The nation is a bathtub. Oh my God, it’s brain draining!
Recently I heard that somebody was publishing a piece accusing me and others of “selling out to the West”. Now, I wish I could announce that I did not care, but in truth my stomach coiled for a while, guiltily. Who, whoooo, Binyavanga, asks the pointing finger of authenticity, do you serve?
The notion of “selling out to the West” is a profoundly middle-class one — a romantic fantasy that some of us have an untainted little core inside of us that is pure Africa, and we stand at the edge of this amazing continent, swinging ancient African martial arts swords at the marauding West.
I am not immune to this fantasy. But alas, when I look into my heart, I find Enid Blyton jostling with Ngugi wa Thiong’o. My Presbyterian grandmother is samurai-ing my medicineman great-grandfather; Little House on the Prairie and The Six Million Dollar Man are bouncing on the great veld of my dreams, together with characters from a Kenyan television programme called Vioja Mahakamani; lions and zebras and Ndebele colours belong to white people on television who wear khakis.
When I was seven, I thought Propaganda was an African country.
Ahhh. The honeyed, fallen world of authenticity …
Now, there are two options. I could simply ignore these contradictions, find an ideology (EthnoMarxoÂNativism?) — and explore my inner self, ruthlessly pulling out the molars of my Western temptations. But I don’t want to be like Che Guevara halfway through the Congo, only to discover that the facts don’t match the ideology (erm … sorry comrades, there are no workers to recruit here). Or I could acknowledge that so much of what I have received is just that. I should be thoughtful and curious to go out of my way, and look at the things around me, and make sense of them.
I do this because it is interesting, and because I am biased.
Actually, I love my home town, my home country and, as I travel, growing parts of the continent. I was born here, lived here, and have had no choice in that matter. As a writer, I find that I have much fresh material to write about at home. But I also feel that I belong to a sort of world commonwealth of words and ideas and history dominated by a strange complex beast called The West. Sometimes I resent this. Sometimes it thrills me. Most times I don’t think about it.
To write, and to be an African in this busy ecology, is to try and make sense of all this. I do not believe in being “an international citizen”. Too much Gikuyu, too much hidden Presbyterian, to much Kenyan primary school in me to be quite so funky. I want to accept commitments and certitudes, but I am wary of umbrella ideologies, or religions, or nationalisms. For no simple reason, most of my money is spent in Kenya, and is wired to Kenya. Most of my rage is directed to Kenya and Kenyans. Most of my prideful written boasts are about Kenya. And I am writing this from the US, where I spend half a year.
Recently I learned that a higher percentage of African immigrants in the US get college degrees than immigrants from any other nation or continent.
We all know that the single largest injection of money into Africa comes from the remittances from the diaspora. What we know less about is how many thousands of businesses are started by people who brought back great ideas and skills from London, from Paris, from Chicago. How many ideas that we use came from somebody who left home at 19, because she wanted to eat a real Big Mac, then hated the real Big Mac? How much of the forging energy of New York has found a useful place in Johannesburg?
My feeling is that, in that perfect and well-lubricated national bathtub, ideas and enterprise can become stale and static, and even self-satisfied and self-deceiving. Maybe the international ocean of drained brains has more eddies and currents and nutrients than we want to see. Maybe, too, our countries get sharper and grow, if they fight to contain the good brains they produce.