Nyabola is a well-known political analyst and activist with a J.D. from Harvard Law. She currently sits on the board of Amnesty International Kenya. Her writing covers a broad range of issues, including politics, technology, law, and feminism.

We recently read her new book Strange and Difficult Times: Notes on a Global Pandemic, published in February by Hurst. We loved the book for the ways it sharply examines the biases, assumptions and failures in Western responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and touches on the ways in which the pandemic has exacerbated global inequalities. She also takes a historical look at pandemics in Africa, from HIV/AIDS in the 80s and 90s, Ebola in the 2010s, to Spanish flu a century ago, all the while emphasizing the need to archive how Africans experienced these global events and their aftermaths. Nyabola is a major voice, writing back against a structurally racist political and economic order through her own first-hand experiences of living within that system.

It was a joy to speak to her via email. In the interview, she shared with us some insights into the ways the pandemic as a problem of storytelling, how African communities came together to help each other during the crisis, and the importance of personal experience in social commentary.

 

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Brittle Paper

Hello Nanjala. It’s great to chat with you. Congrats on the new book. Let us begin with you giving us a quick summary of what the book is about.

Nanjala Nyabola

This is a chronicle of the COVID-19 pandemic as seen from Nairobi.

Brittle Paper

You said in the foreword that this book is about telling the story about COVID-19 “properly.” What did you mean by that?

Nanjala Nyabola

So much of what we do in life is narrative. Stories are the core of how we perceive the world and how we decide what we are going to do with and about what we are seeing. And yet, so many stories don’t get told properly, and so you have this misguided perception that large swathes of the world are silent when indeed they are as Arundhati Roy says “preferably unheard”. As a political analyst and a writer, it really gnaws at me that the story of the second world war in Europe can be told 70 different ways, but we haven’t really had a wave of reflection and narrative around the human experience of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, for example. We’ve had a few, I’m thinking especially about books like Johnny Steinberg’s Three Letter Test. But I’m also thinking more broadly about books like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks which reminded us that so much of what happens in medicine and science is human story that gets written out of the complete account of how these two pieces work. So much of what we know about what it means to survive and navigate a pandemic is targeted towards health specialists and the human story isn’t really centered on. And this to me is a crucial part of telling a story properly — centering on the human experience and emphasising the connections and disruptions contained therein. This wasn’t just a political or a clinical experience, it was also a human experience. Telling a story properly to me isn’t just about narrating a set of historical or clinical facts. It’s bringing in the human dimension to help people understand why these facts matter.

Brittle Paper

I find the title Strange and Difficult Times interesting. Is there a story there?

Nanjala Nyabola

Early on in the pandemic, I started using it as the sign-on in my emails because it felt surreal to have to keep working in the face of so much upheaval. I felt very privileged on one hand to be able to keep working because so many people around me had lost work, but on the other hand it was so surreal to have to keep working when so much was happening in the world. Then I thought if I was feeling this then surely everyone else was having the same experience – people providing care for family members but still having to keep going, people who were able to keep working even while friends and family members lost work, frontline workers etc. Everyone has things going on in the background but in the weird dimension that is work it felt like we were being forced to pretend that nothing was happening because hey – at least we could go virtual. So I started to say it at the beginning of my emails because I didn’t want to be part of sustaining the illusion that nothing was happening in the world. I wanted to hold that space for people in my life to know that they were not alone in feeling very strange about it all. So I started writing it in my emails “I hope you’re doing well in these strange and difficult times…” because I wanted people to feel like they were not alone in observing how strange and difficult it all was. We were going through this very human difficulty, and I just wanted the people I was reaching out to to know that I saw it too, because that collective experience is also part of being human.

Brittle Paper

COVID-19 is still so fresh in the individual and collective consciousness. Like you note, there is so much about the pandemic that is still unresolved, including whether it has ended or is still ongoing. Did you worry that you were writing about something that was still too close, that people hadn’t acquired enough distance to really care about on an intellectual level?

Nanjala Nyabola

Yes and no. Yes because books have a permanence about them than say blogging or tweeting doesn’t really have. So there was and indeed is this anxiety that we’re going to discover something major about the pandemic that’s going to recast how we view the whole experience. Was it a lab leak? Was it an intentional thing? All these are such important questions that I think people are still trying to figure out the answers to, which will shape how we interpret the experience once we know. There’s a layer of international politics that is perceptible to many of us but seemingly lies beyond our reach but at the same time you don’t want to indulge in conspiracy theories, so it’s finding that balance of doing meaningful observation without crossing the territory into speculation.
But on the other hand, as a person who grew up in the shadow of HIV/AIDS, I had a fear that we were all going to be rushed to forget: to “accept and move on” and not to sit with all the wounds that had been carved into our societies. As an African who grew up with that haunting fear over us, I had this fear that what we were going through was generational but that we were going to kind of paper over it. And it’s already happening, we’re already being told to get back to “normal” but what does that even mean? I honestly started the book for myself — as I say in the prologue, writing is how I make sense of the world — and my publisher thought other people might want to read it too. But I definitely had this scenario we are in in mind as I wrote it – that we, especially in the global majority, were going to have our human experience of the pandemic lost to the collective story of what actually happened.
There’s also the dimension that because the crisis will not have a definitive “end”, much like HIV/AIDS is still with us more than four decades later, that instead of getting a comprehensive look back, what we need instead is continuous markers over time to light the path towards understanding. This book is written to serve as one such marker.

