Author and political analyst, Nanjala Nyabola, believes in writing what she knows. ‘I’ve found that if you put aside the desire to be seen and just write from an authentic place of wanting to tell stories you know and that you think the world might profit from hearing, it will take you a long way, even in nonfiction.’
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
I was a precocious reader and have always loved fiction. The novel to me is one of the most powerful forms of artistic expression, especially when in the hands of someone who values a good story as much as they value the craft of writing.
I read my first ‘grown-up’ novel when I was seven, battling through the complete and unabridged version of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett over several weeks. That got me hooked on classics. But I also devoured African literature.
Looking back, given how voraciously I consumed the Pacesetters series, I think my life as a pan-Africanist was almost inevitable. I read books like the Moses series by Barbara Kimenye, and Pamela the Student Nurse by Cynthia Hunter.
During my childhood, I was completely spoilt for choice with African and non-African young adult literature which I read until I finished primary school—then I pivoted to more general literary fiction.
Rather than home, my love for books came from libraries which were the only social space that I was allowed to access alone and unsupervised for many years.
I was a ten-year-old walking six kilometres during the school holidays to read the Encyclopaedia Brittanica at the main public library. The library at my school as well as the two main public libraries in Nairobi came to represent freedom because I didn’t need to explain myself to anyone.
When my school built a large new chapel, they turned the old chapel into a library, so it was this magnificent room surrounded by hundreds of books and stained-glass windows. It was magical. Sometimes the school would keep the library open late for me so I had about an hour after school alone to just sit in this amazing room and read.
How could I not love books after that?
What book from your childhood would you pass on to someone younger?
I think every African child should read the Moses series from Barbara Kimenye, not because they are some universal, single story of what it means to be an African child, but because they are so local and specific that they paradoxically become general. They are the kind of stories that you will find something that resonates because the characters are so fully fleshed out and complete. I never went to boarding school, I am not a teenage boy but I truly enjoyed the adventures of Moses, King Kong and Itchy Fingers at the Mukibi’s Educational Institute for the Sons of African Gentlemen. They are good, funny stories that deserve better than the lazy publishing that they are getting now, and I think they can teach the next generation a lot about good, funny, local story telling. I still have my copies from when I was a kid, and I look forward to handing them down to someone one day.
If you could rewrite a classic book/text, which would it be and why?
I always think that I would want to gather all the ‘big men’ of African philosophy—Frantz Fanon, Stephen Biko, Léopold Sédar Senghor and the like and ask them: ‘what about women?’
I think the most egregious erasure of the generation that fought for independence and subsequently attempted to rule was that of women’s labour and what they did to shape and sustain these movements.
I want to go back and put a pen or a typewriter in the hands of every woman who allowed her home to be a waystation for independence fighters, who fed and sheltered fighters, who gathered intelligence and passed it on—even the ones who strapped a gun on their back and marched into the bush—so they could capture and tell their own stories.
Maybe then we wouldn’t have this weird generational break where the post-independence generation is still trying to sell us a story of meek and invisible women who we know from talking to our grandmothers simply were not the universal case.
Every struggle has its Winnie Mandelas. I would have loved to see more of those stories captured and told.
What makes a good re-write?
For me, a good re-write deepens the story even if it doesn’t necessarily broaden it. It makes secondary characters more complete, it connects secondary storylines more to the main arc. A good rewrite is done from the perspective of the reader of today and the reader of tomorrow and basically tries to answer all of the questions that may be lingering after the first reading.
I always think that I would want to gather all the ‘big men’ of African philosophy—Frantz Fanon, Stephen Biko, Léopold Sédar Senghor and the like and ask them: ‘what about women?’
What is the last book/text you disagreed with, and why?
I recently had to reread Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract for work and I was annoyed by the way he wrote about women and his idea of the family as the centre of social life. A quote:
However lightly we may regard the disadvantages peculiar to women, yet, as they necessarily occasion intervals of inaction, this is a sufficient reason for excluding them from this supreme authority.
Basically, because women bleed, they shouldn’t be allowed access to power. I was ready to fight. I remain ready to fight, Rousseau.
And what’s a book/text that recently changed your mind about something?
