fly back to work in the United States in January. It felt like I was abandoning home. But as soon as the peace agreement was signed, I left. I told myself I was done. Done with too much Kenya. I was going to apply for a green card. Visit for holidays. Save up to help get my family out if necessary. Love from a committed distance.
I drank a lot, got angry a lot that summer. I can see myself now, flapping my arms drunkenly in many jagged locations and railing against this and that, and feeling that if I keep talking the ground won’t open up and make me lonely.
At a reading and a talk at Williams College, I embarrassed myself and burst into bad snotty tears when I started to talk about Kenya. There is no tissue. Please, please, all podiums, have tissue!
I am tired of being alone.
…
It is the summer of the World Cup 2010, and I am in Ghana enjoying things. I have planned to be home in time for the referendum on the new constitution. I am tentative. Each time I have been home, things have been tense, tribe in everybody’s eyes, doubt. Last time, an immigration official at the airport started to speak to me in Gikuyu the moment she saw my surname. Wink wink. No hiding now. We are in conspiracy with one another. Let’s help each other, her eyes said. My uncle Henry, who took care of me in South Africa, is dead. Auntie Rosaria, the sweetest of Mum’s sisters, died of diabetes complications. Auntie Grace, wonderful, warm, and true Auntie Grace—Baba’s big sister—is dead. Baba is fine, but now I worry. Jim has a son, Eddy—a tsunami of energy and laughter. None of my nieces and nephews strongly recall Mum. I wish just one of them had Mum’s voice—so she does not just remain in our generation.
I am diabetic and have discovered doctors. My knees were fine, and then I did that American thing that insists on testing for problems you have not felt. I have an MRI and find out that my knees are on the verge of death, and the moment I find this out, they creak and threaten to pop out of their sockets every time I bend them. Then I spend the night in a sleep clinic and they tell me I have probably never slept well, that I breathe badly, that an operation is imminent. I am excited. Maybe this is the cause of my vagueness. Maybe my vagueness is not caused by too many years of soft-focus trash. I have a syndrome. I am a victim of an -osis.
This is growing up, concerns and worries can no longer be suspended, they are just part of the day. Kenya is suddenly all soft and gooey. People smiling, looking you in the eye and saying mushy things like “as a Kenyan…” or “in this New Kenya…” Shyly, shyly, millions go home to their villages from the city, pay money for buses and gifts, money they do not have, to vote for the new constitution. Even those who vote no do so peacefully. Kibaki is looking dangerously energetic. The fool. But today I like him, beaming like a teddy bear, today I like him. I had planned to be here and leave after the referendum, just for a selfish jolt of good feeling. To leave before I looked too hard and saw ugliness. Now with all of this, I cannot not leave.
In a moment of watery patriotism, the day after the referendum, I buy a benga compilation, done by Ketebul Studios. It comes with a booklet on the history of benga, and a documentary and CD. I am afraid to watch it and find I still hate benga music. Everybody now is saying it is the true music of Kenya. Maybe in my heart I am a little Anglo-Kenyan, unable to appreciate benga.
I start watching the documentary, and somebody with a posh English accent is narrating the story of benga, and then I see a small group of traditional Luo musicians dancing and playing instruments on a patch of dust in a courtyard between grass huts. One man is playing the nyatiti. It sounds fine. No kimay. I am not thrilled. The music is coherent and complicated. The nyatiti and its younger cousin the lyre are two of the most ancient of stringed musical instruments. But it is the entry of the orutu—a wooden bow and string rubbing a fiddle made from a gourd—that scatters my senses and leaves me shifting uncomfortably, that bowel seesawing sound. I still can’t make the connection between the wooden sounds of this instrument and the acoustic guitar sounds of benga.
In the 1940s, thousands of Kenyans, including one Barack Obama Senior, left their villages for the first time, in uniform for the British, and ended up watching their fellow Kenyans dying inelegantly, and buried inelegantly, and left to rot inelegantly in a foreign land. These soldiers lived a life of thrills and excitement, full of adventure and horror. They met and saw people from all over the colonies. They saw them shit; they saw them die. They saw them sing. They expanded, they recoiled, they measured themselves, and they found no mathematical principle to account for their designated roles back home. Here, a man who was just a white man’s cook, barefoot and grateful, could start to push his son to be as good as the colonizer.
A certain taboo of superiority was broken as soldier
s witnessed a mortally wounded Britain floundering in the jungles for its survival. Those lonely evenings, maybe even in ceremonies to mark the dead who were never to be brought home, some started to play Spanish acoustic guitar. They used the guitar to re-create the sounds of home. The man who sits and plays the nyatiti is a storyteller. A group of players will come to a homestead and stand near the granary—far from delicate ears. As he plays the nyatiti, he composes a song, full of local characters, and history, and raunchy scandals, and love, and jealousy. The nyatiti, the drums, the rattles, the ankle rattles, the orutu simply accompany the story.
It is a literary form, and the song, the tune of the song, does not follow a separate and parallel musical scale: it too is a slave to the story, its peaks and troughs, its moments of wisdom, its bad behavior. And people dance, moving enough around the music to inhabit the story. If in Kenya the Spanish guitar was an object to be revered, smooth and without kink, a thing for white people’s music, in Burma—in bloodied uniforms, muddy, exhausted, and malarial—it was used with impunity, with no respect for the forms and scales and manners its brand name promised. To these soldiers, it became only an awkward pretender to the noble nyatiti and the noble orutu. It was weak, but it had to do the job of both. A good orutu or nyatiti player, like a jazz guitarist, will live up to the narrative improvisations of the singer. So they did, musicians like Olima Anditi and John Ogara found a way to make the Spanish guitar re-create the partnership of sounds between the nyatiti and the orutu as accompaniments to singing/storytelling. It became a whole new idea—carrying all of what came before, but a thing of its own.
