Ufahamu Africa

Ep. 122: Hear Ufahamu Africa on Migrations: A World on the Move

July 10, 2021 Nanjala Nyabola Season 5 Episode 122
Ufahamu Africa
Ep. 122: Hear Ufahamu Africa on Migrations: A World on the Move
Show Notes Transcript

Hear more of our conversation with Nanjala Nyabola, continued from Ep. 113: A conversation with Nanjala Nyabola. In this podcast mash-up with Cornell University's Migrations: A World on the Move podcast. Their episode shares previously unaired parts of our conversation with Nanjala and Migrations postdoctoral fellow Eleanor Paynter. Nyabola's work and writing spans themes of migration, politics, and personal experience in her new book "Travelling While Black." Listen to the episode to hear her read excerpts from select essays.   

Books, Links, & Articles

Previous Episodes We Mentioned

Find the books, links, and articles we mentioned in this episode on our website, ufahamuafrica.com.

Rachel Beatty Riedl:

Welcome to Ufahamu Africa, a podcast about life and politics on the continent. I'm Rachel Beatty Riedl, one of your hosts. This week, we are sharing more of our conversation with Nanjala Nyabola, an author, journalist and political analyst in Nairobi, Kenya. We spoke to her earlier this year for episode 113 about race and racism across borders, in a mashup episode with Cornell University's migrations initiative and their new podcast, Migrations: a world on the move. And now without further ado, this is their version of that interview, featuring previously unaired clips of our conversation with Nanjala.

Nanjala Nyabola:

Even if I am a privileged, you know, middle class writer from Kenya, when the migration restrictions come, I am just an African. You can't privilege your way out of some of these complexities.

Eleanor Paynter:

Welcome to migrations a world on the move, a series brought to you by Cornell University's migrations initiative. I'm Eleanor Paynter, postdoctoral associate in migrations and your host for this podcast that seeks to understand our world through the interconnected movements that shape it. We recently completed our first season and are excited to bring you a bonus episode. In this episode we speak with Kenyan author, activist and human rights advocate Nanjala Nyabola, who joined us from Nairobi to speak about her new

book Traveling while Black:

essays inspired by a life on the move, out with Hearst Publishers. In traveling while black Nanjala responds to the question, what does it feel like to move through a world designed to limit and exclude you? She speaks both from her own experience crossing borders as a black African woman who has traveled widely and from her study of critical issues as a human rights lawyer and political analyst and through work on the ground in countries around the globe. She also looks critically at how borders reify divisions between communities, how we come to define otherness, and what that means about how we do and don't respond to people on the move. As she writes, "the experience of traveling while black either as a voyager as a migrant, or as a refugee, is united by this narrow thread of a soul rubbed raw from the disorientation of leaving what is familiar behind someone traveling for leisure can, depending on their budget, pay their way out of some of the discomfort that a hostile receiving community might project. Migrants and refugees have no such choice. The fact of human mobility isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so it remains on us to articulate a shift towards responding to people on the move with empathy." We hosted this conversation as part of a virtual event in April with colleagues at another fantastic podcast, Ufahamu Africa. And so after listening to this episode, be sure to check out more of our conversation with Nanjala there, we'll link to it, along with over 100 other great episodes about life and politics on the African continent. You'll hear Ufahamu Africa hosts on this episode too. Dr. Rachel Beatty Riedl is director of the Einaudi Center for International Studies and Professor of Government here at Cornell, and Ufahamu Africa founder and co host Dr. Kim Yi Dionne is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Riverside, and a contributing editor of the Monkey Cage politics blog at the Washington Post. It's such a pleasure to share the mic with Rachel and Kim. And what an honor to speak with an Nanjala Nyabola about her work and about some of the many ways in which border and migration issues intersect with racism, and necessitate transnational conversations around justice and rights. Our conversation takes up movement across national borders and reflections on home, thinking especially about connections between mobility rights and racial justice. Traveling while Black is Nanjala's most recent book and illustrates the breadth and depth of her work which moves from the personal to the global and across issues of gender, migrant rights, racism, solidarity, and writing itself. Here's our conversation with Nanjala Nyabola, beginning with a reading from the book.

Nanjala Nyabola:

