Binyavanga Wainaina Quotations

I believe in, and will to the best of my ability fight for, equal rights and freedom of opinion for everyone, regardless of colour, religion, nationality, orientation - you know the rest.

Every human being has a bit of gangster in him.

There is no country in the world with the diversity, confidence and talent and black pride like Nigeria.

Living in South Africa and periodically coming back to Kenya, my relationship with officialdom in Kenya was just insane.

I am quite excited that Moi is leaving. Kenyans have changed. We have a free press, and it is no longer a situation of 'follow in my footsteps.'

All people have dignity. Theres nobody who was born without a soul and a spirit.

Every one, we, we homosexuals, are people, and we need our oxygen to breathe.

I like the idea of readers feeling a familiarity, whether it's with Africa or childhood.

I’m extremely optimistic about rapid transformation and change of things in Africa in general.

I, Binyavanga Wainaina, quite honestly swear I have known I am a homosexual since I was five.

We are a mixed up people. We have mixed up ways of naming, too... When my father's brothers and sisters first went to colonial schools, they had to produce a surname. They also had to show they were good Christians by adopting a western name. They adopted my grandfather's name as surname. Wainaina.

People reach an age... where somebody elses platform is no longer yours.

In kindergarten, we had this Irish Catholic headmistress called Sister Leonie, and I remember she would tell us, say, to put the crayons in the box. I remember thinking, 'Why is everyone finding this so easy? Why should the crayons be in the box?'

I knew I didn't want to come out in the 'New Yorker'; it just felt wrong. It needed an African conversation.

I want to be fighting for a society accountable towards its citizens.

I'm not even sure I want to use the term 'coming out.'

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel prize.

It's like I was always not quite sure even how to move in space somehow; I would watch people and then copy them. I found it really hard to walk straight. My brother was always on at me for walking off the pavement. I guess I always expected people to bring me back into line.

When I went to live in South Africa, I immediately began to understand what went wrong. Because here was a place supposed to be under apartheid - I arrived there in 1991 - but here a black person had more say and had more influence over his white government than an average Kenyan had over the Moi government.

There's no point for me in being a writer and having all these blocked places where I feel I can't think freely and imagine freely. There just really is no point.

Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated

It is a pink and blue feeling, as sharp as clear sky; a slight breeze, and the edges of Lake Nakuru would rise like the ruffle at the edge of a skirt; and I am pockmarked with whole-body pinpricks of potentiality. A stretch of my body would surely stretch as far as the sky. The whole universe poised, and I am the agent of any movement.

I like the idea of readers feeling a familiarity, whether its with Africa or childhood.

I love playing with words and texture.

Everywhere I go, I see young people: Confident, forward looking. I have seen them in Lagos, in Rwanda, in the suburbs of London.

International correspondents with their long dictaphones, and dirty jeans, and five hundred words before whiskey, are slouched over the red velvet chairs, in the VIP section in the front, looking for the Story: the Most Macheteing Deathest, Most Treasury Corruptest, Most Entrail-Eating Civil Warest, Most Crocodile-Grinning Dictatorest, MOst Heart-Wrenching and Genociding Pulitzerest, Most Black Big-Eyed Oxfam Child Starvingest, Most Wild African Savages Having AIDS-Ridden Sexest with Genetically Mutilatedest Girls...The Most Authentic Real Black Africanest story they can find...

I have learned that I, we, are a dollar-a-day people (which is terrible, they say, because a cow in Japan is worth $9 a day). This means that a Japanese cow would be a middle class Kenyan... a $9-a-day cow from Japan could very well head a humanitarian NGO in Kenya. Massages are very cheap in Nairobi, so the cow would be comfortable.