I recently read Arundhati Roy’s Azadi which is a collection of essays about modern India. Someone had asked me a few months ago if I wanted to sign a petition about Kashmir and I declined because I felt that I didn’t understand the situation well enough to take sides and I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to justify my position if pushed. But after I read the book I realised that everyone of good conscience should be paying attention to what is happening in Kashmir because it is symptomatic of a lot of the struggles that marginalised communities around the world are facing through the violent processes of state building and exclusion. I would not by any measure consider myself an expert on India or Kashmir, but I do feel better informed than I did before I read it and it’s changed my mind on the need to speak out about the issue. It’s a powerful book, I highly recommend it even if you feel like you don’t really know anything about India.
I recently had to reread Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract for work and I was annoyed by the way he wrote about women and his idea of the family as the centre of social life.
What’s a common misconception about Kenyan politics or politics in Kenya?
I’m going to sound like a broken record, but the erasure of women’s contribution to political life in Kenya is really frustrating. The weird thing is that Kenyan women excel at everything they are given a fair chance at—education, business, creative work—everything that gives us a somewhat even playing field at, we excel in.
And women do participate in politics, just not in electoral politics directly. Since the field is rigged with landmines and institutionalized inequalities that no one wants to honestly contend with, we remain locked out.
Politics is about social capital, and the problem we have in Kenya is that so much of women’s social capital is still bound up with men. To put it directly, we are a society that measures a woman’s value by her proximity to a suitable penis. You can have all the money in the world but without social capital, doors will remain closed.
We have communities that won’t sell land to single women. I know women who lie to their fathers and brothers about businesses they own. Our most prominent golf club where a big part of the political wheeling and dealing happens has a bar that doesn’t admit women.
Millions of men (and women) who won’t vote for a woman if she is single or divorced. And in some communities, there are men who keep their wives and daughter’s identity cards so that these women are unable to open bank accounts or register to vote independently.
And men work hard to keep women locked out of electoral politics. I co-edited a book with Marie-Emmanuelle Pommerolle on women’s political participation in Kenya called Where Women are: Gender & the 2017 Kenyan Elections, and we had research papers from all over the country talking about the systemic ways that women get cheated out of party nominations because our political parties are basically ‘big-boys’ clubs.
We have women who get beaten—literally beaten—during the nomination phase to discourage them from participating. Their nomination certificates get stolen. The party mechanisms keep them in such expensive and drawn-out litigation that they get tired and give up. It’s systemic. And so, the narrative is that women don’t want to participate in politics when the reality is how could you, when people work so hard to lock in whatever meager advantage they have to your detriment?
In Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics, you wrote about the internet’s effect on Kenyan politics and Kenya’s 2017 elections. How have your views evolved since the book?
Not much really—I think the book holds up well, even though it’s been only three years.
I think the one thing that has been interesting to watch is how dramatically the numbers of Kenyans on social media have increased since the book was published. We’ve gone from 5 million WhatsApp accounts to about 12 million in these last three years and the numbers are growing exponentially every day.
The most important point I would reiterate is one I made in the book—power learns, power adapts. And so, for movement builders and social justice activists it is important to keep in mind that the internet is just a tool, but the internet cannot be the sum total of the movement. Power learns, and power adapts, and we must too.
What’s your writing process: edit as you write or draft first, then edit?
I write first and then edit. It’s much easier to edit a draft that exists than to write from scratch, I find. But also ‘writing’ is often preceded by weeks if not months of reading, so especially for the essays the actual typing of the words is the least consuming part.
Some stuff flows easily and only needs a light edit, but I will basically vomit all my ideas out on the page and then spend time obsessing over them and trying to fix them. The most important thing is to not be precious about the words—if it isn’t working, let it go.
I usually create a dumping file where I put all the things I cut—just so that it doesn’t feel permanent, but to be honest, it usually is.
Your book, Travelling While Black, is a collection of essays inspired by your experiences travelling the world as a Black woman. What was your process for writing it?
Travelling While Black represents the culmination of about 15 years of life and travel. Some of the essays are about 15 years old, some of them I wrote at the beginning of 2020. So even though they are not presented sequentially, if I tell you the sequence in which they were written you would be able to trace the arc of my own evolution as a writer and a thinker.