I went to Palermo, the capital of Sicily where hundreds of young Africans arrived each week because I wanted to understand the difference between young people who leave and those like me who remain. The vast majority of what is written about the ongoing crisis is written with the idea that African migration is a problem for Europe to solve. This is partially true in the sense that European countries have created the impetus for much of this migration, and their tacit support for African autocracies in places like the Gambia financing of armed conflicts i places like Libya, and toxi economic policies in countries like Niger, but that is a moral mergency, not a practica one. In practical terms, t e 1.015 million migrants ho made the European crossing n 2017 are only an intimidat ng number if you ignore the fact that a similar number of yrian refugees currently ive in Lebanon alone. The i ea of a Mediterranean crisis s a European crisis has n ver quite sat right with me giv n that the vast majority of t ose who are losing their lives are African or Middle Eas ern. I went to Palermo becau e I wanted to recenter even for yself, African voices in the conversation about wh so many Africans are dying an nymous deaths on the high se s. I wanted to know if the experience of a violent crossing and staring down the pros ect of an untimely underwater d ath had changed their perspec ive of their home countries nd the reasons why they left. I wanted to know if living in Eu ope had changed their minds abo t living leaving Africa. I as not really afraid of Pa ermo until I got out of the air ort. After the first 20 or 30 an airport is just an airport, except maybe the really smal unusual ones where things can get out of control quickly if you drop your attention. Bu once to leave the airport, the eality of the place and the enor ity of the decision you have aken can hit you like a ton o bricks. Suddenly, when I leave the airport, and I need t take a taxi, I remember t at I don't speak a word of It lian. All of the stories that I've heard about racism and int midation of people who look like me, tip from the back of my mind to the front, crowding ut much of the rational thought, but I know quickly what needs to happen. Next, one foot in ront of the other, get to the Airbnb, get something to eat, leep off the anxiety. Pal rmo is not what I expected. thought it would be beautiful, and it is. The architectur is breathtaking and as richl diverse as Sicily's history. The vibe isn't at all what I had been prepared for. Inst ad of a city ossified in ang r and hatred, I find a communit struggling to understand nd honestly engage with it position in a complex histo ical moment where Sicili ns are living with the reality of decisions take 1000s of kilometres away in ome, or Brussels. There is no si gle narrative about how Palerm feels about migration. But he city is built on a legac of migration and economic mar inalization. One that it fac s every day. No one se ms surprised to see me there a couple of curious glances ut for the most part, I am i nored. On the whole, since any of the overt hostility that I've detected in many other cities n Europe. I get more reactions i New York's Upper East Side tha I'm getting on Palermo's w de streets.

Rachel Beatty Riedl:

Thank you so much for this reading and for sharing your work with us today. I'm thinking about how, in this case, thinking about the Mediterranean migration crisis, which you immediately complicate as a label, how that term crisis can really erase individual experiences and homogenize experiences, in fact, on both sides, so in a sense of marginalizing the experiences of of Africans, as if there's just one African experience for those crossing. And on the other side, also, erasing some of the complexities that exist in the reception of migrants and attitudes towards foreigners. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you navigate that. And also then in it, how it helps us think about what it takes to be tell a complex story.

Nanjala Nyabola:

Thank you for that question. It was one of the first way I had experimented with this, putting myself in the story. You know, I'm not a trained journalist, but I had been practicing in the journalism space for a number of years. And one of the first things that editors tell you is take the I out of the story, take the I out of the story. But then, when I was thinking about this migration narrative, the one that exists, I had done professional work on it. I had written reports, research reports for people on migration, and I had done all this stuff. And I still felt like there was something that wasn't really coming together, which was number one what you said -- that this stuff is really complicated but not complicated in the way that policymakers want it to be complicated. What makes it complicated is that it's human beings, and it's human nature and its human behavior, human perceptions of the other. And so I felt like the best way to get at the heart of those complexities was to put the I in the story. So going from being myself as an African woman, going to a place that I had never been before where the reputation that had been communicated was one of you know expect a hostile reception expect XYZ. And where I had been, whereas I'd been to other parts of Europe and I've been to other parts of North America. That's all I had, like, I had a story in my head about how I was going to be treated and how I was going to be received. But at the same time, I couldn't separate myself from the story of the arriving boats. And so to be able to see that and to see yourself reflected, which is what a little bit I talk about in the in the essay, yourself reflected to the people who are arriving in such a difficult and such a scary and risky context. So the section where I talk about, I stood on that pier for probably a good four or five hours. And I'm the only black person there who isn't arriving on the boat. And sort of the sense of how do I keep myself in a place of abstraction while trying to do this professional work, but also recognizing that a lot of what's happening here is not based on objective metrics, or whatever, but is actually based on just how people think and or feel. And so that's, that was the intellectual challenge, I guess, of writing this essay, because I wanted to move beyond abstract ideas of policy and abstract ideas of crisis, and, and all of these things, and to actually get to the what's the human side of the story? How are the people interacting with the story? And I took a lot of inspiration from the work of Bell Hooks, who writes a lot about herself in the stuff that she does, and talking even when she's writing about love as a political practice, she's talking about her family and how she experiences family. And I think it's a very feminist approach to bring human beings back to how we think about ideas. I think the idea of taking the self out of is not ... the temptation is to think about that as a way of being objective. But I think that there are some things that maybe being subjective isn't the worst thing in the world, and especially when it comes to communicating fear and anxiety and confusion. There was this moment where, when the people started coming out on the boat, and they're walking down these steps, these metal steps. And I'm standing next to this in the press, and you're just hearing this chunk, dunk, dunk, dunk, dunk. And people who are coming off of these boats are just crushed, you know, just completely crushed. I mean, they've been walking across the desert for I don't know, how many years? How do you communicate the urgency of that moment, without putting yourself in the narrative without putting a human being in the narrative, like, I could write you a report and tell you 230 People are riding the tuna one, and they face these health conditions, and they did da da da, but there's nothing that will ever captured the emotionally jarring experience of that dunk, dunk dunk of people who are just, you know, coming out of this really deep trauma, and then entering into this uncertainty of what their next couple of months will look like. So the this essay is really one of the ones that moves, I hope fluidly, I think so as a writer, between academic practice and academic knowledge, and trying to communicate that in a very human way that is trying to tell people that this crisis, this idea of political crisis, sometimes makes it hard for us to process the human dimensions of the choices that are being taken, and that the policymaking decisions are, are there are people at the other end of that, and whether they are, as you said, the people in Palermo, who, I spend a lot of time in the essay showing how complex the people, the personhood, the community in Palermo is, you know, in dealing with all of these issues, the people who are on the boats, and then the people who like myself, who receive the secondary impact, you know, of heightened migration policies, even if I am a privileged, you know, middle class writer from Kenya, when their migration restrictions come, I am just an African. You can't privilege your way out of some of these complexities. So, yeah, that was that was the thinking behind that particular essay. And, and I hope, I wrote it as an invitation for people who might have read the stories in the paper might have seen, you know, a little three minute segment in the news, but might not have felt empowered to be part of the conversation because the policymakers have been writing about it in such abstract terms. And I've written this as an invitation to say, well, actually, it's a human thing. It's human beings that are doing this to other human beings and you are empowered to be part of this conversation, to demand a much more humane story, because it's part of it.

