Binyavanga Wainaina was unconventional, unstructured and fluid. He went against the grain even as a child.
While his siblings used a human weighing scale to know their weights, Binyavanga used a kitchen scale on which he would put his hands, one after another and then his head before summing up the readings.
This is how unconventional, unstructured and fluid Binyavanga, 48, known colloquially in his social circles as 'Binya' was.
During a memorial gathering at the National Museum of Kenya yesterday, family and friends described the prolific fiction writer as unorthodox, anti-status quo, and a free radical who was synonymous with pursuing uncharted waters.
From the ceremony, it was clear that Binyavanga, known colloquially in his social circles as 'Binya', lived an activist life, not necessarily speaking it, challenging the establishment.
For example, his uncle Njuguna Wainaina said that the larger Wainaina family lived "a very conservative stark up Christian" way of life that was too rigid to allow open-mindedness.
Binyavanga challenged all these. Last year, for instance, he announced that he had proposed to his Nigerian boyfriend who had accepted to wed him early this year in South Africa. As a global figure, he used his twitter feed during the World Aids day in 2016 to announce he was HIV positive.
But it was ambassador Martin Kimani, the director of the National Counter Terrorism Center, whose personal experience with the fallen prolific writer, who personified this attribute.
"When we schooled with him at Lenana School, we wrote and performed a play which stood out but the school decided to own it," he said. They would then rebel and played it secretly outside the school despite being warned by the administration that this would attract suspension.
"We did it anyway. That was the spirit of Binya," Kimani said of the founder of Kwani? magazine who died on May 21 aged 48.
He was true to this characterisation to his death given that not even a prayer nor any religious connotation was on display at the gathering at the NMK.
His sister Melissa Wainaina said in her tribute that her brother was free minded, stopped at nothing to achieve what he believed as freedom. "He encouraged us to challenge long-held beliefs and norms without any fear. He also taught us to question institutions of power."
Jimmy Wainaina, the elder brother, said that though he did not share some of his [Binayvanga] views, he accepted him and allowed him to live his life without prejudice and judgment.
"Binya set up shops in domains that no one had charted before," he said.
He also had a soft side, lavishing those he loved jealously and with "reckless" devotion. His younger sister Claire Wainaina reckoned that Binyavanga would spend his resources without a care on those he loved, giving an example of where he bought one of his infant nephews an iPod worth Sh35,000.
The award-winning Binyavanga was born to a Kenyan father and a Ugandan mother. He was cremated on Wednesday.
