"If you show somebody dying of AIDS you get money," he says.
One of the challenges for African writers, says Wainaina, is getting funding. Part of the goal with the magazine was to bring attention to writers that larger organizations might not notice. In the first year, Kwani? published a story by Kenyan writer Yvonne Owuor, which earned her the following year's Caine Prize. He won the Caine Prize in 2002, awarded annually to a writer in Africa for a work published in English, and used his winnings to cofound the literary magazine Kwani? The magazine publishes the work of writers from throughout the African continent. in well-oiled boardrooms in Nairobi and Lagos and Johannesburg in cramped tenements in the suburbs of Paris inside the residences of the alumni of the Presidential School of Lomé in the markets of Accra and the corrugated iron bars of Lusaka in social halls in the giant markets of Addis Ababa." It is, then, an Africa of infinite faces, personalities, and routines that Wainaina describes. He imagines all of the millions of people who might be reacting to the win, "some living in musty dormitories in Moscow tired and drunk. In one scene, the author travels along the Hudson River on a MetroNorth train, checking the news of the 2006 World Cup on his laptop as Togo takes the lead over South Korea.
We get an influx of images and sensations, a multifaceted view of a country, a continent, and, above all, a person.
His writing is full-bodied and rich, describing a present-tense world in sensual, emotional, and psychological detail. Wainaina's new memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place (Graywolf Press), offers a rich vein of observations on a childhood in Kenya, his experiences as a young man in South Africa, and as an adult regarding Africa from his position as a writer and teacher in New York.
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