Rachel Beatty Riedl:

Thanks so much, I really especially appreciate what you're saying about how putting the self in the narrative is a part of a way of really accessing and reflecting on, but then also engaging with the urgency of the moment. So being really present there, and then also being able to write about it in a way that really conveys that urgency and its complexity to others. And I think that essay is such a good example of that kind of spread throughout the book and throughout your work. So your book moves really beautifully between reflections on, as we've heard, your own presence and experience in places, and also reflections on how representations have a place outside of it, how they circulate beyond, and really affect broader understandings of those places. And you're thinking in particular about several points in the book about how certain images affect in particular Western ideas of places that are often exoticized or othered in some way. And I wanted to stick with this idea about images and complexity to think about questions of representation. So you write about the power of images to convey the complexity of the situation and provoke empathy. But you also caution against what's become a kind of saturation in the media of images of suffering. And I think the Mediterranean migration crisis is a really significant example of how that's operating. So you mentioned in the book, The widely circulated photo of toddler Alan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler who was found on the on a Turkish beach, and I'm sure many in our audience can picture this photo because it circulated so widely and provoked an immediate response of compassion, people raised a lot of money, and there was a lot of push for humanitarian support for migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean. But that quickly waned. And in the meantime, that image has become an icon that sort of uses the image of a child to represent what we've just discussed -- this really complex set of circumstances. You also mentioned in the book, the famous photo of a vulture and a starving child, and what is now South Sudan. "I knew right in talking about these images that," I'm quoting from the book, "photographing crisis should be about more than just consuming the death of the other." So I wanted to invite you to expand on that discussion. How do you think about the need to represent and convey what is happening? And you've talked about this in terms of your own personal positioning, but maybe thinking more broadly about the role of the media, journalists, also scholars and others? How do we navigate this line between needing to represent crisis and the risk of perpetuating really problematic narratives?

Nanjala Nyabola:

I think if I was to summarize that particular essay into a single sentence, it would be: I don't know. And really, so what it is, is it takes you through what some of the considerations and sort of tries to leave you at a position where maybe you're in a better position to make an evaluation than you were before you read it, even if it doesn't necessarily give you a conclusive answer. Because the truth is, it is complicated. And we do, what I point out is that images work, right Alan Kurdi, as you mentioned, got people to open up their purses, it created this sense of movement, it created this sense of reaction. But then what comes after that, what comes after people are scared and what people after people are confused, and people are shocked, and people are angry? And I don't think that we spend enough time thinking about what comes after that. And really what comes after that is that people become desensitized, you can only publish so many images of starving children of dying children before people start to think about starving children and dying children as abstractions, rather than human beings who are at the other end of human-made crisis. I think that we have become especially insensitive towards representations of death with African people. I consume a lot of media and I consume a lot of international media especially. And people point out, had pointed out, for example, with the Coronavirus crisis, that we saw a lot of images of the Ebola deaths in 2014 when the Ebola crisis was taking root in the Mano River Basin in West Africa. We didn't see a lot of images of death, when the Coronavirus was at its worst in Europe. And then you know as an as a human being, you're like well, I don't want to see more dead people like I'm actually okay with there being less dead people of all racial backgrounds, of all backgrounds? I don't want to be bombarded by images of that. But then there's so there's like these two parallel practices are happening. One is, is there an inequality issue embedded in the way that we make and distribute images, especially of African people, especially of African children. But beyond that universally, has our story telling about crisis and about conflict become overly dependent on horrific imagery in order to compress, you know, these really long narratives into bite sized chunks that then have knock on effects? Those are the two threads that I think run through this conversation. And I think one way of thinking about it very easily is well, what would this feel like if I was on the other end of the lens? One of the first things I noticed when I moved to the UK a couple of years ago was that the broadcasting standards in the UK are such that you cannot put the image of a child on television without the consent of that parent. So you'd often be watching the news, and you'd see the blurred images of children. You know, if there was an interview about a child, it would often be blurred, even if it was just a general story. But you never saw similar standards being applied when it was African children who were being filmed running away from bombs and things like that. And what we saw with that starving child, you know, I was looking into the story of the of the starving child with a vulture is the trauma that came from that photograph had an impact on the family of the child and also on the photographer. Because it becomes this baggage, you know, that all of them carried and and couldn't carry because it brought with it certain expectations about what the photographer should have done, what the photographer was supposed to have done in order to help that child. And then with the parents, that was the story that we didn't, we didn't abandon our child, we put the child down because we're going to queue up and we didn't want the child to be harmed. But the narrative of African parents and abandoned children in you know, in crisis is so portable, that people grab grab onto that as oh my gosh, this is such a bad drought, it's driving parents to abandon the children, because that evokes much more reaction than the what actually happened, which is we just put the child down so that we wouldn't have to get into that scrum. I think that the short answer for me is the easy answer too often because I think leaving the complicated questions unasked, uninterrogated is what is leaving us in this situation where we sense that there's an injustice, and there's an inequality, embedded in image making aand image transmission, and we're talking about conflict and research here. But you know, even if you think about Instagram, and you have these Instagramers, who come to Africa and take pictures of sunsets and acacia trees, and you know, black children, and put them all over there, there, there's that same thread of inequalities embedded in there and how, what we believe African personhood should be represented or other personhoods should be represented, because this happens in Asia as well, in photography, and what I hope is that people will at least we can move towards asking some of these complicated questions. And especially, you know, the reason why this book is written that way that it is not just within the academy, and not just within professional circles, but all of us because I think people are sensing that there's an injustice in there. And and maybe this essay nudges us to start to articulate the question more publicly, and it becomes more and more consistent part of the way we think about image making as part of our storytelling. That was a long answer. Sorry.

