TY - JOUR AU - Wenske, Ruth S. PY - 2021/05/05 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Teacherly aesthetics: Literature and literacy in Binyavanga Wainaina’s works JF - Tydskrif vir Letterkunde JA - Tydskr Letterkd VL - 58 IS - 1 SE - Research articles DO - 10.17159/tl.v58i1.8353 UR - https://letterkunde.africa/article/view/8353 SP - 61-75 AB - <p>In this paper I use the concept of teacherliness to explore the connections between literature and education in Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir <em>One Day I Will Write About This Place </em>and his opinion pieces on education. I read Wainaina’s texts against the way the literature/literacy duality has been envisioned in historical discourses, arguing that deeper pedagogical questions were largely overlooked in the intersections between the two theoretical fields. To address this lacuna, I use Paulo Freire’s theory of Critical Pedagogy to analyze historical debates of curriculum and canonization, as well as Wainaina’s more recent engagement with the Kenyan educational system, in which questions on <em>how </em>to write are intertwined with thoughts on <em>how </em>to teach. After detailing this history of literature and literacy in East Africa, I explore the themes and aesthetic devices that Wainaina develops in <em>One Day </em>to reflect on his own role as an educator in the context of his troubled relationship with his own schooling. By focusing on the theme of failure and Wainaina’s embedding of oral structures into his text, I suggest Wainaina’s work offers insights and concrete narrative patterns that might become fruitful tools through which educational theory and literary analysis might illuminate each other’s blind spots, specifically in regard to oral skills in education.</p> ER -