Kwanini? Series
Discovering Home
"Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans."
Winner of the 2002 Caine Prize for African fiction, Discovering Home tells the Kenyan version of that universal story: returning home and seeing it for the first time. By turns compassionate and bitingly ironic, this edition takes readers on a whirlwind journey from Rift Valley to Maasailand and beyond. Along the way, the social geography underlying family relations, political contacts, the Ndombolo dance and the Sunday sermon are revealed in all their solemn hilarity
Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kenyan writer. He won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing. He is the founding editor of Kwani?,and has written for The EastAfrican, National Geographic, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly, Vanity fair, Granta, the New York Times and The Guardian (UK). Wainaina has taught at Union College and Williams College, and is currently the Director of the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College. His memoir, I Will One Day Write About this Place, will be released by Graywolf Press in 2011.