Strange and Difficult Times: Notes on a Global Pandemic

by Nanjala Nyabola

"We had hoped that we lived in a world that would rally in the face of a common threat. Instead, we found that the collective good is abandoned for the economic and political benefit of a handful of people, and nationalist myths of exceptionalism rob billions of their right to survive."

Strange and Difficult Times is a new essay collection looking at the biases, assumptions and moral failures in Western responses (both individual and collective, psychological and practical) to the 'crises' of the early twenty-first century. Nanjala Nyabola focusses on the big crisis of the current moment, Covid-19, and the world that it may leave in its wake.

Condemning the ways in which the pandemic has exacerbated global inequalities, she argues against the lazy lens that attributes agency to the West and subjecthood to Africans and others in the Global South-drawing all of the aspects of the pandemic together into one structurally racist and ethically indifferent political and economic order. This is the Global South writing back against a system that wasn't designed to include or benefit it, in the voice of a representative with a keen understanding and first-hand experience of living and thinking within that system.

Nyabola offers reflections on the future of the state, the purpose of government and the dangers of post-truth democracy. She presents the deepening of inequality via the 'new normal' of the 'post-Covid world', but which is in fact divided into societies that are post-Covid and those that have not been permitted to protect themselves and recover. And she takes a historical look at how African countries, governments, peoples and individuals have been treated and written about during past pandemics, including HIV/AIDS in the 80s and 90s, Ebola in the 2010s, and Spanish flu a century ago.

Genres: Africa, Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2023

Reviews

[Tutankhamun18 · Rating 5 out of 5]

“For African millennials like myself who are part of the roughly three-quarters of Kenya's population that is below the age of thirty-five, our defining generational marker. is not avocado toast or home ownership. We are the HIV/AIDS generation that destigmatised and adapted to the omnipresence of that disease. We are the first generation for whom sex without condoms was ever an option, even sometimes with the person vou are married to. We are the generation that had to get com-
nil dogs as candle orderontat condom use, or who saw the purple and fortable with people coming into our classrooms with wooden yellow billboards for Voluntary Counselling and Testing for HIV/
AIDS proliferate on every street corner in our hometowns. Once. you have re-organised your whole life around the threat and presence of HIV/AIDS, putting on a mask is not something worth fighting about.”

This is a very powerful essay collection by a Kenyan joirnalist that sheds light on the 2020 pandemic year from the Kenyan and African perspective.

It is divided into three sections; Life, Death & Normal. The Section called Life was the best, but all fantastic and thought provoking to me and likely other western readers like myself.

Chapter 1: Reasoning by Analogy - How Kenya dealt with pandemic, open questions about the nature of knowledge (science, western practices vs. traditional practice) and how colonial governments have distorted the past through the approach to recording data

Chapter 2: Lockdown - Lockdown as power and how it perpetuated racist and unequal policies that verg much reflect colonial history and Kenya as a city

Chapter 3: Masking - Mask wearing in Kenya

Chapter 4: Unmasking

Chapter 5: Waiting to be saved - History, power and the record of history in the comtext of Africa, public health & pandemics

Chapter 6: Airborne - Power, indoor space, control of aur and the cop-out of calling people “magical”

⭐️Chapter 7: Global - Global responses mean the west, Regiomal responses didfer, EU fail, Africa worked well due to fear of repeating Ebola (where they did not coordinate)

Chapter 8: Policing the Pandemic - covid 19 and police brutality (Kenya and Global perspective)

Chapter 9: The fears of a global minority

Chapter 10: The art of asking useful questions - questions about Africa and the West and how they were/were not affected by covid 19

Chapter 11: Death and Funeral Announcements - The low covid 9 death rates in Africa

Chapter 12: Disposable People - Capitalism, the desponsability of bodies and leaving the old & young behind

Chapter 13: Vocabularies - Covid, power, medicine, choices and those worth saving

Chapter 14: The fears of the other

Chapter 15: Omicron - Omicron and the perception of Africa

Chapter 16: The numbers on that - Vaccines as a commercial product

Chapter 17: Survive

Chapter 18: Long covid

Chapter 19: Patently Unjust - Global vaccine politics

Chapter 20: Necessary, Righteous Rage

[Mike Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nanjala tells this story properly. A short and sharp indictment of response of "the West" to the pandemic with regard to the injustices that were perpetrated, as well as those that were exacerbated. The book also tells the story of the response to the pandemic in African countries, a story that is often, as Nanjala points out, either lost or misrepresented in the Western media. Often we find that the African response to the pandemic has been in many ways more robust than that of "the West", despite facing an uphill battle due to aforementioned inequities.

A lot of the material was not new for me because I follow Nanjala on Twitter, but I am giving it 5 stars because I feel strongly that this book needs to be read and heard. Nanjala writes with a sharp, focused anger that brings clarity to the pandemic rather than obscuring with rage. It is this focused, clarifying anger and sharp insights on the truth about Africa and the pandemic that deserve to be widely heard.

[Claire Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nanjala Nyabola's Strange and Difficult Times: Notes on a Global Pandemic is a powerful and insightful collection of essays that examines the social, political, and economic implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in Africa. Throughout the book, Nyabola challenges the dominant narratives about the pandemic, particularly the way in which Africa has been portrayed. It is a book that will stay with you long after you have finished reading it.

[Guchu · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit...basic, I think it's for a variety of reasons: I had already read some of the essays and there isn't much more than what is in the popular public domain. I was hoping for deeper analysis/data/patterns and not just the impressions I already have as an African in Africa during the pandemic.

[Edina · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pivotal, critical account about the COVID-19 pandemic. An important piece of history...ensuring that OUR story is told properly and that all players are accounted for.