Travelling While Black - by Nanjala Nyabola

First requirements before consider going somewhere: I only ask for a clean and safe hotel, an easy visa process, and a means to get there and back.

To survive, you depend on a foreign society’s hospitality.

When we move not out of choice, but out of necessity, we encounter other societies at their best or at their worst. Having an influx of people from disparate backgrounds show up at your border.

I became such an avid reader and writer to imagine all of these experiences that I couldn’t have in my real life.

Men imagine that a woman travelling solo is a declaration of sexual availability.

To give yourself over completely to another society - and its biases - challenges you to continue being fearless and turning up, or to walk away and return to your comfort zone.

The traveler depends not on power, but on motion, on a willingness to go into different worlds, use different idioms, understand a variety of disguises, masks, rhetorics. Travelers must suspend the claim of customary routine, in order to live in new rhythms and rituals.

Dislocation and exclusion gives you perspective on things that others may take for granted, and a deeper understanding of the fluidity and complexity of culture.

Language is a vector for a shared history.

It’s one thing to preach equality - it’s another thing altogether to shun privilege.

Would women accomplish if they didn’t have to spend so much energy learning how to survive men?

In Kenya, if you strip away the British Puritanism or the Islamic winds from the coast, there is a myriad of African identities jostling for dominance and survival.

People, when they learn that I am African, almost always assume that they have had a better life than I have. A black, African woman is almost always at the bottom of whatever constructed hierarchy of value a society has in place, and so I am more likely to be viewed as an object of pity.

Don’t ask, “How can I help?” Your presence clouds the conversation. It dangles an illusion of power that you don’t have.

Whatever fears you have in your normal life are only intensified by travel.

We consume information about each other and form stereotypes, not realising that they are doing the same to us.

Guidebooks are written with such certainty.

Privilege can insulate the traveller from consequences, but it can also make someone a lightning rod for unwanted attention.

The Instagram accounts of major international humanitarian organisations, where funds are raised: Black and brown subjects are photographed either struggling or in the process of receiving assistance. But for the places where these organisations work - the subjects are often photographed empowered or resolute. In the former, the photographs are a plea for help; in the latter, they offer an appearance of solidarity. They reduce a person’s entire life experience to a single moment for the purposes of raising money.

Europe has always been a violent place.

1990 Schengen Convention closed off all humane routes into Europe for citizens of these unwanted countries who could not meet the required thresholds.

When your options are certain death while standing still, versus a minute chance of success if you move, you will move.

Cities foster empathy, because they are by definition diverse and multifaceted, and understand intimately the importance of multiculturalism for enriching daily life.

People with a spiritual or intellectual disposition, constantly feeling like outsiders, are best placed to look at their societies. They can do it from a place of abstraction that makes their analysis sharper or clearer. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.

Some people find home in disconnection and transience. For some people, home is not a geography but a state of mind - it’s wherever they can do work that feels meaningful or useful. Writers recognise home isn’t a place, but is in the ever-changing community or fellowship of people who see the world the way you do, and find the words to describe it.

Editor at Random House tried to champion the African writer, but there was a sense that there could only be one.

The voice of men is often portrayed as neutral, while women’s voices are considered “special interest”.

Career writers are outsiders, comfortable with solitude and being misunderstood. Yet that compulsion to be seen and understood makes a person learn how to use language well. To lock yourself up in a room for 12-18 hours a day, weeks on end, speaking to nobody and committing words in the hopes that someone will resonate.

CBD in Johannesburg, Nairobi and elsewhere - abandoned after independence, when there was a mass exodus to nearby, newly built suburbs. Like Detroit and Cleveland, where formerly prosperous city centres have crumbled because that prosperity could not survive desegregation. They flourished because restricting non-white residents meant that economic resources could be focused on the white population. Once white people, who formerly represented the main tax base in an urban centre, leave for racially homogenous suburbs, cities shift their planning focus to those suburbs and deprive the formerly prosperous CBD of key resources.

South Africa economic system sees black foreigners as a threat, while white foreigners are seen as “investors”.

Kenya: as a British colony, colonialism was not uniform: Resistance from the coastal city-states that were never officially colonised.

If you are neutral in the face of oppression, then you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

A foreigner is a person who lacks some fundamental right to make claims on the territory in which they are foreign.

A 2019 study of Canadian immigration data found that three of every four African students had had their student visa applications rejected, and that students from African countries were far more likely to experience this than those from any other region. The global average for rejection of Canadian student visas is only 39 per cent. Somalia and Mozambique had the highest level of rejections - 100 per cent of all Canadian student visa applications. Considering that each student visa application costs $160 in application fees and another $100 to provide biometrics, the Canadian government is raking in millions worldwide from African student visa applications that it knows it is going to reject

“Africa for beginners”: The implication is that Africa is hard, and you need to start off somewhere easy that won’t overwhelm you from the outset. When people call Nairobi “Africa for Beginners”, they mean all the upmarket places that have been deliberately packaged to be easy for outsiders, often to the exclusion of locals.

Something alien or “wrong” is more interesting than what we think is “normal” or “right”.

People who live in slums are not defined by their housing situation.

Only societies that have been through the violence of colonisation are put into the taxonomies of tribes. In themselves the colonisers saw “high societies” and organised politics. In the Other they saw chaotic brutes organised according to indiscernible, inferior clusters that they called the tribe. The term is riddled with the idea that this is something that lesser people do.

Swahili word for tribe is lugha or kabila. Lugha is the word for language. Kabila only came into popular use because ukabila for tribalism: “Wewe ni kabila gain?” - What tribe are you? - is something that a lot of Kenyans used to ask each other. But that changed after the 2007 election, because the question was followed by violence. Today, the question is loaded with the weight of this tragedy. Having the wrong surname at the wrong place during Kenya’s 2007–8 post-election violence left many people dead. In politically tense moments, a person’s name and the implications of ethnicity that come with it become critical.

Ethnicity is more important to the analyst than it is to the analysed. It’s a lens through which they can categorise. But doesn’t actually have as much explanatory power as the analysis claims.

As a woman, I got my tribe in Kenya. I inherit it from my father and I lose it as soon as I marry. I can’t pass it on to any children, unless they are intentional about carrying it forward.

Parklands, Nairobi: the heart of Nairobi’s Indian community. For a middle-class Kenyan, Parklands is the dream.

Asians in Kenya amount to about 1 per cent of the national population, but they are an economically powerful and highly visible minority.

Democratic Republic of Congo is in effect four countries - the Lingala, Kikongo, Kiswahili and Tshiluba regions. 600 languages within them, bound together by the absurdities of colonisation. It takes five hours to fly across the country at its widest point. Even its second and third largest cities are bigger than the capitals of most other African states.