Brittle Paper

The world is not new to global pandemics. But are there aspects of this pandemic that are unprecedented?

Nanjala Nyabola

I think just the size of the global population and the organisation of global politics and economics has shifted a lot of things. There are so many more people in the world today and so many more of us on the move which means the knock-on effects of decisions like quarantines or travel bans have shifted a great deal. You’re no longer talking about tens of thousands of people but millions or even billions of people affected by single bureaucratic decisions. I’m not sure that people really grappled properly with the scale of some of these decisions. And then you have the issue of interdependency – that a choice taken in one part of the world has such major downstream effects elsewhere. Trade, tourism, transport – our worlds are so much more closely connected in the 2000s than they were before on a more grassroots level. Small businesses in Paris are dependent on the patronage of Chinese tourists in the summer; booksellers in Kenya are dependent on supplies from the UK. So there’s a level of connectedness that intensifies the outcomes of bureaucratic decisions that I think makes the outcomes unprecedented, even if the inputs are familiar.

Brittle Paper

There was something you said in passing that left me really intrigued. You said you rode across Kenya on a motorcycle in the early days of the pandemic. That experience deserves its own book. Can you tell us about the experience?

Nanjala Nyabola

You’ll have to read that book when it comes out. 🙂

Brittle Paper

Would you say that your experience in being in Kenya through the thick of it and looking out from Kenya at the West and Asia and how they were scrambling gave you some unique insights into the pandemic?

Nanjala Nyabola

Absolutely – in both good and bad ways. I think the good thing was that I saw things that foreign media really missed about how Africa was experiencing and managing the pandemic that restored my faith in Africa, that I think many young Africans really need to see. It reminded me as an analyst how it is important to make distinctions between African people and African governments. Because African people came through for each other in simple but necessary ways that really kept us alive. The story that was already emerging in the foreign press was that Africa was “lucky”. I didn’t see luck. I saw communities pulling together and creating solutions with what was available, working together to reduce the sting. I saw people adapting so quickly to a rapidly transforming context without stopping to argue about things that ultimately wouldn’t get us closer to being well. We didn’t have to convince millions of people to look out for each other in the way that you had to in many Western societies. I also saw governments providing experts with the tools they needed and then getting out of the way to let them do what needed doing. I saw Africa work. Now, were there shortcomings? Absolutely. There was corruption. There was unbelievable state violence in countries like Kenya where the police still see their primary role through this colonial logic of standing in between ordinary people and the property of the wealthy and the coloniser. And we saw that if we didn’t look after each and fight for each other, the world would not bat an eyelid in letting us die. I think it was necessary for me to see this and with this book invite other people to see this, because in the chronicles of world history people tend to see African governments and not African communities, and the resulting story of dependency and failure becomes the narrative of what it means to be African.

Brittle Paper

Let’s talk about the form of the book. You said that a book about the pandemic should be both a dirge and a sonnet. Can you elaborate on that fascinating note on genre? How would you describe Strange and Difficult Times in those terms?

Nanjala Nyabola

I am so glad you asked me that question because as a writer of creative nonfiction, I so rarely get questions about style and yet it’s so important to me. That’s why I always call myself a writer and not a journalist – to give myself permission to experiment with genre and style. Music is a major part of my writing process. I did a lot of musical theatre in high school and so I appreciate the value of musicality in delivering a monologue or a solo, which is essentially what writing is. I usually pick a single record for each project and I listen to it over and over again while working to allow me to create the soundscape of the project before I find the words. For this, it was the 1991 recording of “Kaung’a Yachee” by Boniface Mganga and the Muungano National Choir. If you read the book out loud, there are sections where the musicality comes out – in the chapter about statistics, in the chapter about air. And I picked that song partly because it’s African but also because it oscillates between these very quiet, slow, dirge-like moments and these very steady, rhythmic moments accompanied by drums and kayambas, before culminating in this big final bar. It’s a choral piece that has three voices that are the leaders at various moments, singing separate parts and yet singing together at the same time. This is the challenge that I had for this book. I wanted to write the layers as separate but all part of the same whole, like the parts of a choir. I wanted it to have “up” moments of hope and optimism without skipping over the “down” moments when we have to acknowledge that we have just endured a collective tragedy. So like “Kaung’a Yachee”, I wanted it to be expansive in its vision but have an eye to the details that permeate each layer, so that if you’re just listening for the soprano bits – the moments of “up” – you’ll have as rich an intellectual experience as if you’re listening to the whole ensemble together.