Rachel Beatty Riedl:

Great, thank you so much. On the subject of crisis, but shifting more to thinking a little bit about political dynamics and policy questions. Especially because, you know, one of the one of the ways that people are talking about the implications of this crisis is the effects that its having -- border crises not only in the Mediterranean, but elsewhere in the world -- the effects that these places are having on the asylum regime and on people's ability to claim asylum and to obtain protection, and this is something that you address in a different chapter, you have a chapter on the end of asylum. And I think these are really especially urgent, and you note this as well in connection with deportations and returns of asylum seekers and refugees to conflict zones, and also in the context of climate change and the different forms of displacement and mobility that are linked to it. So as national border policies around the world, and especially in the Global North, effectively draw the right to claim asylum into question. What chance do you think there is for revisiting the 1951 refugee convention. Or if we're really seeing the end of asylum, what do you think a post asylum world might look like?

Nanjala Nyabola:

One of my favorite, favorite quotes probably of all time, but certainly for this era has always been Antonio Gramsci's,"the old world is dying, the new one is not yet born. And now is the time for demons." I think that the current refugee and asylum context that we live in was born out of I mean, not I think it is, it's born out of the Second World War. And the realization that withholding the right to asylum withholding the opportunity for asylum led 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of people to their untimely death, because they were deported. And they were sent back and they were unable to claim safety. And so there's a there's a guilt that comes from that, that then fuels the idea of a right to seek asylum, not necessarily a right to be granted asylum. So over the next couple of years, as Europe is no longer the only place in the world that is framing the notions of asylum, you know, there are other countries start to become part of the global international order and more vocal about it, suddenly, the goalposts start to move. And it is no longer convenient for European countries and North American countries to have these more open ended asylum policies, because there's a parallel energy of increasing conflicts, you know, during the Cold War, proxy wars, all of that stuff. But then also that there are new threats that the old order didn't contend with -- climate change and this spike in natural disasters are triggered by climate change. We have a generation that's growing up that doesn't necessarily understand how bad the Second World War was, and how much death and destruction was wreaked sort of all over the world. Didn't we talk a lot about the Holocaust, probably not enough. But then we also think about all of the secondary conflicts that were happening all over the world. And, and so this generation is living in a time whereby their elders have not done a great job of communicating the urgency, why we have these rules of asylum, why we have this need for asylum, but they're facing unprecedented threats that will require asylum. And this is the new world that's not yet born, that we hope that the new world will be a policy, an open door policy to asylum that will reflect the complexity of the world that is coming, that it will not just be war, it will also be climate change. It will also be natural disasters, it will also be internal displacement, all of these new things that the old world wasn't able to accommodate. But in the interregnum, in the period in between the death of the old and the birth of the new, things are going to get complicated, things are going to get difficult and a lot of people are going to get hurt. And this is what I talked about the as the end of asylum, that the countries that have the most power to grant asylum are going out of their way to withdraw it. Whether you're talking about the deaths in the Mediterranean Sea, or the detentions of the Mexico US border, or the high sea interceptions in the South Pacific with Australia, regional sort of hegemons, India, you know, returning Rohingya refugees withdrawing citizenship to millions of people in Assam, Kenya building a wall with Somalia, Morocco, building a wall with the Western Sahara, like the way in which this whole thing is playing out, the signal has been sent from the most powerful country in the world that it's okay to arbitrarily withdraw or curtail the right to asylum. And now everybody's trying to do it. And I don't think people realize how fundamental the right to asylum or the right to seek asylum is to the global order that we live in today. And that is what that essay says, that this thing is so deeply woven into the way in which we think about statehood and state power, the ability to open up our borders to people who think, who seek safety, that idea of our states as being a benevolent thing, is actually part of the reason why we agreed to the social contract, while we agree to live into this international order, because we, we believe that, yes, states can be bad, but look at this benevolent thing that we do when we open our borders to people who are suffering. Once that belief starts to erode, then what's the point of living in the social order? Is it just for suffering sake? Is it just to endure surveillance and policing and all of these things? I just don't think that policymakers realize how fundamental that belief is to the structure. And so what I'm drawing attention to is that that once the right to asylum goes, once this curtailment is complete, once it becomes possible and it is increasingly becoming possible for governments to say let them die, let them die rather than let them in, everything else will start to unravel. And we're already seeing it, we're already seeing it in the inabilities, how people ignore international condemnation for human rights atrocities, our nation states ignore invitations to seek peace, for conflicts for mediation. We've already seen in this region, for example, with governments refusing to subject themselves to regional or international mediation, because they don't believe that the system works in their favor anymore. We are already seeing it in the refusal, WHO, the United States walking away from an international organization in the middle of a pandemic in the middle of a crisis, it's going to have a knock on effect. And I wrote this essay, because I think that people will wake up one morning, most of us will wake up one morning, and we'll look around, and the world will look different in the next couple of years. And we might not understand why the world looks different. Why suddenly, what's happening with vaccine nationalism right now is more the rule than the exception, is happening in more domains than then we thought. And I think that this is where it started. Because we pulled on this one thread that is so woven into everything else, and nobody said anything about it, and nobody did anything about it. And now, it's suddenly everywhere. That whether it's vaccines, or conflict, or climate change, or food security, or whatever. So that's the red flag. That's the alarm that that essay is trying to raise that this is a big deal. What's happening right now, it's a pretty big deal.

