On July 28, on this page appeared an article about how Kenyan writers and readers allegedly idolise the West.

The article started by quoting extensively, a review by the Economist on Binyavanga Wainaina's One Day I Will Write About This Place.

What was laughable was the attendant irony linking a Western magazine's scathing attack on an African writer and accusing African writers and readers of idolising the West all in one breath.

The net effect was an article laden with intellectual conmanship.

Quoting the Economist's negative review merely because the book doesn't subscribe to the Western prescription of an African book, and accusing African writers and readers of idolising the West is the height of insincerity.

I read the manuscript of One Day I Will Write About this Place sometime last year and it was incredibly fresh.

Its language is cassava chips crispy, its events real and closer to home than anything I have read by a contemporary Kenyan writer.

Outside the foreign observer Michela Wrong in It's Our Time to Eat, no recent literary work captures modern Kenya as Binyavanga's memoir.

The Bookforum review says this of the book: "He does not present one mythical continent, but rather a fractured, complex, and ever-shifting collection of experiences."

In essence a fresh new examination of Africa in a way the world doesn't see it.

This Africa the world doesn't see is what the Economist's reviewer doesn't like.

He would rather the usual African pornography of poverty, war, disease and death.

Well, death is in One Day, but it's dignified. The writer's mother dies. Apparently that death isn't gritty enough to meet the Economist's approval. Africans should not die with dignity, but from war or disease or poverty!

The reviewer criticises the repetitive contexts of the book, the frequent plot returns to Nakuru, for example. What he fails to appreciate is that the book is a memoir.

The memoir opens in Nakuru and pans around the world to South Africa and Nairobi's Kirinyanga road and Uganda but always returns to Nakuru.

It's Binyavanga's hometown, at the floor of the Rift Valley, the home of flamingos and, apparently, has everything "West" that Binyavanga idolises that the article's writer finds it adequate to quote the review.

The same review criticises Binyavanga for writing a memoir! Now, magazine reviewers choose form for writers! Really!

And that is the review to quote and attack African writers for idolising the West!

The New York Times reviewed One Day recently. Nobody has reported that fact and nobody has quoted the major positive reviews.

It is true that African writers get fame and money from the West, whatever "the West" means in this global village.

But they don't go chasing for the fame and money, they are resultant perks from their creative toil. Perks from the West and East and from Africa.

The thread of thought on the West is so '60s, a bygone era that only washes on the idealistic which, unfortunately, remains just that - ideal.

The reality is that Chimamanda Adichie is Genius Award winner - MacArthur fellowship - and it enables her to continue writing.

Writing is not easy financially and, for ages, writers have survived on the gratitude of a benefactor, a writing advance or a secondary job, say teaching.

I see no African benefactor for our writers and few of our universities offer creative writing courses.

So give our writers a break if their fame and money comes from the 'West' of our global village.

I agree that literary prizes are donor-funded and, yes, they have an agenda. Take the Caine Prize; the winning stories not about Africa's porn are countable.

In Monica Arac de Nyeko, the 2007 winner, Africans can be same sex loving, and in Binyavanga's Discovering Home he travels to a happy family gathering.

The rest, Africans are butchering each other in Rwanda (Yvonne Odhiambo); in a refugee camp they wait to exhale in a donor T-shirts (E.C Osondu), then fighting with sticks in Sierra Leone (Olufemi Terry) and this year from Paradise we hit leafy Budapest, an imaginary Harare/Bulawayo suburb to scavenge guavas (NoViolet Bulawayo).

Not typical

Those who have read Binyavanga agree he is not your typical African writer. Not typical because he doesn't write the expected African porn.

He doesn't carry creaking dry bones stories, observes with satellite precision and renders with intelligence. Meet him and encounter his geo-politics and ideology, which is radical and cutting edge.

To quote the Economist review on his work, African writers and readers idolising the West is akin to calling the toilet seat a plate.

African writers are publishing and not cowed by the "publishing is expensive" mantra.

Traditional publishing is slowly regressing into alternative publishing.

The game is playing online with Kenya's Storymoja, Ivor Hartmann's Storytime Africa blog, AfricanWriter and Black Magazine to name a few.

The unwarranted pigeonholing of African writers for being 'tantalised' by the west is cheap, easy and escapist at best.