Nanjala Nyabola

What does it feel like to move through a world designed to limit and exclude you? What are the joys and pains of holidays for people of colour, when guidebooks are never written with them in mind? How are black lives today impacted by the othering legacy of colonial cultures and policies? What can travel tell us about our sense of self, of home, of belonging and identity? Why has the world order become hostile to human mobility, as old as humanity itself, when more people are on the move than ever? Nanjala Nyabola is constantly exploring the world, working with migrants and confronting complex realities challenging common assumptions - both hers and others'. From Nepal to Botswana, Sicily to Haiti, New York to Nairobi, her sharp, humane essays ask tough questions and offer surprising, deeply shocking and sometimes funny answers. It is time we saw the world through her eyes.

Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move

Travelling While Black

From the upheavals of recent national elections to the success of the #MyDressMyChoice feminist movement, digital platforms have already had a dramatic impact on political life in Kenya – one of the most electronically advanced countries in Africa. While the impact of the Digital Age on Western politics has been extensively debated, there is still little appreciation of how it has been felt in developing countries such as Kenya, where Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and other online platforms are increasingly a part of everyday life. Written by a respected Kenyan activist and researcher at the forefront of political online struggles, this book presents a unique contribution to the debate on digital democracy. For traditionally marginalised groups, particularly women and people with disabilities, digital spaces have allowed Kenyans to build new communities which transcend old ethnic and gender divisions. But the picture is far from wholly positive. Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics explores the drastic efforts being made by elites to contain online activism, as well as how 'fake news', a failed digital vote-counting system and the incumbent president's recruitment of Cambridge Analytica contributed to tensions around the 2017 elections. Reframing digital democracy from the African perspective, Nyabola's ground-breaking work opens up new ways of understanding our current global online era.

How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya

Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics

In this new collection, Nanjala Nyabola takes stock of a world in crisis. Her incisive yet moving prose unpacks the injustices shaping Covid’s starkly different outcomes between countries and communities, and reveals rich societies’ shockingly inaccurate view of how her home continent has fared. From the hidden truth of fast action, mutual aid and transnational cooperation in poorer countries to the widespread falsehoods of Western commentary, Nyabola exposes a global society scarred by colonial legacies, lazy narratives and ingrained biases. These essays are an inventory of the staggering political and social failures of our time, and the myths exposed in Covid’s wake. Watching coronavirus spread in Kenya and around the world, Nyabola reflects on a long history of onlookers denying the Global South’s agency and successes in times of emergency. Armed with her insider-outsider perspective, she reveals harsh truths about our broken system, and calls powerfully for a sincerely shared post-pandemic world—one where voices like hers can help to write a real global history.

Nanjala Nyabola

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