For decades, the name Toni Kan has been associated with almost all literary genres. From poetry to literary fiction to short stories and biography, Kan has done it all. The evidence of his versatility is all over his book Riding the Storm: The Untold Story of Africa’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Though not a novel, it unfolds with the confidence and sweep of one. Drawing on his gifts as a poet, novelist, short story writer and biographer, Kan tells the story of Africa’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic using the tools of literary fiction: scene, character, tension and momentum. What emerges is a narrative that reads less like a policy chronicle and more like a carefully structured human drama, one shaped by urgency, uncertainty and the weight of responsibility at a moment when the world seemed to be unraveling.
The book moves, in most cases, as a novel would, following people rather than abstractions, decisions rather than statistics. At its core are four figures, three men and a woman, whose paths converge at the height of the crisis: Strive Masiyiwa, John Nkengasong, Benedict Oramah and Vera Songwe. And there is South African President Cyril Ramaphosa playing a key supporting role.
Kan introduces them not as distant power brokers but as individuals already marked by earlier skirmishes with another health emergency; Africa’s deadly encounter with Ebola, and therefore unusually prepared for what was to come. When the pandemic bares its fangs, the reader is shown where each of them was, what they were doing, and how swiftly their worlds are reordered by a threat that disdained borders.
The author lays bare how Masiyiwa, an industrialist and philanthropist, was drawn into a continental role that required speed, persuasion and moral clarity. He shows us how Nkengasong, the scientist who operated from the nerve center of Africa’s public health infrastructure, had to translate data into strategy while racing against time. We are presented with how Oramah brought the language of finance into a space dominated by fear and scarcity, mobilising capital as a life-saving instrument. And the book unveils Songwe, who, grounded in development economics, treated the crisis as a health emergency but also as an economic and social reckoning. Together, they form the backbone of the story, as committed continental actors navigating impossible constraints.
The book shows Nkengasong as a man accustomed to urgency. As head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he is portrayed as both scientist and translator, turning epidemiological complexity into continental coordination. The pages linger on his early days of the crisis, when data was scarce, testing capacity uneven, with fear moving faster than facts. Nkengasong’s challenge was not merely to understand the virus, but to persuade governments to trust a shared framework of response. His voice carried the authority of science, but also the burden of history. Africa had long been spoken for in global health conversations. Here, he spoke for himself and for a continent unwilling to be managed from afar.
We discover that where Nkengasong provided legitimacy, Masiyiwa supplied momentum. The book treats the latter’s appointment as African Union Special Envoy on COVID-19 not as a ceremonial gesture but as an admission: bureaucracy alone would not move fast enough because Masiyiwa’s instincts were shaped by markets and systems, not protocols.
Wars require money; this is where Oramah’s role deepens the narrative. The book portrays him as operating in a quieter register, away from press briefings and televised summits. As President of Afreximbank, Oramah understood that solidarity without financing is mere performance. Vaccine deals demanded guarantees, credit, and risk absorption at a scale few African institutions had ever attempted. Through the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust (AVAT), Oramah’s bank became the lever propelling aspiration and execution. The book is clear-eyed here: without Afreximbank’s balance sheet, Africa’s pooled procurement strategy would have collapsed under the weight of its own ambition.
If Oramah handled the numbers, Songwe, the book shows us, handled the horizon. Her chapters seem the most reflective in the book, concerned less with the next shipment than with the next decade. As Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), Songwe is shown persistently widening the frame, refusing to allow COVID-19 to be treated as a temporary disruption. For her, vaccine access was inseparable from economic dignity. The book credits her with asking inconvenient questions: What does recovery mean if manufacturing remains external? What does resilience look like if health security depends on charity? Songwe’s contribution lay in connecting emergency response to structural reform, in reminding leaders that survival without transformation is merely postponement.
Around them move other characters, aides, technocrats and political leaders, including Ramaphosa, whose support and authority reinforced the collective effort.
Kan pays attention to these supporting actors and fringe player, showing how large outcomes are shaped by coordination, trust and persistence rather than lone brilliance. He also draws clear lines between past and present, reminding the reader that Africa’s relatively swift and coordinated COVID-19 response did not emerge from nowhere, but was built on institutional memory, hard lessons and relationships forged during earlier epidemics.
From Kan’s telling, we see that pandemics do not arrive with instruction manuals, they arrive as rupture of routines, of borders, of certainty.
We see that COVID-19 did not simply test Africa’s health systems; it exposed the scaffolding beneath power, coordination, and trust. This book understands that truth, which is why it resists the temptation to count ventilators or tally infection curves. Instead, it follows people. And through their intersecting paths, it tells a story about leadership under siege at the heart of which is a quiet insistence that Africa’s COVID-19 response was not improvised heroism but deliberate construction.
We find in the telling not a tale of saviours than of builders, working to assemble something the continent had barely quite possessed before: a functional architecture of collective action.
In telling this important story, Riding the Storm becomes more than a record of events. It is a meditation on leadership under pressure, on Africa’s capacity for self-organisation, and on what it means to act decisively when history accelerates. Kan’s prose allows the reader to feel the anxiety of the early days, the urgency of closed-door negotiations, and the quiet triumph of systems that held when many expected them to fail. It is this human, narrative-driven approach that gives the book its power, transforming a global catastrophe into a story of agency, collaboration and continental resolve.
What further gives the book its weight is its vivid portrayal of how the actions of the major and minor characters interlock. None of them, the author shows, could have succeeded alone. Science without logistics would have stalled. Procurement without financing would have failed. Financing without economic vision would have been shortsighted.
***Olukorede S. Yishau is the author of two novels: In The Name of Our Father and After The End; a collection of short stories: Vaults of Secrets; and a travel book: United Countries of America and Other Travel Tales. He is concluding work on his third novel. He lives In Houston, Texas.