That’s what the collection is supposed to represent—the evolution of my own thinking on the idea and politics of human mobility. Some of the essays I wrote as soon as something happened and I didn’t want to forget. And then at the beginning of 2020, I got an AirBnB in Bologna, Italy and spent 6 weeks turning all these bits and pieces that I had collected over the previous 15 years into a manuscript.
I didn’t know at the time that a pandemic was brewing at my door that would speak directly to some of the issues I raise in the book. I actually left Italy the week before they recorded their first cases of COVID-19. Then, after a handful of other international trips, I came back to Nairobi and was grounded by the pandemic and went back and looked at the manuscript again from the perspective of a world that was being forced to reimagine what human mobility could mean.
Overall, the book represents an idea that Toni Morrison shared that guides my writing generally: ‘if there is a book out there that you want to read and you haven’t read it yet, you must be the one to write it’.
I felt like I was in a unique position to think about the politics of human mobility because I had studied migration and refugee law but I am also an avid traveller. I wanted to write a book about something that I have experienced and witnessed—the shrinking space for human mobility in the world today and the violence that we—especially as black women—are left vulnerable to just by the political choices taken at the abstract policy plane.
But I also wanted to get African women excited about travel—to tell them that it’s complicated and difficult, but do it anyway. I wanted to write a complicated book, to show a face of African personhood that was angry, frustrated, vocal, confused but also—I hope—funny, witty, and sharp.
Because my goal for all my writing is always to demand for Africans the right to exist in all our complicated glory.
The most important thing is to not be precious about the words—if it isn’t working, let it go.
What is the most meaningful piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
Aside from the Toni Morrison quote above, I think the most meaningful writing advice is probably ‘write what you know’.
African writers, and especially African writers of nonfiction, can often be made to feel like we have to write a certain way and around certain themes to gain recognition and acceptance. That if our stories are not about politics or war or economics that they are not important.
But I’ve found that if you put aside the desire to be seen and just write from an authentic place of wanting to tell stories you know and that you think the world might profit from hearing, it will take you a long way, even in nonfiction.
Write that crime novel. Write that romance novel. Write that weird ‘Amos Tutuola-style’ epic that weaves sheng’ or pidgin in with English or French and takes the reader on a fantastic journey. Write it.
Your stories are important just as they are. Me, I’m a huge nerd—the biggest. I love ideas. So, I write nerdy African books and articles about ideas because it’s what I know, and it has never steered me wrong. Write as yourself and write what you know.
So what’s more important to you: the story or how it is written?
How it’s written for sure. Some of my favourite books are very still—not much actually happens—but the author basically is demonstrating that they have mastered whatever language they are writing in and that they are master world-builders. Some of my favourite books like Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music, Bessie Head’s Maru, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea or Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd fit this mold—these are all very still books where there’s very little action or movement per se but they paint such vivid pictures and descriptions that you just want to sit with the author and see the world through their eyes .
Who is an author you wish you had discovered earlier?
I’ve written a whole essay about my journey to Bessie Head in Travelling While Black, so I won’t belabour the point.
Just that I wish more people read her with the same enthusiasm that we champion her male contemporaries like Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
Bessie Head was an unqualified genius who saw rural Africa with such a depth of humanity and feeling. She poured her heart and herself in the page in a way that I have never since seen. In a way I wish I had read her earlier, but another way I think her books came into my life at the right time—when I was ready to receive them. Everyone should read Bessie Head.
What is your favourite topic to write or read about these days? (Please include the names of articles and books, if possible)
I’m always operating on three frequencies with my reading—academic research, activism and advocacy, and finally, entertainment. So there’s always these three wavelengths operating side by side.
The last thing I read for academic research as I said was rereading all this material on the social contract—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, etc.—because I want to really think about what it means to have a social contract.
Why do we live within societies and governments? Because I look at how some of these governments are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and I think our leaders have forgotten why we have governments.
For my activism, I’m currently reading a lot about the COVID-19 vaccine because I think it’s atrocious that 30 years after the HIV/AIDS pandemic brought Africa to its knees, we still have Western governments refusing to let poorer countries manufacture vaccines off-patent in order to make sure that everyone is vaccinated.