Kim Yi Dionne:

I'm so glad that you brought up vaccine nationalism, because I wanted to, I wanted to bring attention to the people in the audience to an essay that you wrote in The Nation, titled, "Vaccine nationalism is patently unjust." And, you know, the way you're talking about an unprecedented threat, right, the way you're talking about justice, I see that reflected in this essay that you've written. And I wonder, you know, especially when you're thinking about the switch from being benevolent about Europeans seeking asylum, so losing that eroding that belief in benevolence when it's people of a different color, who are now coming, right. So I wonder if you could talk about vaccine nationalism as antithetical to justice, but also, if you might connect this essay that you wrote in March for The Nation to your book? And can we talk about this, this vaccine nationalism as racial injustice?

Nanjala Nyabola:

Yeah, you know, the interesting thing is, at least from where I sit, I know that sometimes when people read the work, they might not see the connections. But for me, the connection was almost immediate, that this was an example of what I had been raising in this essay about the end of asylum, that this practice grafted on to a different context, this practice of injustice of selective inclusion of you know, my exclusion on the basis of tenuous factors is replicated in the vaccine nationalism practice that this inward looking, these high walls, high fences is exactly what's happening with the migration conversation. So for me, the reason one of the main reasons why this particular subject has just captured my attention was that, I mean, I've said this to people privately, I've said it on social media, there is no reason to believe that a system that will say let them die on the high seas, let them die on cages in cages on the Mexican border, let them die in these extraterritorial processing centers will then turn around and say, Oh, but let's be nice about the vaccines. There's no reason to believe that a system that will allow death at that scale will then find its benevolence when it comes to a pandemic. And so, for me, that injustice, that connection was almost like a one to one correlation. And that was what brought about the urgency because I think we're going through sort of cycles of moral, international moral crises, and where we keep making these policy arguments. And we keep making these abstract economic arguments, when really what we are facing is a moral crisis and a crisis of justice and a crisis of global justice. I think, especially when I when I put out that article, I got a lot of African people from different parts of Africa saying, Well, you know, our governments should have done this and our governments do that. And I'm, I'm always like, you look, nobody is as quick to criticize African governments than they do wrong as I am. I'm first in line and I will write essays about it. This is not one of those situations, this is a situation whereby the vaccine pipelines, the production pipelines are being compromised by the hyper nationalism of two countries especially, the United States and the United Kingdom. Every single study, every single policy, every single research has said it makes more sense to vaccinate health workers everywhere first, right? And then start thinking about universal vaccination programs. Right now the United States is sitting on not the population of the United States, I think is just over 230 million. So that includes everybody without children, right and the United States is sitting on 1.3 billion doses of vaccines. And even the Biden administration sort of coming in at the end of the Trump administration looked at a policy that had gone into making these vaccines and said, Yeah, this is we're hoarding, this is selfish, this we are the ones who are created this artificial shortage. And the same thing with the United Kingdom and with what's happening with AstraZeneca vaccine in Europe. And so, yeah, it is it is fundamentally a justice issue, because a lot of African countries, certainly not all, but there are a lot of countries, African countries that have said we are willing to pay, we're willing to pay a fair price to get these vaccines, but there is nothing to pay for. Because the supplies have been compromised by this nationalism, there is nothing to buy, there is nothing to to secure. And whatever there is to secure we're being charged more for it. An example that I gave in the essay that European countries are paying $2.15 for the AstraZeneca vaccine, African countries are paying $5.20. Like it's such a one to one correlation that the global injustice that we've allowed to take root when we think about who deserves to live or die in the process of seeking asylum is replicated and how we're thinking about who deserves to live or die when it comes to securing vital medications. We've seen it before. I make this point a lot in my writing about COVID. I'm old enough, I lived through worst of the HIV AIDS pandemic in Kenya. 10% of our population, one in every 10 Kenyans was HIV positive, I've buried many family members to HIV AIDS, there is no reason to believe that it won't happen again. There is no reason to believe that it won't happen again, because it happened 30 years ago, that there was medicine and people needed the medicine and governments chose to protect the IP and the manufacturing profits over protecting human life. So again, just raising the alarm, and inviting people to think deeply about what the global justice conversation is. Of course, it would be great, African countries should have deepened their manufacturing capacity. Of course they should have, and hopefully they will. But that argument to me is the equivalent of fiddling while the Titanic seats, like we can have that debate, and we should have that debate. But right now, in this emergency, if we don't think about this as a global justice issue, we are facing a very difficult future, not just in Africa, right thinking about variants, but think about what's happening in Brazil, that think about what's happening in India, but think about what's happening in Tanzania. Viruses don't respect nationalism. And so to get governments and policymakers to get out of that nationalistic mindset, I think is one of the most urgent global justice issues that we need to contend with right now. And for many of us, self included, it is really a life or death issue. Like it's really like we're being told that there is no plan until 2023. Just hang tight, that's patently injust. I wanted to ask you a bit following on this about the ideas of belonging. In particular, because one of our research priorities, one of the themes that we've been taking out throughout our migrations initiative is at the intersection of mobility and racial justice around the right to stay at home, right, and the ability to not be displaced and dispossessed which can be linked to untenable conditions at home and generate forced migration, whether due to political conflict or forces of continuing imperialism, environmental degradation, resource scarcity, or, or individual and personal familiar circumstances. So generally, with the exception of elite cosmopolitans, most migrants opt to leave their home when staying put becomes untenable. And I'm wondering if when we think about migrations across space from rural to urban migrations as people come to the city to find opportunities or to urban migrations in other countries in the way in which the impetus behind border crossings and leaving, one's home country can be this kind of dispossession or displacement. As