A review by shonatiger
Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move by Nanjala Nyabola
5.0
Easy enough to rate: 5/5, but how to explain?
It's a book written with great passion, and it carries you along. But as author explains at the beginning, she's coming from a place of privilege as she writes; and that comes across throughout the book, down to ways she sees, perhaps.
Then, I struggled to tell who the audience of the book was to be: Academics? Humanitarian workers? Westerners? Privileged Africans who travel? That kind of distracted me, especially when I came to dense passages full of jargon and high concepts. In that sense, not the most accessible book.
However, there's a lot to think about in here, and it's very much worth reading, not least because it's an important voice, and an important perspective: a black woman, about travel, race, politics, Africa, xenophobia, writing, and much else.
It's a book written with great passion, and it carries you along. But as author explains at the beginning, she's coming from a place of privilege as she writes; and that comes across throughout the book, down to ways she sees, perhaps.
Then, I struggled to tell who the audience of the book was to be: Academics? Humanitarian workers? Westerners? Privileged Africans who travel? That kind of distracted me, especially when I came to dense passages full of jargon and high concepts. In that sense, not the most accessible book.
However, there's a lot to think about in here, and it's very much worth reading, not least because it's an important voice, and an important perspective: a black woman, about travel, race, politics, Africa, xenophobia, writing, and much else.