Published by Hurst, 2020, 264 pages

Some of us travel for pleasure or work, others have no choice but to leave their homes to try and find refuge elsewhere. In this book, Nanjala Nyabola—a political analyst from Kenya—writes about people on the move, including refugees and migrants, and about what it means to travel as a person of colour.

As she says in her introduction, “This is not a travel memoir. These are essays inspired by travel, about the way it changed what I think matters and about the ideas that come from dislocation.”

She works as a community organizer for a non-profit organization in Haiti. Although, she is Black, like the Haitians, she is quite clearly not from there, so the locals see her as white. As she ventures outside the confines of the world of international organizations, she discovers the real Haiti. She realizes that everything she had read about the country was filtered through the American media and mindset, which focused on “chaos and upheaval”. When she engages with the Haitians, learning the language, she discovers a completely different side to the country.

Nyabola has worked with migrants and refugees, and has seen first-hand the effect of rich countries’ exclusionary policies.

She travels to Palermo in Sicily, with its rich mix of cultures, woven together over the centuries. She heads to the dock to meet a cargo ship that has picked up migrants from the sea. Watching the migrants leave the ship, “stumbling down the stairs, grabbing hold of either the railing or whatever meagre possessions they have on their person”, she is reminded of slaves.

“It’s difficult to put the look into words—a vacant stare screaming that something essential has been taken from them, the shoulders slouched forward with an otherworldly resignation.” However, maybe because of Palermo’s past, they are welcomed and taken care of, and the media doesn’t carry the usual scare-mongering headlines. This, unfortunately, is more exception than rule.

Refugees covered in this collection include the South African writer, Bessie Head. Her writing spoke to Nyabola when she was feeling alienated at Oxford. Head wrote about “what it feels like to lose a handle on reality and on one’s sense of self”. She was born in South Africa with a white mother and Black father at a time when “the regime was concocting its racist violence”. Made stateless when she was 27 by the apartheid government, she spent the second half of her life in Botswana. She wrote constantly, but the world outside was not open to women African authors, and her work was dismissed. She died in 1986 in Botswana, “poor, sick and alone”.

Many of the essays focus on Africa: the way African governments and societies are now reluctant to accept Africans from other countries, unlike the time when Head sought refuge in Botswana. But this is not always the case: when Nyabola visits Burkina Faso, she is taken under the wings of two complete strangers she meets on the bus, who ensure she is fed and taken care of. 

In “Periodic offerings to the visa gods”, Nyabola writes about trying to get a visa for South Africa and being rejected because the applicant in front of her in the queue had been rude to the official. This opens up the question of how efficient visas really are: for example, what kind of a system forces people to pay a large sum of money merely to apply, whether they are accepted or not? Not to mention the extra hoops you have to jump through if you are a person of colour, trying to fulfil “an opaque normative standard in order to gain admission”, trying to prove you are a “good migrant”.

This is such a rich collection of essays that it is hard to do it justice. Nyabola raises questions that are not always comfortable but that need to be asked. One of the rewards of reading is when good writing changes your perspective, making you question assumptions that you barely realized you held. Nyabola succeeded in this, at least with this reader.

This review first appeared on Women on the Road.