Riding the Storm: The Untold Story of Africa’s Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic by Toni Kan, Narrative Landscape Press: Lagos & Nairobi, 2024, 245pp
A novelist, poet and biographer, Toni Kan is one of the most consistent of his generation in contemporary Nigerian writing. He is also a public relations man. A well-fostered reputation has endured for long among the literary smart set in Lagos and Abuja. His latest book Riding the Storm: The Untold Story of Africa’s Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic is sure to balloon that reputation beyond his country of birth Nigeria. President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa is a fan already, volunteering a concise and ecstatic foreword to the book. The Business Council of Africa honoured it with a second runner-up prize as Africa Business Book of the Year. It is not hard to see why.
Approached for a possible publication on the subject, Toni Kan made a self avowal: “I was born to write that book.” Before then, he had a chance encounter with a management staff of Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, then a spell with the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development both engagements not unconnected with Covid-19. All through that period, he’d become “the man in charge of the Ministry’s Covid-19 communications to a country of over 200 million people who were confused, perplexed and panicked by the pandemic running riot in our midst.” So, when the pitch came, finally, to write a book on Africa’s response to Covid-19, he considered it a story falling plum in his lap.
Under such circumstances, writers seldom disappoint. Toni Kan does not. Riding the Storm is at once a comprehensive and compelling investigative essay of a continent up against a pandemic others thought it couldn’t survive. That it survived at all is a rare feat of achievement. How that survival came about is less because of reliance on outside help and more because of looking inwards, capitalising on the ingenuity, resilience and resourcefulness of Africans themselves.
Involved in the salvific mission were key players in banking, science and technology, humanitarian services, international organisations within and outside Africa, heads of governments and ministers, sundry professionals in the public and private sector, a retinue of aides/ assistants working round the clock to halt the virus on its track and also provide a lifeline to businesses and citizens. Drawing largely from interviews, access to archival materials and extensive research, Toni Kan’s narrative dwells on the spectre of a virus posing an existential threat to humanity, specifically Africa spanning three years from 2020. It also covers a raft of high-profile meetings between business execs and heads of governments in Africa, calls to their international counterparts and CEOs of pharmaceutical companies all of it geared towards one objective: saving Africa from Covid-19.
Toni Kan’s story begins in sequential order from the moment Africa’s patient zero from China landed at Cairo International Airport Egypt on 14 February 2020 through the initial panic, reception, proactive measures and response to the virus by governments across the continent. There are occasional flashbacks to Africa’s experience with deadly viruses in the past, Ebola Virus Disease, for instance. Still, readers do not lose track of the author’s fascinating account from start to finish.
The rupture Covid-19 caused back then is fading gradually from public memory, now that the world has moved on (as it should.) Riding the Storm brings it all back in vivid clarity. In the early stages of pre-vaccines, the virus surprised the entire world like an unsolvable medical mystery. Contracting it was just breaths away since it was airborne, especially in the company of infected persons. Preventive measures were frequent use of sanitisers, wearing face masks and social distancing in public places. Even so, many succumbed easily as the virus decimated populations on its relentless march from the Orient, particularly those in climates with arctic conditions.
The infection rate and casualty figures rose steadily, approaching apocalyptic proportions, prompting Tedros Adhanon Ghebreyesus, Director General of WHO, to declare Corona virus a public health emergency of international concern. A mandatory lock down followed worldwide, disrupting and paralysing human activities for a long time afterwards. Most countries banned public gatherings. Some permitted no more than 50 people at any one time. Mass movement and transportation of any kind ground to a halt within countries and across borders as if denying, as if robbing humanity of the very essence of existence – mobility.
There was, indeed, an existential threat to humans on planet earth at the time, reasonably expected to be several notches higher in Africa. Notorious for its unreliable, overstretched health facilities and infrastructure, others looked on the continent the same way affluent people rate the survival chances of impoverished neighbours battling a lingering medical crisis. Expected death rates ranged from five, six to seven digits, not to mention its overwhelming impact on an already wobbly economy.
Despite such gloomy predictions by reputable institutions like London School of Economics and individuals, notably Melinda Gates, Africa pulled off a remarkable feat of resistance when its very survival was at stake. Part of the reason for that, in the author’s reckoning, is the strategic preparedness and heroic effort of the principals leading the war against Covid-19. They include Cameroonian virologist, pioneer director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, John Nkengasong, his compatriot Vera Songwe, Under Secretary General of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and Nigerian academic, trade finance banker Benedict Oramah, president and chairman Board of Directors of Africa Export-Import Bank. Zimbabwean billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist, Strive Masiyiwa, played the role of a genial and avuncular coordinator of this group whose work schedule would soon be altered as the virus itself disrupted lives all around the world.
In their common quest to save Africa, and though separated by distance and time with meetings convened mostly virtually, the four, according to Toni Kan, “found themselves drawn inexorably towards each other, as though destiny was a puppet master tugging at unseen strings.” Hovering not far from them is the paternal figure of Ramaphosa himself who was Chairperson of African Union at the time. Elected AU Chair only weeks after Covid-19 outbreak, Ramaphosa would put all his weight and resources behind the battle against the strange virus blowing like an ill wind across the continent. At his urging, for instance, special envoys were appointed, “real African heavyweights,” comprising Abderrhmane Benkhalfa, Donald Kaberuka, Trevor Manuel, Masiyiwa, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Tidjane Thiam, two or three of them also members of AVATT (African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team.) Leveraging on his contact with other world leaders and CEOs of pharmaceutical companies, Ramaphosa made that urgent call, when necessary, to unblock bureaucratic bottlenecks in purchasing or supplying vaccines to the continent. Together with the tireless effort of the principals, Ramaphosa’s charismatic leadership galvanised many of his colleagues in the AU to action, many of them personally taking part in deliberations online.
