Africa Is a Country

We are angels, victims of everybody

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

We are angels, victims of everybody

By
Binyavanga Wainaina

Looking inside ourselves and working on the dark hearts of our colonial crap.

The writer Binyavanga Wainaina.

I am a Gujarathi Kenyan. I never ever ever criticize Kenyan Gujrathis. I am a Yoruba African. Yoruba Africans have never ever done a bad thing ever. Not One. I am an Igbo African. I cannot share in public my real anger about Igbo political leaders. I am an African intellectual who is silent when my King talks genocidal shit. I am a Gikuyu. We are angels, angels! Victims of everybody.

In fact everybody else is fucked up. I am a white South African – I have nothing to reconsider – if u ask me if I do, I will emigrate. And somehow we all collectively believe that our intellectuals and writers will be at the forefront of looking inside ourselves and working on the dark hearts of our colonial crap.

I am a White American author with power. If you brown American writers do not queue up behind our singular opinion of Charlie Hebdo – you are not loyal citizens and the powers are watching you. I am a Black South African – all the rest of you are why I am fucked. It was not apartheid. It was you. I am a Tanzanian African. Kenyans are beasts working too hard to undermine us. We prefer working for Afrikaner farmers – who by the way we give large tracts of land. All this is what animates much of our Facebook.

Further Reading

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.

Whose game is remembered?

The Women’s Africa Cup of Nations opens in Morocco amid growing calls to preserve the stories, players, and legacy of the women who built the game—before they’re lost to erasure and algorithm alike.