Binyavanga Wainaina, the first winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, has greatly embarrassed Kenyans with his public confessions and posturing about his private life.
Smack in the middle of the national debate on the morality of the Sh347 billion tender for the standard gauge railway, and swirling claims of a military fly in the March 4, 2013 elections ointment, Binyavanga has gone and exposed Kenya and the continent to international ridicule by talking about his being homosexual.
Kenyans were happy to embrace Binyavanga’s earthy writing in the novella, Discovering Home, to bisect his How to Write about Africa and analyse his memoirs, One Day I Will Write about This Place. But they did not need to know anything more about his personal life.
It is embarrassing to have to tell children that their role model — recognised as Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum — has a dirty little secret that is now public.
For an African man of his unique talents and numerous achievements, Binyavanga should know better than to go revealing the continent’s secrets to the world. Africans have never been gay, at least not publicly. They cannot start now. That is why, as an African, Binyavanga must uphold, promote and protect the doctrine of heterosexuality according to the natural order.
The mere thought of same-sex relations irks African gods so much that they visit drought, locusts and pestilence upon the continent.
In South Africa, vigilantes against gay activity administer corrective rape on lesbians; in Uganda and Nigeria, they make strict laws to formally save gay people from angry mobs that would lynch them.
Here in Kenya, the men and women of God are on their knees praying for the redemption of these lost ill souls. Other than once when some men were attacked in Mombasa for visiting a clinic for treatment, gay people live their little shameful lives quietly in private.
And still, the Binyavangas of this world are not grateful for the silent sneers and polite whispers. They want to rub their lifestyle in the faces of a tolerant and long-suffering Kenyan public, even when gay people have it so good they form an association that gives annual awards.
Instead of hanging his head in shame and spending the rest of his life in a state of permanent penance, begging forgiveness, Binyavanga wants Kenya and the world to sit up and talk about a biblical abomination. Given that no one has come to arrest him for breaking the law that forbids congress against the order of nature, questions must be asked about Binyavanga’s intent in revealing his gay identity at the age of 43 when he could have waited until his old age.
It appears that writers are increasingly becoming agents for the global campaign to promote and normalise homosexuality. Only recently, the inclusion of Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider on the schools literature reading list nearly caused national indigestion when it was whispered that the writer is gay.
Unless Binyavanga disowns his public declaration, his work must be bisected under a microscope to expose any hidden attempts to recruit young people into the gay lifestyle.
His publicity stunt, complete with a video on YouTube, points to a deliberate and well thought out attempt to popularise the gay lifestyle and convert honest God-fearing heterosexual men to the dark passions of the flesh. Next, he will be changing the Constitution to allow for same -ex marriages to destroy families and ultimately instal Satan as King of the Universe.
By Kwamchetsi Makokha-nation.co.ke/