Brittle Paper

Still on the question of genre, what was it like crafting a social commentary woven with personal life and stories? What do you think this blending brings to the work?

Nanjala Nyabola

For this book, it just felt inevitable because, like for most people, the pandemic whittled down “experience” to what was visible out my window and in the news. So it was integral to the story that I set out to tell. I think more broadly however that for women and for African women especially, it’s a method that allows us to claim space in the narrative landscape in which men’s experiences – and indeed white men’s experiences – are still seen as the default. I think anecdote is a really powerful research and storytelling method for women because it allows us to critique on two levels – one on the nature of “the default” and two on the substance of the story. I’ve been reading a lot of Annie Ernaux lately and I feel like I have learnt more French history from reading her herstories – and half of my undergraduate degree was in European politics! Direct social commentary can be great for telling you what, but personal stories are fantastic for revealing the why, and in order to have as complete a grasp of history, I think it’s really important to understand both.

Brittle Paper

One of the strengths of this book is how self-conscious it is about language and reasoning. You spend a lot of time drilling through vocabulary, terminologies, rhetorical conventions like analogies, comparisons, and questioning. Why are you so attentive to language and the protocols of intellectual reasoning?

Nanjala Nyabola

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. We do language, and that may be the measure of our lives”. These words from Toni Morrison’s Nobel acceptance speech are an intellectual talisman for me. Anyone who grows up multilingual will tell you that words are not just names for things. They create maps and relationships between objects and moments in our minds. Language is our way of giving order to experience, and so the choice of words or the meanings we infuse into words is a political thing. I’ve always been struck by how poorly the multilingual view of the world is captured in the way histories are told, particularly from the postcolonial context because we are usually forced to reason and present ourselves in the world in a language that was forced on us. Where does all that trauma go? What happens to all the colour that inhabits our lives when we have to refract our experience through a language that was beaten into our parents or our grandparents? What is the measure of a life that is experienced in one language but only captured in a second? These are some of my intellectual obsessions. So these days I tend to look at English as an artefact rather than just a fact of my life. English is my index language, but English cannot make me laugh the way Kiswahili does – those big belly laughs that make your aunties slap each other on the shoulder, and bend over with tears in their eyes. So these days I’m constantly weighing it up, measuring it against Kiswahili and my mother language, testing what it can do and how it does it, exploring the cartographies that it creates in our social and political experiences. I no longer take the cartographies of English as the default, and I think this is why readers in the postcolony connect so often with what I write, because deep down we are all grappling with this experience.

Brittle Paper

Speaking of analogies, you kept going back to the colonial response to the Spanish Influenza with a focus on the vital stories that are missing about how Africans fared in those times in their private and communal worlds. Are there ways that the COVID-19 pandemic is reproducing its own kind of archival erasures?

Nanjala Nyabola

Yes, absolutely yes, and this is why writing this book felt so urgent to me. I work a lot with archives and with knowledge production on the continent, and I am constantly confronted by the silences around the African experience of global events and I just kind of felt us hurtling towards this moment yet again. We are going to get a lot of academic research in due time, but it will be hamstrung by the inequalities of scientific knowledge production. We are going to get historians in a few years, but they will start with the artefacts created in the news media. We are going to get a lot of policy documents but they will reflect the vagaries of funding and the politics of those spaces. I know because this is the reality I confront every day when I do my academic and policy work. Journalism will continue to chase catastrophe and failure, and meanwhile these small but very important stories about how we helped each other survive will be overlooked. So it was really important to me to try and get ahead of these structural issues and just hold that space. Just put a pin in the archive so that maybe someone who is producing this academic, policy or historical work has something they can reach for that says “African people were here too, and we didn’t just go quietly into the night”. My primary audience when I write is always other Africans, and particularly young Africans, because it breaks my heart when I see so many people blindly accept the narratives of dependency, failure and weakness that characterise the story of who Africa is. I think it’s so important to give Africa the one thing that these narratives work so hard to deny us – complexity. Complexity is such a fundamental human value but we are so routinely denied it as Africans that even we as Africans internalise it and shrug it off. “This is Africa,” we parrot, as if we are the only region in the world that cannot be particular, but must always be general. Who told you that “this is Africa”? To paraphrase Malcolm X “who taught you to hate yourself?” I’m not trying to sell people cheap optimism – I want to point people towards moments where that optimism and that sense of possibility is earned. These narratives are so important to shaping people’s beliefs about what is possible, and about how they will allocate their energy in service of what they think needs doing. It almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I write to remind young Africans especially that our story is complicated, and there is more room for them to shape outcomes than the dominant narratives might reveal.

Brittle Paper

Being in the diaspora gives you a global perspective on blackness. What would you say the pandemic revealed about Black lives today?

Nanjala Nyabola

Am I in the diaspora?

Brittle Paper

I quite like ending with such a poignant question. It was great chatting with you, Nanjala. Thanks for your considered and illuminating responses.

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Buy Strange and Difficult Times by Nanjala Nyabola: Amazon | Bookshop