His mother, Rosemary, who trained in secretarial studies, ran several businesses, including a hair salon, and his father, Job, headed a government-owned company that produced pyrethrum, a natural insecticide harvested from chrysanthemum flowers. At this time, the country of his birth was only eight years older, having just wrested itself free of the British Empire. I know, because I was there-I was the Indian chap with him that night.īinyavanga Wainaina was born in 1971 in Nakuru, the agricultural capital of Kenya. Then, he looked around, delighted, as if it had just dawned on him how much he enjoyed generating this peculiar mix of bewilderment and adoration. He inscribed the letters carefully so as not to hurt: BINYAVANGA. Whereupon the stranger unbuttoned his shirt and dramatically declared, Write anything! The Kenyan motioned for a pen and wrote his name down on the stranger’s chest. A stranger walked up and said, Are you that … and the Kenyan smiled. The Kenyan leant back against the bar, under a thundering cloud of disco and smoke, like a grand Sufi mystic. In the basement of The Village, the party was in full swing. It went on like this for a bit, until the bouncer threw his hands up in the air and let them through.

Are you sure you want to go in? Yes, they said again, and here is fifteen pounds for the three of us. Look, the bouncer pleaded, shaking his head. At that very moment, behind a window to their side, a go-go dancer vigorously bounced against the glass, his groin only a few inches away from their faces.

(He insisted on calling this a boubou.) At the door of The Village, they were met by a kindly bouncer, who drew them aside and gave them the chance to admit they were hopelessly lost. The Indian man wore a cotton kurta that went below his knees, the Indian woman was dressed in a silk saree, fresh flowers in her hair, and the Kenyan man wore a full-length kaftan with dramatic bell sleeves that he had got made in Dakar. Now it just so happened that each one of them was dressed in non-Western clothes. They proceeded to join a mutual friend’s birthday party, which is how they ended up at The Village.

After dinner, they walked along the river to the Tate Modern Museum to pick up the third of their trio, an Indian woman who had just staged a performance involving a Palestinian mime artist and Bombay electronica. Earlier that evening, they had both endured dinner with a pompous American law professor who would, years later, mount a forgettable run for President. Two of the three were men, one of whom had just flown in from India, the other from Kenya. One day in September 2006, three visitors to London walked up to the door of The Village, a gay bar in Soho.

Originally published as an afterword in How to Write About Africa, published by Hamish Hamilton September 29th, 2022 in the UK.

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