Something calls my attention. I pause the documentary, stand up, my hands shaking, get a coffee, and come back and watch Mike Otieno, a Kenyan guitarist—and music genius—speaking. Here it is, the source of all kimay. The music of the nyatiti is all about the singer. The nyatiti and orutu do not create their own sounds. Their job is to follow the words, the intonation, the language and melody of the song, to maintain the integrity of the story. So, if you take the singer away, what they sound like is what the singer was saying. They mimic the singer. The nyatiti is plucked, not strummed, and this makes sounds very different from any other Spanish guitar sound. Because Nairobi in the 1960s was now full of Luo benga guitarists in this tradition, benga as an idea spread quickly to different tribes, and their new popular music. Any good benga guitarist can mimic the architecture and musical rhythms and verbal sounds of any Kenyan language. Stripped down, that is the intent of benga.
Kimay is people talking without words, exact languages, the guitar sounds of all of Kenya speaking Kenya’s languages. If kimay brought me uncertainty, it was because I simply lacked the imagination to think that such a feat was possible. For kimay was part of a project to make people like us certain of our place in the world, to make us unable to see the past and our place in it. To make us a sort of Anglo-Kenyan. Right at the beginning, in our first popular Independence music, before the flag was up, Kenyans had already found a coherent platform to carry our diversity and complexity in sound.
We fail to trust that we knew ourselves to be possible from the beginning.
Acknowledgments
Over the past six years, while writing this book, I have been fortunate to receive the attention, support, and goodwill of many people.
I would like to thanks my muses and readers who all intervened with support and love during the many creative crises: Martin Kimani, Chimamanda Adichie, David Godwin, Ed Pavlic, Keguro Macharia, David Kaiza, Sara Holloway, the Secret Wambui, Dr. Wambui Mwangi, John Ryle, Muthoni Garland, Achal Prabhala, Sarah Chalfant.
Special thanks to Fiona McCrae, my editor at Graywolf Press.
Thanks to the Wingate Foundation, and the Ford Foundation team in Nairobi, Kenya, especially Rob Burnet and Dr. Joyce Nyairo, who have changed the arts landscape in Nairobi. I would like to thank the people at the Lannan Foundation, and Aslak and the team at the House of Literature in Oslo. The team at Granta magazine and Granta Books, and the Farafina community. Thanks to the Chimurenga community. Thanks to Tom Maliti, Kairo Kiarie, June Wainaina, Malla Mummo, Angela Wachuka, Billy Kahora and the Kwani? community. Thanks to Mikhail Iossel and the SLS team.
Many thanks to the Bard community for welcoming me here. Thanks to President Leon Botstein, Professor Chinua Achebe, our patron, Jesse Shipley, Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, Jim Brudvig, Michèle Dominy, Irene Zedlacher, Professor Mary Caponegro, Max Kenner, and Professor John Ryle of the Rift Valley Institute at Bard College. Many thanks to the English department at Union College, especially Professor Harry Merten and Stacey Barnum. Many thanks to Professor Kenda Mutongi of the Africana program at Williams College, where I spent a wonderful semester as the Sterling Brown Visiting Professor of African Studies. Many thanks to Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Teju Cole, and Chris Abani. Many thanks to the team at Graywolf Press, and the team at the Wylie Agency.
Many thanks to Andy and Georgia Hanson for offering their home and friendship to me in 2007 when I needed to hide and finish writing this book.
I would like to pay tribute to the late Rod Amis, legendary editor of the amazing netzine g21.net, who published everything I sent, and always paid $100 by Western Union for each story—from his own pocket. Rod was the most generous and giving editor I have worked with.
Much love and good wishes to you all.
Binyavanga Wainaina
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
May 2, 2011
Binyavanga Wainaina is the founding editor of Kwani?, a leading African literary magazine based in Kenya. He won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing and has written for Vanity Fair, Granta, and the New York Times. Wainaina directs the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College.
This book is made possible through a partnership with the College of Saint Benedict, and honors the legacy of S. Mariella Gable, a distinguished teacher at the College.
Previous titles in this series include:
Loverboy by Victoria Redel
The House on Eccles Road by Judith Kitchen
One Vacant Chair by Joe Coomer
The Weatherman by Clint McCown
Collected Poems by Jane Kenyon
Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship
by Nuruddin Farah:
Sweet and Sour Milk
Sardines
Close Sesame
Duende by Tracy K. Smith
All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems by Linda Gregg
The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song
by Ellen Bryant Voigt
How to Escape from a Leper Colony by Tiphanie Yanique
Support for this series has been provided by the Manitou Fund as part of the Warner Reading Program.
The text of One Day I Will Write About This Place is set in Adobe Jenson Pro, a typeface drawn by Robert Slimbach and based on late-fifteenth-century types by the printer Nicolas Jenson. This book was designed by Ann Sudmeier. Composition by BookMobile Design and Publishing Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Friesens on acid-free 100 percent postconsumer wastepaper.
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