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admin “It takes a village for most causes to succeed. Let’s learn to cooperate rather than compete. Let’s learn to pool resources together than pulling resources apart. Together, we can do more. Apart, we will do less.”
The name Toni Kan has, for decades, moved with ease across the landscape of literature. Poetry, literary fiction, short stories and biography. There are few genres he has not entered, and fewer still that he has not impacted with his distinctive voice. His book, ‘Riding the Storm’, bears quiet but convincing testimony to his range. In it, his versatility is not announced, but revealed, page by page, in the confidence of a writer who has mastered many forms and knows exactly when and how to use them.
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 coming apart.
The book moves, in most cases, as a novel would, following people rather than abstractions, decisions rather than statistics. At its centre 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 battles, especially Africa’s 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 is, what they are doing, and how swiftly their worlds are reordered by a threat that respects no borders.
The author lays bare how Masiyiwa, an industrialist and philanthropist, was drawn into a continental role that requires speed, persuasion and moral clarity. He shows us how Nkengasong, the scientist who operates from the nerve centre of Africa’s public health infrastructure, had to translate data into strategy while racing against time. We are shown 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 how Songwe, who is grounded in development economics, treated the crisis as a health emergency that is also an economic and social reckoning. Together, they form the backbone of the story, not as committed actors navigating impossible constraints.
The book shows Nkengasong as a man accustomed to urgency. As head of the Africa Centres 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, and fear moved 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 see that where Nkengasong provided legitimacy, Masiyiwa supplied momentum. The book treats his 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. Masiyiwa’s instincts were shaped by markets and systems, not protocols.
Because systems require money, and 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 head of Afreximbank, Oramah understands that solidarity without financing is performance. Vaccine deals demanded guarantees, credit, and risk absorption at a scale few African institutions had ever attempted. Through the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust, Oramah’s bank became the hinge between 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, 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 reinforce the collective effort.
Kan pays attention to these supporting roles, 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 instructions, that 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, and it 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 see less 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 how it vividly paints how the roles 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 short-sighted.
My final take: It takes a village for most causes to succeed. Let’s learn to cooperate rather than compete. Let’s learn to pool resources together than pulling resources apart. Together, we can do more. Apart, we will do less.
