Deciding what audiobook to listen to requires its own special calculus, related to but distinct from the factors we consider when picking a book off a shelf. From the Book Review’s own endless listening, we will select and review a different title each week, from a range of genres, to help you decide. See you next Friday.
HOW TO WRITE ABOUT AFRICA: Collected Works, by Binyavanga Wainaina. Read by Dominic Hoffman and Yinka Ladeinde.
Reading Binyavanga Wainaina makes you sit up straight. Dismantling the Western world’s constructed myths and clichés about Africa, his art firmly orients you toward the reality of life across the most genetically diverse place on earth. On the page, the excellent “How to Write About Africa,” a posthumous collection of his essays and short stories about the continent, might fool you into thinking Wainaina wrote from a place of anger at and disdain for the stereotypes that have reduced Africans to little more than the “dollar-a-day people.”
But listening to Dominic Hoffman speak the late Kenyan author’s words into your ear offers a different pleasure. You fall back, relax and imagine yourself alongside Wainaina himself, absurdly funny and inviting, in the corner of a bar in Nairobi drinking Tusker and eating the Swahili braised chicken you hear about in his essay “Food Slut.”
The dynamic narration channels the disarming humor in which Wainaina wrapped his activism, a playfulness that gave voice to his desire for others to appreciate and respect a continent he adored — as it actually is, and not merely the illusion devised by those he describes as “third world chroniclers.” (Or by the celebrity-fronted charity campaigns he writes of in “The Continental Dispatch” that tear through Africa “looking for a project to love.”) As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in her warm and personal introduction, crisply read by Yinka Ladeinde, the author’s “impatience with any sort of constraints” was an attempt to “hasten Africa to its awaited glory.”
Dipo Faloyin is the author of “Africa Is Not a Country.”
HOW TO WRITE ABOUT AFRICA: Collected Works | By Binyavanga Wainaina | Read by Dominic Hoffman and Yinka Ladeinde | Random House Audio | 14 hours, 10 minutes
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