Even as I mourn his death, I think of Binyavanga Kenneth Wainaina with love, glad to have known him and been loved by him.
“Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won a Nobel Prize.“In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country.”
Binya apologised and hugged me with an exuberance of one who had known me for a long time. It was his way. You would meet him for five minutes and feel as though you had known him your whole life because of the way he opened himself up to people, the way he had no filter. It was the best thing about him, but also the worst. Sometimes those around him whom he embraced so generously would not always be well meaning.
H and I spent the Christmas holidays in Nakuru with the Wainaina family. Baba, big brother Jimmy, little sister Chiqy and their children treated me not as a friend to June and Ken but as the sibling between June and Chiqy. On the first morning in Nakuru, I woke up in a panic because H was not in bed beside me where he had slept.
On moving to Nairobi, I would see Binyavanga every now and again, but not as often as we both would have liked. It was not long after my moving there that the continent’s homophobia came to the fore. In Nigeria, MPs debated about making homosexuality a crime punishable with a jail term. In Uganda, they argued the same thing.. It was at this time that he started being referred to in Kenyan media as “writer and gay rights activist”.
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