Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move

What unites these wide-ranging essays is a common concern with migration, racism, and the author’s own identity as a Black, Western-educated Kenyan woman who travels constantly for professional and touristic reasons. Ultimately, she argues, it is by leaving home that people find their identity. She visits Haiti as a volunteer for a human rights group and ruminates on the fact that locals call her “white” because she is foreign and educated. Other essays explore her outrage at European immigration policy and its human cost and the question of whether mobility should be a human right and not just the purview of a small, usually Western and white elite. The book also features a lovely essay about the life and legacy of the South African author Bessie Head, who lived much of her life in exile in Botswana and died in relative poverty. The passion, erudition, and fluidity of Nyabola’s writing is attractive, even when the arguments occasionally fail to convince. Provocative and always willing to take on the conventional wisdom, Nyabola emerges with this book as an important observer of contemporary Africa and its position in the world.