Title: Traveling While Black
Author: Nanjala Nyabola
Year: 2021
Publisher: Hurst
ISBN: 978-1-7873-8382-1
The author is a Kenyan woman that I follow on Twitter. I learnt about the book when she posted essays on her timeline about the humiliating experiences (all the stories were about humiliations suffered) of black people (and especially black Africans) when we try to travel to other countries. I thought the book would be accounts by different people. However, it is a collection of the author’s essays, some about traveling and others about the black African experience. This is a good thing because honestly, the racism and discrimination black people suffer and mete to others, while differing in detail is the same in form and motivation. Despite the current ethos which says that every person is unique and their view is valid and worthy, reading a litany of complaints would quickly get boring. A bit like those talk shows where people narrate their ordeals, and everyone has a good cry. So, it is good that the essays were about different things, showing different angles of the black skinned experience.
There are accounts of the poor treatment she received in her travels through some 70 countries. Sometimes the bad treatment is because she is black, other times because she is a woman and other times because people are sometimes shitty. There is a palpable anger in her excoriation of the visa process which is the starting point of the poor treatment. Black people are always subjected to an insulting and intrusive scrutiny when we try to travel outside our countries. This happens even when the issuing country will not issue the visa, as exemplified by a 100% Canadian rejection rate for student visa applications from Somalia and Mozambique. This discrimination is even done by African countries to each other. South Africa's visa process is restrictive, despite how much African countries supported that country during apartheid. What pains me about this, as a Nigerian, is that the treatment was not always that way. Between the 1950s and 1990s, Nigerians did not need visas to travel. It was partly because we were rich enough (or acted as if we were) that the costs of our visits were less than the benefits and so we were accepted. That we have become undesirable is squarely our fault because we have mismanaged our resources and some of our citizens have been badly behaved. However, this does not excuse the fundamental injustice of a visa regime which, no matter how you cut it, is initially discriminatory on grounds of race and then wealth. There is a belief in Nigeria that if our country had lived up to its potential, we could have demanded respect for black people because we would be rich and powerful enough to be able to threaten other people's interests. But when our government is so bad that our citizens risk dying in the Sahara or the Mediterranean just so they can take menial jobs in Europe, who are we to complain when other countries try to shut us out? The author makes an argument for better treatment due to our shared humanity. I think it is a weak argument because maltreatment is also human. I think, given how ubiquitous it is, it is even more human than kindness and the other virtues. Further, there is no obligation for kindness to be non discriminatory.
Her anger at racism is outmatched by the anger at the world’s treatment of women. Some of the anger is justified, but some is not. In one essay, she talks about how University of Oxford is not conducive for women, especially black women. My thought was – so what? The world is not obliged to conform to anyone’s ideals even though it is idealists who sometimes do what is required to improve the world. However, her anger at the discrimination women experience, the redress of which becomes the primary thing in the lives of some (militant?) feminists, made me understand the seeming stridence of some LGBT campaigners. Both are demanding for acceptance on their own terms because the terms society wants to impose are those demanded by others in the past. It is not something I have to like, but it is a valid stance. In her efforts to change Oxford and kick against the patriarchy, she questions why she has to like the African literary canon - Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. She chooses not to like them because they are men and she wants books by women. She even decides to read only books by women for 1 year and in the process discovers Bessie Head, a South African/Botswanan writer, about whom she writes so rapturously, that I have decided to read her. I'll also read Zora Neale Hurston, who is another liked by Ms. Nyabola. Despite the male writers (especially Achebe) being fantastic, liking them is like liking Shakespeare. It has a bit of a forced quality, it is what is expected, and it takes courage to disregard them. However, I think her decision to not like them due to their sex is self limiting and smacks of misandry.
There are accounts of the good treatment she received, in Africa and Haiti. The way she was treated in Burkina Faso is how she would be treated in parts of my country, the rural parts. I think her bad experiences in the cities of the West are more to do with how big cities shape people’s behavior. Her impression of Haiti left me rather ashamed of my ignorance of the country. Whether we like it or not, black people's history does not appear to be as glorious as those of other old world peoples. I think knowing more about ourselves would help us celebrate our achievements more intelligently and thus build up our pride. Haiti in particular is something to be proud of - the first black republic; the first country to throw off slavery - that it has been messed up since independence does not diminish that achievement. It is a shame that I don’t know more about it and even the wider Caribbean. Reading this book, I am resolved to read more about the region. This was the third reading recommendation I got from the book.
Normally, I'd not take book recommendations from a zealot, and zealot she is in her feminist anger, but she writes so well that I think her taste in books has to be good. Her writing style is beautiful in its simplicity and directness. It is not particularly elegant, but it is functional. The jargon of social justice and wokeness uses words - othering, micro-aggression, agency - that I find hard to understand and that often seem meaningless. Except for micro-aggression, this is the first book I'm reading that uses such words in a way that makes sense. In her usage of the terms, I sense, unclearly, a vast meaning, like seeing the silhouette of a whale as it passes under a boat, or a mountain through fog, or a forest at night. Used properly, sparingly, as she does, these words explain aspects of the human condition that show a nuanced experience of victimhood, which brings me back to her anger. Sometimes it is raw and uncaring, I imagine seeing her causing a scene and railing. Other times, it is resigned, despairing, acknowledging the futility of fighting the weight of the world's history. This despair is most apparent when she writes about Africans discriminating against each other within countries in the form of tribalism and between countries in stupid, misguided nationalism and xenophobia. While it might be naïve to expect black African solidarity in the face of the world's scorn for us, it makes perfect sense for us not to treat each other in the way we complain that others treat us.
This book is a strong contender for my book of the year and it is highly recommended.