Music memoirs from Africa: tracking music in Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir: One Day I Will Write About This Place

Abstract

ABSTRACT“Music Memoirs from Africa” seeks to highlight how music can be used as a tool by contemporary authors to dynamically communicate modern and refreshed experiences of diaspora, sexuality, pan-Africanism, and questions of belonging. Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place is examined throughout the paper to demonstrate how music is used to communicate Wainaina’s personal experiences. These memories further translate into collective experiences of those that belong to a global contemporary Africa. Wainaina’s use of music demonstrates a tangible example of how music can be used as a tool to assist in issues of representation of African experiences at large. Citing Tsitsi Ella Jaji the paper concludes that music (and other art forms) can produce a renewed sense of pan-Africanism through its creation of a present consciousness that invokes both the present and past. The paper emphasises how music through the nature in which it is produced, transported and received can invoke a pan-Africanism that can embrace both its history as well as modernity.