The Death Of Binyavanga Wainaina: A Legendary Kenyan Journalist
“In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.”
I quote from Binyavanga Wainaina’s 2005 essay “How To Write About Africa”, one of my favourites. It’s a brilliant piece of satire, full of trenchant sarcasm and irony, meant to mock the way hacks – mostly mediocre white men and women from the “West” – who fancy themselves adventure writers or philanthropists or “conservationists”, who like to portray Africa, or rather Africans. This is an iconoclast’s unique way of smashing malicious stereotypes. I can’t resist quoting another passage from the essay:
“When writing about the plight of flora and fauna, make sure you mention that Africa is overpopulated. When your main character is in a desert or jungle living with indigenous peoples (anybody short) it is okay to mention that Africa has been severely depopulated by Aids and War (use caps)….. Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.”
It’s a Kenyan intellectual’s way of being a representative of Africa while refusing to be pinned down or diminished or sidelined by dishonest and deliberately racist Eurocentric misrepresentation of Africa. It’s an African anti-racist’s way of exposing the hypocrisies of racists. Sub-Saharan poverty, that has come to dominate popular imagination of the continent outside of it, is a morbid obsession of supremacists. Left behind as a wasteland after decades of violent plunder, genocide and social engineering by European colonials, this kind of portrayal of Africa serves to bypass acknowledgement of historical responsibility of European peoples, thus relieving them of any sense of guilt, and at the same time help rake in profits for the philanthropy industry, again dominated by the “West”.
It’s just more of white people selling black people to white people and congratulating each other on a job well done. Binya’s essay exposes this circlejerk of self-satisfied casuistry. Binya wasn’t just about irony-filled racism-bashing, or painting a picture of colonial Europe’s bequest to Africa – through heinous divide-and-rule policies – of internecine violence, or even just about describing African humanity in all its hues and timbres and complexities; he was also an LGBT rights activist in a country that still criminalises homosexuality (much like India did till very recently).
Wainaina’s style has inspired many modern African – and non-African – writers to break and remake moulds.
He once refused being coopted by the Swiss Alps talk shop that is the World Economic Forum, where some of the most rapacious capitalist plunderers and morally bankrupt, powerful political players in the world gather for their annual virtue-signalling, hypothetical-philanthropy-pantomime act. Not for him the myriad pretences and vanities and fakeries that make human civilization such a toxic nation to inhabit. Humanity lost Binyavanga Wainaina on Tuesday, 21st May 2019 to a stroke. He was just 48. I am tempted to wish him peaceful rest (although that feels empty to an atheist like me) but that would be asking him to do what he never could in life — be at peace. To me, wishing him peace would be an insult to the memory of a vitally important peace-disrupter like him.
I am not a good obituary writer. But if rebirth were a thing, I would demand to be reborn as Binyavanga Wainaina with all his ‘imperfections’ intact, to steal him from him. Having spent some time and electrons on Binyavanga, let’s have a slice of another “third world” story.
The “Third World” Literally Unwilling To Put Up With “First World” Nonsense
Canada had lovingly dumped mountains of its waste on the Philippines a few years ago, allegedly for “recycling”, violating the Basel Convention (for Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Waste) with a kind of easy contempt only “Western” countries seem capable of affording – and then refused to take it back.
Duterte, the Filipino President, might not be the best exemplar of leadership, but in this case, his mouth has done the job years of polite diplomacy couldn’t. Canada has decided, pell-mell, to take its waste back, fearing the Philippines might actually dump it back on the former, with an extra serving of love. Waste, like life, comes a full circle. This from Duterte is certainly a demonstration of, if not strength, a sense of conviction.
This is the “Third World” literally unwilling to put up with “First World” nonsense; a repudiation of the tacit violent message that brown lives matter less than white lives. I was going to add “or really that any lives matter less than the rest”, but I know that Duterte isn’t the best messenger for that piece of wisdom. He is a proponent of vigilantism against the illegal drug trade, and has been responsible for thousands of extrajudicial killings in the name of “War on Drugs”.
In reality, it’s a war on poor people. Most of those killed have been found to be poor drug peddlers or worse, innocent people on the streets. He used to do it when he was Mayor of Davao City and has blithely carried on the slaughter after being elected President. This is dangerous in a world where power is becoming increasingly unaccountable.
Duterte himself is quite proud of his record, and among other things, his “political incorrectness” and “tough on crime” reputation has brought him devotion from middle-class urban and overseas Filipino electors — much like how urban middle-class upper caste Hindus and NRIs (no prizes for guessing that the more powerful and wealthy among them are upper caste Hindus and that they take their bigotries with them wherever they go) are the engines of Modi’s popularity growth. There is a “Third World” stereotype (hint: not “currymuncher”) in there somewhere.
In an article titled “Can We Revive Empathy In Our Selfish World?“, psychologist Jamil Zaki makes a pitch for a seemingly quixotic experiment. He proposes to use VR to help people connect with the experiences of the homeless and wrest their hidden empathy from them, and inspire lasting behavioural changes that could translate to policy priorities. Quite apart from concerns whether or not such an experiment would be successful in bringing any real change, this is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in the world today.
The Unempathetic Indian Voter
Empathy is now being contemplated as a commodity for sale because our education system(s) and our ruthlessly capitalist-consumerist global economy have failed our inner humans. In India, we have ‘developed’ objects abstract and concrete, like ‘infrastructure’, e-governance’, ‘banking system’, ‘health insurance system’, ‘environmental standards’ etc., with humans missing from this ostensible development project. This has worked splendidly for some.