Central to Africa’s successful campaign were the three Ts proposed by the scientist Nkengasong to track, test and treat. It was also imperative, despite the lock down, for the 55-member countries of the AU to “coordinate resources, collaborate to build institutions, cooperate across borders to build capacity and communicate to share gained knowledge and experience.”
It is not for nothing Toni Kan devotes an entire chapter to Ebola Virus when it ravaged three adjoining West African countries (Guinea Conakry, Liberia and Sierra Leone) in 2014. In his rendering, it presaged the resilience that would come to play in the fight against Covid-19, a legacy, the author calls it. And sure it was. Recruiting Masiyiwa’s support to tackle Ebola back then, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma famously reminded the Zimbabwean of the need for self-reliance. “We cannot have people from outside coming in to solve our problems. We need our healthcare workers.” Masiyiwa lent her a sympathetic ear. More than a half decade later, the holdovers from the medical facilities on the ground including hundreds of community health care workers were redeployed, repurposed to combat the new disease.
The series of interminable meetings convened in as many venues across the continent do not escape the author’s attention. Ideas discussed and decisions taken at such meetings would form the basis for several intervention platforms, programmes. Under the competent guidance of Oramah and his equally competent staff, Afreximbank stepped forward with a number of relief packages such as Pandemic Trade Impact Mitigation Facility (PATIMFA) to provide financial support to African governments, central banks and private companies as palliatives to the financial, economic and health shocks of the pandemic. It was a humanitarian gesture no doubt but there was also a logic to it which Oramah himself alluded to rhetorically: “A bank cannot allow its customers to die. To whom will it then provide services?”
Likewise, dozens of adhoc committees sprung up as part of Africa’s response to the virus. There was COPREFA – Covid-19 Pandemic Response Facility to fund the freight of supplies. (Ethiopian Airlines played a vital role as p-freighters during the lock down.) The number of such committees and subcommittees in Riding the Storm boggles the mind, almost getting an impatient reader woozy. Painstaking author that he is, Toni Kan makes sense of it all, following and recounting minutiae of such meetings to propel his narrative.
What also drives Toni Kan’s narrative is presenting Riding the Storm more or less as a work of fiction. In the hands of a less gifted writer, the book may have turned out differently crammed with boring data as you find in scientific reports. Instead, there is a novelistic touch by Toni Kan in describing people not only physically but their idiosyncrasies and sartorial proclivities as well. Conservative by nature, Masiyiwa is a “slightly built man, balding” with zero tolerance for unethical business practices. Oramah has a “soft stutter.” Kwabena Ayirebi, a staff of Afreximbank, has the “kind smile of a happy man.” And the places: Cairo is a “city of a thousand minarets.” And the peculiar turns of phrase: of keeping the African heads of governments as “a united choir singing from the same pages of a continental hymn book.” Elsewhere, he refers to one successful outcome as “preparation receiving a bear hug from opportunity.” Passages like that dot the book here and there giving the impression of an author who is clearly a verbivore.
From conception to execution, Riding the Storm comes as close to any publication on what Pan-Africanism is or ought to be. Two proverbs – one on the jacket and another preceding the foreword – reinforce that view. “When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.” The second, an oblique reference to telling African stories by Africans, goes thusly: “Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero.”
The implication is clear enough: Left to outsiders, the result is fairly easily predictable. In 2014, for Instance, New York-based media empire Conde Nast published two separate stories in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker on the outbreak and management of Ebola virus in the affected regions of West Africa. Under a stereotype title, “Hell in the Hot Zone” by Jeffrey Stern was published in VF on 11 September 2014. On 20 October the same year, another followed by Richard Preston in TNY with an apocalyptic headline “The Ebola Wars.” Stories told by Africans on and about the continent are likely to be not so condescending or unflattering. “I care that people of the Black world tell our own stories and call ourselves into being with nuance and dignity,” publisher of Cassava Republic Bibi Bakare-Yusuf declared in a recent interview. “And I care just as much that we own and control the infrastructure of the imagination: how ideas, words and worlds meet and circulate.”
Nothing could be truer of Riding the Storm, the author and publisher Narrative Landscape Press with offices in Lagos and Nairobi. An indigenous publishing company helmed by Eghosa Imasuen, writer and medical practitioner, Narrative Landscape Press boasts of more than a dozen titles by writers across Africa. In the 2025 catalogue, there is How to Write About Africa (2024) by late Kenyan Binyavanga Wainana, So the Path Does not Die (2023) by Pede Hollist, a Sierra Leonean. Ghanaian Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small World (2023) makes the list just as In the Company of Men (2021) by Veronique Tadjo from Cote de’Ivoire. There is, of course, a gaggle of Nigerians including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Dream Count (2025.)
For Toni Kan, Riding the Storm has a special significance not only in writing the book itself but the whole process leading to it. He refers to it in his intro as “serendipity and coincidence,” which he references in a quote attributed to onetime African American envoy to the UN Andrew Young: “Coincidence is God’s way of being anonymous.” And that fate, providence or whatever you might want to call it possibly has a faint echo in the tattoo of Psalm 16:6 on Toni Kan’s arm: “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.”
***Michael Jimoh is a Lagos-based journalist