you discussed it in your book, the frustration surrounding visa and access to that mobility, governments create often arbitrary categories to limit access and create state sanctioned explosions to push certain types of people out even once they have arrived. So how do you think about these broader connections between belonging, home and mobility within these kinds of edifices of institutional and systemic controls, the idea of the place where you belong, and the idea of being able to belong where you are? Yeah, again, that's a really great question. And it's part of the reason why I have so many essays. You know, when I wrote a book about travel, I think a lot of people pick it up with the expectation that it's going to be an exploration of leaving. But there are a number of essays that are about home, and about how complicated home can be, and how disorienting home can be. And I really underscore that idea that longing has to be about more than just identity, it has to be more than just, I was born here, and therefore I belong here. Because for millions of people around the world, that is just simply not true. I've used it, I think so many of my writings Warsan Shire's quote about sometimes home is the mouth of a shark. Sometimes home is conflict, sometimes for most climate disasters, sometimes home is gendered violence, sometimes home is structural violence. And sometimes home is just a complete lack of opportunity. And our ideas of belonging have to be open to that, because that mobility that comes from that is part of the human story. But there's also an interesting energy that I think and maybe I feel like I didn't have enough space to capture this in the book, which is I think about how how much power is loaded into who gets to move just because they can, and who can only get to move when it is a crisis. And I think about how Dominic Cummings, who is one of the chief advisors of the current Tory administration, and is, in many ways the architect of the hostile immigration policies that the UK is putting into place, his wife is the granddaughter of the last governor of Kenya. So his grandfather in law, left the UK came to Kenya, no visa, no stamp, no nothing, wreaked a tremendous amount of havoc, let's be real. And then his grandson in law is saying Kenyans can't come. So there's also this historical, you know, consequences that I would love, I would have loved to have a little bit more time to get into. And I tried to get into the idea of the ID card in Kenya and how the ID card in Kenya is constructed. But there's something there that I think is also worth thinking about deeper, which is how there's postcolonialism, this life after colonization, and this lack of reparations, and this lack of restitution that came from the the the colonial process is also part of this conversation. But to go back to your question, I think that state building ... Arundhati Roy has a great book that came out last year called Azadi, and it's about state formation in India. And I really highly recommend it because I think she articulates some of the ideas that I sort of get at but didn't really get into as much as I would have wanted. But I think that state building is a fundamentally violent process, because it involves reorganizing our sense of place, our sense of belonging, our sense of community to conform to this constructed political entity, the state, that government, and there's always people who are at the margins of state building, any country that you go to, there are always people who are the margins of state building, who are going to feel the weight of that process and the violence of that process deeper than others. And what I'm alluding to in this idea of visas is how in the process of state building one particular face of bad violence is always gonna be felt at the border. Because the border is where the states have the most power to make their strength felt. Right even in a country like Kenya, which cannot provide water, forget for the whole country for its citizens in Nairobi, cannot provide clean drinking water 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the 4 million people who live in the capital city of Nairobi, but has money to pay for biometrics at the border and for a fence with Somalia and for you know all of these things because the border is where the declaration of statehood can be its most unambiguous. And that is why a lot of states in the process of state formation projects, so much money, power, time, efforts, military capacity, everything to policing their borders, there's an insecurity there that's being addressed. And it's being projected onto individuals. And again, this is one of those essays where I thought to myself, perhaps the most effective way of telling the story is by putting myself in the story, that when you talk about it, the way that I just did, I think a lot of people just kind of blank out, you know, and again, this book is written with the idea of being an invitation for ordinary people who maybe are not in policy circles, who maybe are not specialists, who're not experts to start to think about these things in a very quotidian way. And to feel like, even if I'm not an expert on migration, I somehow feel more empowered to think critically about human mobility. And so to say, you know, look, here is this abstract idea of what state building is, and the border as a site for state formation for state to project their power. And this is what it looks like, in human terms. This is what it looks like, uh, you know, when people are rounded up and put in detention centers, and, you know, are told that you don't belong, you can't come in, you can't go out. So I, I think that the visa regime in the last 30 years, starting in 1990, the end of the Cold War, is becoming such a nightmare of all of these issues of projecting state power, of violence and racism and all of these issues. And we're entering it, we're sleepwalking into a disaster. We're sleepwalking into a disaster where racism will become so normalized and bureaucratized. And if we don't call it what it is, right now, look at what has happened. I give the example of the UK Border regime, or at the Canadian border regime, whereby 100% of all Canadian student applicants for Mozambique were rejected in 2019 100%, of all Somali, the average rejection rate for Canadian visas around the world is 29%. I think in Africa, it's 61%. So there is a routinized rejection of African people in this visa application process. And it gets couched in this bureaucratic terms. And so we don't, we don't use the R word. We don't call it what it is, which is, there's a racism there's a racist logic that is creep that is present, but even creeping into this global visa regime. And hopefully what that essay is done is it's invited people to start to think about things in this way, is the next time you are at the border, it's not just about, you know, they made me get a yellow fever vaccination. But did they humiliate you, did they make you declare your grandmother's assets while you were asking to go there for a two week conference, four day conference, they make you yell how much money you have in the bag in an open room filled with strangers, before they let you in for that conference, because that's what happens to us. They make you get a letter from your husband or your father, show that you are a woman of good character before you went to Bali, on that girl's trip weekend. Those are the kinds of things that I'm hoping people will start to think about a little bit more critically, and to situate into this global context of racial justice and racial injustice.