The numbers and standards of living of the middle classes have exploded since the 1991 reforms, even as the lower classes have stayed stuck in traditional, informal occupations with little proportional growth in wages or opportunities for upward mobility. This has led to rising wealth disparity. Today, the top 10% of India’s population owns 77% of its wealth; these are beneficiaries of India’s small formal sector. There has been virtually no growth in manufacturing jobs, which have been hoovered up by China’s sweatshops and enterprising ASEAN economies. This means a growing percentage of people working in the informal sector, or in the formal sector with their labour casualized, in a state of precarity. All this has exacerbated wealth and well-being disparities in India. With an increase in wealth, the Indian middle-class has further alienated itself from those below them on the socioeconomic scale. Empathy has been a casualty.
Actually, that’s not the whole story. Lack of empathy is a built-in feature of Indian society, always has been. It has always been deeply divided along ethnic, caste and class lines, exploitation of the powerless by the powerful one of its key aspects. Division along religious lines is a more recent import – a direct result of a deliberate divide-and-rule policy of the British colonials. The British only taught the Indian privileged classes/castes the finessed art of perpetuating structural violence through “laws” and institutions, giving them more “reasons” not to empathize with those they had directly or indirectly exploited and dehumanised for centuries.
Now we have words like “meritocracy”, “development”, “progress” etc. bandied about to suggest that any step taken with a long-term view to redressing historical wrongs done to socioeconomically backward groups in society is counterproductive. With jobs drying up, a sense of victimhood has intensified among upper caste youth at the sharp end of the globalisation stick. Violence against those deemed to be wrongly benefitting from affirmative action policies have found more “reasons” for itself. Fewer than the reasons to empathize with people who are “inferior”.
The rise of Hindutva, coinciding with the rise of the middle class, has given many of these empathy-lacking people a sense of purpose. They have now identified their “enemies”. They have found more punching bags to take out their frustrations on – Muslims, Dalits, women. An overarching Hindutva narrative has sought to subsume the Dalit struggle as part of its crusade against “invaders” like Muslims and Christians and has succeeded in doing so, even as Dalits get lynched by vigilante mobs.
It has sought to “liberate” women by picking and training the most illiberal ones among them, even though the highest number of crimes in India continue to be committed against women, which are underreported in any case. Terrorists/terror accused, all the better. Strangely enough, some opportunistic privileged Muslims have somehow managed to make common cause with Hindutva in order to reap personal benefits. So, lesser empathy available.
Is it any surprise, then, that we have just witnessed the first general election in India where real issues failed to make an impact? Those lacking empathy, some sure psychopaths among them, have made a killing this election season, literally and figuratively. There are strong indications that their ranks will grow; the beef police has already swung into action, for example. Elsewhere, in the national capital, Gautam Gambhir, a feisty ex-India bat famous for delivering middle-class Indian millennials their wet dream – an ODI World Cup, and no less so for being an utter boor and a pugnacious pottymouth, stayed true to form by spreading scurrilous rumours against his lower profile but decidedly better qualified election rival Atishi Marlena.
The latter broke down at a press conference talking about it, clearly deeply wounded. Unempathetic voters bubbling with hate probably “reasoned” that a weeping Oxford-educated, education-focused, non-“celebrity” woman was lesser than an ex-willow-club-swinging, expletive-spewing rich lout. In case you were interested, “GG” has a philanthropy concern, with a primary focus on “saluting the martyrs” and funding the educations of their surviving children. You won’t hear him advocating for desperately needed improvements in horrendous working conditions for soldiers, especially non-officers, a majority of whom come from poor rural or semi-urban backgrounds. Upper class/caste “empathy”. Selective, convenient, “not rocking the boat”.
If the recently concluded elections revealed the extent to which most Indian voters are morally incompetent and stewing in bile, they also left us with something to cheer. Chandrani Murmu, contesting the Keonjhar (“a rich land with poor people”) LS seat in Odisha, became the youngest ever MP at a shade under 26 years old, defeating a vicious misogynistic WhatsApp campaign against her. As a young and educated Adivasi woman, she is likely to bring an entirely new perspective to lawmaking, especially for Adivasis, whose rights to education, livelihood, healthcare and environmental protection have been victims of perennial neglect. Here’s wishing Chandrani great success in all her endeavours.
Binya probably didn’t follow Indian politics, and most certainly didn’t follow the 2019 elections. If he did, he would have struggled, in his own way, to make sense of the circus. He would probably have settled for a memoir about his confusion with India’s vibrant contradictions – trilling about India’s enormous diversity while at the same time lamenting the devastating legacies of British colonial social engineering in the country; a dekko at the swarms of homeless people left behind in the wake of the ginormous Antilla; an indignant passage about the inevitability of a black person facing racist abuse in India contrasted with the ‘atithi devo bhava‘ attitude of some Indians; a dab of astonishment at the sense of jugaad shown by an enterprising nine-year-old homeless kid, or the Ola driver with a Ph.D in biochemistry, or a village – where female infanticide is not unheard of, unaware of how skewed India’s sex ratio is – imploring its goddess of worship to bless its young couples with more sons.
Binya would probably identify the nooks and crannies of India where empathy resided, and attempt to glean from them the reason why the rest of the country lacked it. He would probably quietly nod to himself in concluding that these confusions were what informed Indian politics and perhaps even foresee a not-too-distant future where a viciously petty and intellectually vapid authoritarian misgoverning entity would entrance India into fatally embracing 56-inch chests full of hate.