How To Write About Africa by Binyavanga Wainaina

About Binyavanga Wainaina

How To Write About Africa by Binyavanga Wainaina

Wainaina's love for truth and deconstructing Western misconceptions about Africa made him a critical voice for many middle-class Kenyans. (Tuko) How to Write About Africa began as a satirical essay in Granta magazine that went viral worldwide and remains one of the most widely shared pieces of writing about Africa ever published. With devastating wit, Wainaina catalogues every patronising, sensationalist, and reductive trope used by Western journalists, novelists, and filmmakers when writing about the continent — the dying children, the corrupt leaders, the noble wildlife — and exposes the ideological framework that produces them. The essay collection expands this critique across a range of African experiences, combining savage satire with genuine intellectual rigour. It is essential reading for anyone who writes about, reads about, or thinks about Africa.