Kim Yi Dionne:

Thank you for that. I think, since we're, we're past the hour mark, we should we should allow our patient attendees to ask their questions. And I'd like to go ahead and read one on behalf of Tyler. So thanking you for being here and for taking the time. They write, "in several parts of your book, you talk about the contention between working as a black woman in development -- visibility, racism, etc. And the issues within the development sector. The vaccination injustices. Also the impact it had on the arivees in Palermo and the girls in Haiti to see you there awaiting their arrival. What does solidarity, advocacy and support look like from those of us in the diaspora? Social media insight on the possibilities of global black solidarity? How can we assure these online solidarities have offline possibilities? What may be standing in the way?

Nanjala Nyabola:

That's a great question. And I'm not gonna say that I what I'm giving is like the comprehensive 360 answer, but this is just one piece that I think is really important. I think it's important for us to learn about each other. And I think it's important for people to be in conversation with each other outside of the narratives that are serving specific geopolitical functions. So the Haiti example for me was a great example because I write about the ambiguity that I contended with. But everything that I knew about Haiti by the time I went to Haiti was something that was given to me by media, and not even Haitian media, but European media. I mean, look what's happening right now. There's a crisis in Haiti. And Haiti is suddenly everywhere in the news. But what was Haiti before this crisis happened? What was actually happening before that? Most people don't know, what everybody knows is that there are people in the streets in Haiti protesting. And so I think it's important for us to learn each other, and to pick up as much as we can about each other's context so that we are not necessarily trying to speak in place of the other and we're not trying to speak over each other and we're not trying to, to take up room that would, you know, be better occupied by someone else, that we're actually working in dialogue with each other.

Kim Yi Dionne:

There are a couple of more questions in the Q&A. And one is from an anonymous attendee. And I think when I read their question, folks will understand why they're anonymous. They wrote, since the status of immigrants is so liminal in the United States, there's so much reluctance to speak out, I must confess, I've hesitated to speak out in fear that my visa won't be renewed. The smoke and mirrors around the process make it hard to tell whether that fear was reasonable or paranoid. In your view, how can we organize and advocate for our rights when we face varying degrees of uncertainty and threat?

Nanjala Nyabola:

