Boko Haram and Booming Banks. Ebola and tumbling borders. Gays, lesbians, and a sexual revolution in WhatsApp. Africa Rising: roads, tens of millions of newly banked, taxable citizens. A thousand new writers, musicians, film-makers a year. Africa tumbles, grows, suddenned into a hurricane of change. How do black people, Africans Imaginers, prepare our thoughts to deal with the adventure: its horrors, pleasures and opportunities? I talk about transport systems of dreams, desires, and thoughts. The political economy of romantic love, the avenues and streets of the metaphysical lives of people, and the architecture of bodies pleasuring, wounded, re-engineering for a future with pasts unforgotten, with our future reimagined. What is Africa in the world? What Will Africa be in the World?
In April 2014 the Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina featured on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential persons in the world. His satirical essay «How to Write About Africa?» has become an important point of reference, literary and politically, for activists and authors, and he has founded the literary magazine Kwani?. In his 2011 book One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir, he describes his coming of age in the Kenyan middle class. Earlier this year he published what he characterized as a lost chapter from his memoir, where he reveals that he is gay. This coincided with a number of African countries passeing discriminatory homophobic laws.
Wergeland Litteraturhuset Lecture by Binyavanga Wainaina Universalisme 2014