Top 22 Binyavanga Wainaina Quotes

I love playing with words and texture.

Living in South Africa and periodically coming back to Kenya, my relationship with officialdom in Kenya was just insane.

I’m an African. I was brought up here; my home is here. Being an Afropolitan, I am here to stay.

I want to be fighting for a society accountable towards its citizens.

All people have dignity. There’s nobody who was born without a soul and a spirit.

I’m extremely optimistic about rapid transformation and change of things in Africa in general.

The time we are living in is the greatest opportunity to be queer, and it is almost the most dangerous time because everything is up for grabs.

When I went to live in South Africa, I immediately began to understand what went wrong. Because here was a place supposed to be under apartheid – I arrived there in 1991 – but here a black person had more say and had more influence over his white government than an average Kenyan had over the Moi government.

I believe in, and will to the best of my ability fight for, equal rights and freedom of opinion for everyone, regardless of colour, religion, nationality, orientation – you know the rest.

I knew I didn’t want to come out in the ‘New Yorker‘; it just felt wrong. It needed an African conversation.

There is no country in the world with the diversity, confidence and talent and black pride like Nigeria.

Every one, we, we homosexuals, are people, and we need our oxygen to breathe.

Every human being has a bit of gangster in him.

It’s like I was always not quite sure even how to move in space somehow; I would watch people and then copy them. I found it really hard to walk straight. My brother was always on at me for walking off the pavement. I guess I always expected people to bring me back into line.

I’m not even sure I want to use the term ‘coming out.’

Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.

What is astonishing is that globalised technology, like Whatsapp and Viber, really gives a lot of leeway to negotiating spaces and to keeping one’s identity. So people are able to be more receptive as a gay community to be part of an environment that is going to challenge the law.

People reach an age… where somebody else‘s platform is no longer yours.

There’s no point for me in being a writer and having all these blocked places where I feel I can’t think freely and imagine freely. There just really is no point.

I, Binyavanga Wainaina, quite honestly swear I have known I am a homosexual since I was five.

We are a mixed up people. We have mixed up ways of naming, too… When my father‘s brothers and sisters first went to colonial schools, they had to produce a surname. They also had to show they were good Christians by adopting a western name. They adopted my grandfather‘s name as surname. Wainaina.

In kindergarten, we had this Irish Catholic headmistress called Sister Leonie, and I remember she would tell us, say, to put the crayons in the box. I remember thinking, ‘Why is everyone finding this so easy? Why should the crayons be in the box?’