So, reading a lot of press but also a lot of WHO and Africa CDC briefings to be able to understand what’s happening and to comment informatively on it. I think a lot of people don’t realize that we as Africans are in a fight for our lives, that if we lose this, we could lose millions the way we lost millions to HIV/AIDS, and I feel a certain burden—or maybe impetus?—to be part of this fight, however small my contribution may be.
For entertainment, I’m very eclectic with my tastes—I’ll read anything about anything as long as it’s well written. I generally read a lot of African writers, but I’m not doing that at the moment. I just finished a novel called Cassandra by a German writer, Christa Wolf, that retells the story of Homer’s Iliad from the perspective of a Trojan priestess (i.e. the guys who lost the war for their survival because they allowed a giant wooden horse into their citadel. File under ‘stupid reasons to win a war that later make great metaphors’). It was a good book and such a creative way to tell this story that so many people think they know.
And I’m currently reading a book called Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism by Kristen Ghodsee. It’s basically about how Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries aggressively pursued gender equality policies during the Cold War period in part because Western or capitalist societies didn’t, and they wanted to shame them. So Russian women were the first to go to the moon, and women were working in Soviet factories even after the end of the war—things like that.
The book argues convincingly that women who have more leisure time and better work conditions have better sex. The thing is though I lived in the Czech Republic for a bit, and I can tell you that some of these policies have had an interesting effect on what women from central Europe consider to be equality. For example, Czech women get three years paid maternity leave for each child but they still have the lowest birth rates in Europe. A friend of mine explained it this way—why would you spend four years in university and get a job you love only to spend three years at home, six if you have two kids?
People overestimate what having children means to women, and underestimate what work represents especially if you love what you do. You could be at home for almost a decade if you have three kids! So a lot of Czech women actually want less maternity leave. In fact, the research suggests that the thing that makes the biggest difference in increasing birth rates isn’t indefinitely longer maternity leaves—it’s availability of affordable and trustworthy childcare. The golden length seems to be about one year paid maternity leave, or two years family leave split between both parents. Anyway, it’s an interesting book about things like that. And after that I am starting The Street is my Pulpit by Mwenda Ntarangwi which is a book about Kenyan hip hop and Christianity through the eyes of one of our best known rappers, Juliani.
African writers, and especially African writers of nonfiction, can often be made to feel like we have to write a certain way and around certain themes to gain recognition and acceptance. That if our stories are not about politics or war or economics that they are not important.
You’ve recently written about (COVID-19) vaccine nationalism. What’s been surprising and unsurprising about the politics of COVID-19?
I think the most surprising and equally unsurprising thing was that we haven’t learnt anything from the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Why are we still denying poor countries the opportunity to make life saving drugs? How are we still overlooking the agency of African people in our analyses of what’s happening on the continent?
Why are the leaders of African government still allowing graft to take root in the face of such an all-consuming crisis? How are we still allowing politics and hubris to guide our responses rather than reason and kindness?
We are making the same mistakes all over again and it is really frustrating. I guess it’s true what they say ‘those who don’t learn from the past are bound to repeat it, and those who do learn from the past are bound to watch others repeat it’.
Question from Edwin Chege: Which two authors, past or present, would you have over for dinner and why?
Toni Morrison for sure.
The second would be a tie between Edward Said and Angela Y. Davis. Both have had such a profound impact on me and my thinking, and have such varied interests and backgrounds that I think conversation would flow easily.
My favourite thing about Said is that he did literary criticism, played classical piano, and was in politics—he was such a polymath, and I think that made his work richer.
And Angela Davis is the epitome of the scholar-activist. Not a lot of people know that she has a PhD in Philosophy from Humboldt University in Berlin, and I have such a profound respect for her ability to talk the talk and walk it too. Angela Davis is still alive so maybe that might happen? I have faith.
Bonus: Please suggest a question for a future author’s First Draft.
What was the last book that triggered a physical reaction in you—tears, anger, a shout of frustration, an audible and extended laugh, or something like that—and why?⎈
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