What a question. Um, I'll tell you what, that anxiety is part of the reason why I wrote this book. It's an anxiety that I had throughout the process of writing this book, because some of the ideas that emerged in this book, if you read them, you'll see came when I was a migrant, when I was a foreigner. So there essays that are based on my time in the US, there are essays that I wrote when I was in Italy, there are essays that I wrote when I was in the United Kingdom, even in Haiti, and the arbitrariness of it all, is not something that I think has a simple answer. Well, maybe not a simple answer. But direct answer would be, can there be can we build critical mass? I love what organizations like BAJI, the Black Alliance for Justice and immigration are doing, CCR, the Center for Constitutional Rights. This is just in the US context. Because what they're trying to do is to get this local immigrant alliance going so that people who do have that local privilege, who do have that measure of security that citizenship brings, which is by no means guaranteed, like we're seeing the United Kingdom is a great example whereby they're starting to erode even the right to citizenship that they're starting to deny. You saw the Shamima Begum case, she's a British citizen, joined ISIS, and they've revoked her citizenship even though she was born in the United Kingdom, she grew up in the United Kingdom, but because she's Brown, they have revoked her citizenship rights. So citizenship is increasingly under threat. And so I think that building those immigrants, citizen alliances, educating people who are at home slightly more at home than immigrants, I think, is a starting point for trying to have that conversation become more part of the popular imagination. I think what the DACA immigrants did was incredibly brave. But I don't think that that could have happened if there wasn't a significant number of citizens saying, I will speak up. I will stand with you. So how do we build those alliances, I think is going to be a key part of doing this. I wanted to also ask you in thinking about those mechanisms of coordination, I wanted to come back to thinking about the ways in which migration itself and mobility is something that up ends coordination, right? It's something that can create difficulties in making new ties, right. So when we're thinking about rural to urban migration, or thinking about migration out of country, how do you think that those aspects, you know, how do people connect and how does migration potentially reshape social fabrics? You know, coming back to your own story about, you know, growing up in Nairobi and seeing Nairobi as your home and knowing Nairobi, like the back of your hand, not feeling connected to the village of your father, right? How do migrations reshape the social fabric and how can we think about that potential for advocacy and collective action with those those types of mobility? You know, there's two essays about Nairobi in this book, and one of the reasons why Nairobi has always been intellectually and personally fascinating for me is not just because I'm from here, is because it represents an outgrowth, if you will, of the settler states, the settler colony. Because the settler colony really is about displacement, so my family circumstances are about the settler colony, is about a system that said that, for example, only black men were allowed to live in cities and white and black men were supposed to live in cities and are working and are enslaved doing whatever white families and their families had to stay in what we still colloquially call the reserves. And the reserves, meaning people use it right now in language, but they don't realize that reserve literally meant labor reserve. And that the ID system, the kipande system was a way of creating a pipeline of forced labor from the reserves to the urban center. So Nairobi, represents this very weird historical art. And I similar cities will probably be Harare probably be Johannesburg, whereby there is a generation there, two, three generations of people whose presence in the specific town or city is a consequence of violent migration and violent upheaval and human mobility, who have crafted a sense of identity and belonging within this urban context that challenges the norms of identity and belonging that happened elsewhere. So when people ask me where I'm from, I say I'm from Nairobi. I know what they want me to say. They want me to talk about my ethnic identity, they want me to talk about where my my family's from, but being third generation Nairobian, this is an identity that I claim for myself that confounds this national discourse on ethnicity, and a lot of Europeans will tell you the same thing, that this is the only place in Kenya, where you have a critical mass of people who are drawn from different ethnic backgrounds, and yet feel like they have more claim to belonging and to rights and etc, etc, than the"reserves." And I think, with rural urban migration more broadly, without that violent context, because what makes that possible is the violent breaking apart of the community, right? It is young men, especially being being put in this forced labor pipeline and being brought to urban areas. In contemporary times, you don't necessarily have that violent break, but you do have this energy of seeking opportunity and seeking space. And I always find myself wondering, is there room in this sense of being from Nairobi, being from Johannesburg being from Algiers being from, you know, the migrant, the settler colony city, is there room for this new other way of belonging where people bring that rural energy, sort of notions of identity and belonging into the urban context. And I think Nairobi is an example of it is possible, like it can be done. But migration necessarily brings with it a dislocation and what's happening with a lot of rural urban migration to Kenya, same thing that's happening with international migration, people seek out community, they look for the people that they know, they come at the invitation of someone from family, they come and then stay with someone, and so you end up with people in concentrated in areas where they are acting as satellites of the broader ethnic group that they've left behind. And in a country where ethnic polarization can, and ethno nationalism is a political issue, it's a thing. What we've seen happen is the replication of some of these broader dynamics in a local scale, or whether you're talking about post election violence, and we're talking about even gang violence and other types of localized violence. So we did these reports, I was one of the editorial team on the report for the International Organization for Migration on Africa's migration story. And we had essays from all over the continent from all over the world really looking at different aspects of migration. And one of the essays is about specifically about rural and urban rural urban migration in Africa and health and looking at how rural urban migration actually serves African cities actually enriches African cities. And I think it's important to reframe, we've we tend to look at rural urban migration as strictly connected to the labor question. But I think it might also be interesting to reframe it as a question of what does it do for our cities? How does it enrich the way our cities function? How does it enrich our cultural life and our social lives in our cities? And I think that essay does a particularly good job of that. The essay, the collection is freely available. I mean, you can download it from the IOM Africa office website. But overall, look, I just think that people have always moved. And I think it's important to keep making it possible for people to move because I think it's better for all of us, when people are able to go where home is not the mouth of a shark and and to create opportunities for them to build new homes.

Eleanor Paynter:

Many thanks to Nanjala Nyabola for sharing her work and her words with us. Traveling while Black is out with her publishers and available widely. Thanks also to Dr. Kim Yi Dionne and Dr. Rachel Beatty Riedl for collaborating on this mashup episode. You can hear more from our conversation with Nanjala on episode 113 of Ufahamu Africa, and we'll link to that on our episode page. Stay tuned for more content in the coming months including our second season heading your way this fall. Thanks for listening to Migrations a world on the move, a podcast by Global Cornell's migrations global Grand Challenge, an across disciplinary and multi species initiative that studies how the movements of people animals, microbes, resources, ideas more shape our world. You can learn more about the initiative at migrations.cornell.edu where you can also find relevant links from this episode. Follow us at global Cornell and with the hashtag Cornell migrations. This podcast is hosted by Eleanor Paynter migrations postdoc at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and produced by Megan DeMint. Much of the podcast was produced at Cornell University on the traditional homelands of the Cayuga nation. And we recognize Cayuga nation sovereignty and the indigenous peoples who have lived and continue to live on this land. Our music is Basically Really by Steve Fossett. Migrations a world on the move is available on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts and Stitcher.