Popular Kenyan Gay rights activist and Author, Binyavanga Wainaina has died at the age of 48. He was reported to have died on Tuesday night, after a brief illness in Nairobi Kenya.
Binyavanga Wainaina won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing, was a key figure in the artistic community who promoted local authors. He was best known for his essay on How to Write About Africa.
Binyavanga Wainaina was also named among Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2014 for his gay rights activism. He also helped to create tolerance for the LGBT community by coming out publicly in 2014 as gay in Kenya, a country where laws still criminalize homosexual behaviour. He also revealed he was HIV-positive. He published a painfully honest essay online to mark his 43rd birthday.
He said he came out to help preserve his dignity.
“All people have dignity. There’s nobody who was born without a soul and a spirit,” he said, in an interview with The Associated Press in January 2014. “There is nobody who is a beast or an animal, right? Everyone, we, we homosexuals, are people and we need our oxygen to breathe.”
One of his friends and author herself, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said this about him:
Wainaina “demystified and humanized homosexuality,” saying he decided to speak openly after the death of a friend: “He felt an obligation to chip away at the shame that made people like his friend die in silence.”