Why a tree makes it hard to write about Africa

Trying to write about Africa is a little like negotiating its wild roads: Clichés materialize suddenly and constantly. Bloat-bellied children pop out from hidden paths, and diesel trucks huffing acrid dust onto roadside flowers careen around corners.

It's a continuous process of creative evasion. And it's a process mired in an irritating complication: many of the clichés about Africa – expansive skies, unexpected contrasts, fiery sunsets – are real and ripe for the writing. So why resist?

A case study: Recently, I was cruising up a road that lifts its lucky travellers from the banks of Lake Malawi to the top of the Rift Valley escarpment. An orange-juice-and-grenadine sun spilt itself into the sky before condensing into a warm pink orb so soft you could stare into it. I turned to my Malawian co-worker Sangwani: "Oh my God, look at the sun!"

He smirked. "You've never seen the sun before?"

Somewhere between Sangwani's everyday sun and my Lion King watercolour is the wonderfully terrible rift of cultural difference. It was one of those moments when you suddenly find yourself facing the chasm and are forced to appreciate the gravity of the particular ground you stand on.

Perception perceives itself, and there is space for movement. But clichés hoodwink. They are general truths that, obscuring difference and perspective, also have a vein of falsehood. And so it is no surprise that some writers are finally fed up with the clichés that perpetuate this continent's almost mystic fame and infamy.

A recent article in Granta by Kenyan author and journalist Binyavanga Wainaina entitled "How to Write About Africa" offered an incisively ironic guide to the journalist and would-be travel scribe. It undermines almost every tired African trope conceivable: "Always use the word `Africa' or `Darkness' or `Safari' in your title ... Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated ... And sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big and red. There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical," he writes.

Like Sangwani's subtle retort, Wainaina's piece urges much-needed cultural self-reflection. It asks writers to stop objectifying Africa with imposed identities and stereotypes, and to write difference with honesty. Even if the African sunset might break your heart every time you see it, it is setting over a few million real human stories. Letting go is hard to do.

Have you ever seen a phantom face in a crowd of someone you miss or just left? On that same drive with Sangwani, I was peering at the plants and landscapes streaking past like an impressionist film reel when I had a quietly appalling epiphany. I had been looking longingly for acacia trees. I wanted "Africa Trees," as my friends and I once called them in Kenya. Now and again one would show its flat-topped fame in the scrub and forests by the side of the road, and I could think, "I'm in Africa."

Sometimes I would debate the relative merits of a close call. "Maybe all acacias aren't quite flat?" But they seemed far too sparse to satisfy my longing. A patch of remarkably Canadian cedar forest was decidedly wanting. After spending time in Kenya and a slow, disorienting adjustment to a very regular life in Malawi, I needed the old dream for fuel.

Such is the power of romance and discourse. So time passed, the sun started to set, and Sangwani made a comment that brought me back to life as it is lived.

In fact, he brought me back to Africa.