In How to Write About Africa and Other Texts, a collection of articles and chronicles available in Catalan from Eumo Editorial, translated by Martí Sales, the Kenyan journalist and writer Binyavanga Wainaina (Nakuru, 1971–Nairobi, 2019) offered a long list of recommendations to white Western authors on how to write about the African continent. The list was sarcastic: it caricatured the ignorant clichés, the biased reductionism, and the hypocritical, redemptorist paternalism with which we white Westerners tend to approach the so-called "black continent". Furthermore, the list served Wainaina to implicitly assert the vast and immensely rich complexity of authentic Africa. Some of Wainaina's phrases: After reading Wainaina's text, it is impossible not to consider it as a yardstick to measure the ethical and moral credibility and the cultural and intellectual insight of books set in Africa written by white authors. Such as, for example, the novel The Trophy, by the Belgian author Gaea Schoeters (1976). From a plot point of view, the materials Schoeters handles are extremely risky, cliché-ridden, Hemingway revisited and subtly infused with Joseph Conrad: an American white hunter, who has made a fortune by investing in the stock market, has bought the permit to hunt a black rhinoceros, the missing piece in his extensive collection of trophies and the gift he wants to give his beloved wife, who awaits him in New York while he is in Africa. Extremely risky and cliché-ridden, as I said. But Schoeters, aware of the pitfalls she can fall into – crude and condescending simplifications, but also the Manichean and self-punitive romanticization of the guilty white person – overcomes the test with flying colors. That Schoeters is a bold author is demonstrated by the fact that her white hunter protagonist's name is Hunter White, which in English means "white hunter". A thriller unfolding in a progressively ominous way

There are two reasons that explain why El trofeu is not only not a mediocre novel about Africa (touristified fiction, postcard literature) but is also an excellent novel. The first reason is that the properly novelistic elements function like a gear in which everything is in place and works in a resounding and fluid way: the plot, a thriller, unfolds in a progressively ominous manner; the characters, both white and African, have a dense psychological and moral background, are loaded with reasons for being as they are and for doing what they do, and also have a representative weight of the civilizations and worlds to which they belong without ceasing to be unique individuals; and, finally, the prose, agile and muscular, concrete and atmospheric, is a suitable vehicle both for the exploration of serious moral dilemmas and for the narration of action and adventure situations and scenes.The second reason is more difficult to summarize, but it is even more decisive: it is the essayistic dimension that, in a settled, always astutely incorporated way, is present in El trofeu and makes it more than a novel. This essayistic dimension, which never erupts in the form of an excursus but always appears integrated into dialogues, actions, and thoughts, gives an exhaustive and plural vision of the contradictory and often tragic African reality: ecosystems, business forms, animal and human predators, languages, rites, cultures, history, gods, struggles and coexistence, what is ancestral and what is geopolitical... In El trofeu, hunting is the axis around which memorable experiences (in the best sense of the word, and also in the worst) and a fascinating world are articulated.

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