The First Black Woman to Visit Every Country in the World

The flag in Jessica Nabongo's photograph from the Seychelles is small and a little crumpled, the kind of thing you would buy in a souvenir shop, and the moment it touches the sand she is laughing rather than crying, which is what almost every interviewer has remarked on since. The smile is unforced. Behind her the water is a flat tropical green and her father, Charles, who had flown out from Detroit to surprise her on the last day, is half-hidden in the corner of the frame. She is thirty-five years old. She is wearing a yellow dress made for her by a small designer in Uganda, the country her parents had emigrated from in the 1970s. She has just completed, by her own count, a journey of almost three years that took her to a hundred and ninety-five sovereign nations, and the headline is not really the record. The headline is who she is. No Black woman in recorded history had ever before been documented standing in every country in the world, and on 6 October 2019, on that Seychelles beach, that thing had quietly stopped being true.

Jessica was born in Detroit in 1984 to Ugandan immigrants. Her parents had arrived in the United States the way many African professionals of that generation arrived, with two suitcases, an offer of postgraduate study, and the assumption that they would return home after a year or two and never did. Charles became a pharmacist. Her mother, Sarah, worked in healthcare administration. Jessica and her three siblings grew up in a Detroit suburb that was almost entirely white, in a house full of Ugandan food and Ugandan friends and a permanent low-grade conversation about identity that ran in the background of every dinner. They were African, the parents insisted. They were also American. They were, equally, Black, in a country that had its own complicated and often violent definitions of what that word meant. Jessica has said in many interviews that the long international project of the late twenty-tens grew, on some level, out of a childhood spent trying on different versions of herself in the mirror and being told, by both sides, that none of them quite fit.

Her first solo international trip was a one-week visit to Uganda at fourteen, with an aunt as chaperone, and the second was a school exchange to Spain at nineteen. After college at St. John's University she joined the United Nations Development Programme in Rome as a junior consultant, then moved to Benin for two years to work on agricultural projects, then to Tokyo to teach English. By the time she was thirty she had already visited around sixty countries, mostly through work, mostly with no particular plan. The idea for what she would call Catch Me If You Can crystallised in a single afternoon in 2017 in a friend's apartment in Detroit, when a casual count of her passport stamps came to ninety-five and she realised, with the calm certainty that characterised most of her bigger decisions, that she could be the first. There had been Black men who had completed every-country travel by then. There had been white women. The intersection was open.

The funding plan was modest. Jessica had savings from years of consultancy work. She set up a small LLC, secured one main sponsor in the form of a luxury travel company called Lonely Whale, picked up smaller equipment partnerships, and accepted that the rest would come from her own pocket. She set herself a public deadline of completing by her thirty-fifth birthday and announced it on Instagram and at a public talk in Detroit, partly because she wanted the pressure of a deadline and partly because she had learned from older friends in the marketing industry that publicly stated goals are harder to abandon. From spring 2017 onwards she travelled almost continuously, with brief returns to Detroit and to her apartment in Mexico City, where she had been living off and on since 2016. Her two younger siblings ran her social-media accounts when she was in low-connectivity countries. Her father kept a wall map at home with red pins for the visited countries and gold pins for the ones still to go.

There were countries that broke her. Tonga was the first time she cried on the trip. She had landed late on a Sunday, in a country where almost everything closes for the Sabbath, with no functional bank card and a hotel that had double-booked her room. She slept on a bench outside the airport with her backpack as a pillow and woke at dawn to a stray dog licking her face. Iran was hard in a different way, and the small kindnesses there, the family in Esfahan who insisted she take their daughter's bed, the elderly Tehran taxi driver who refused to take her money when he discovered she was visiting alone, became some of her most-shared stories on the road. Eritrea, where she had to wait six days for a transit visa, she described as the longest week of the project. Somalia, where she travelled with two private security contractors for forty-eight hours of permitted Mogadishu sightseeing, was the country in which she was most acutely aware of how visible a Black American woman with a foreign passport was on a street in the Horn of Africa.

The most photographed leg of Catch Me If You Can, predictably, was the African one, and Jessica has been candid in print about the fact that for many of her followers it was the first time they had ever seen the continent presented as a place of beauty rather than charity. The Instagram photographs from that stretch are unmistakable. The yellow dress in front of the colonial pastel facades of Saint-Louis in Senegal. The blue and white headwrap in front of Lake Kivu in Rwanda. The careful, almost editorial portraits with old men in Conakry and with the queen mother of a chieftaincy in Ghana. She had hired, for several weeks of the African swing, a young Cape Verdean photographer named Elton Anjos, partly because she wanted images of the higher quality that her project deserved and partly because she wanted, very deliberately, to put money back into the local creative industries that mainstream travel media had so consistently ignored.

The criticism arrived, as it always does. The first wave came from other every-country travellers, some of them white men, who pointed out that several previous women had visited every country before her, even if none had been Black. The second wave came from inside the African diaspora, with some commentators arguing that a globe-trotting Detroit-born consultant could not fairly claim to represent African women, most of whom would never be allowed an American passport in the first place. Jessica's responses, over and over, were patient and unrhetorical. She had never claimed to be the first woman, she pointed out. She had claimed to be the first documented Black woman, which was a statement of historical fact rather than of personal merit. As for representation, she said, the point of the project was not to speak for anyone. The point was to put one specific kind of body in front of one specific kind of camera, in front of one specific kind of audience, who had been allowed to grow up assuming that travel was a thing white people did, and to disturb that picture.

The hardest day of the trip was not in Mogadishu or in Pyongyang or in any of the obvious candidates. It was in Lourdes, France, in 2018. She had detoured from a working week in Toulouse to spend a single afternoon at the Catholic pilgrimage site, where her aunt had once been before she died of cancer in her thirties. Jessica had lit a candle at the grotto for her aunt, walked to the riverside, sat down on a bench and not been able to get up for an hour. She wrote, later that night in her hotel room, that she had not realised until then how much of the project was unfinished mourning. Her aunt had been the first person in the family to travel widely and would never herself see the countries her niece was now collecting. Some of the work of Catch Me If You Can, she wrote, was simply finishing journeys that other women in her family had been forced to abandon.

The final stretch, in late September 2019, was the Seychelles, and the surprise that her family had quietly engineered for months was that her father, Charles, would fly out to meet her there. He had not told her. She arrived from Mauritius on the morning of 5 October, was met at the airport by her local fixer and driven to a small resort on Mahe, where her father stood barefoot in the lobby with his arms folded and a barely contained smile. The photographs from that evening are some of the few in the entire archive of the project in which Jessica is plainly not posing. The next morning, at low tide on a beach the resort staff had cleared for them, she planted the small souvenir flag and her father took the photograph. It is the photograph that ran the next week in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and most of the international press. She was thirty-five years old. The country count was a hundred and ninety-five.

The aftermath of Catch Me If You Can has been quieter than the trip. Jessica wrote a book called The Catch Me If You Can, photographed and published by National Geographic in 2022, which became a New York Times bestseller and is, more than the Instagram, the document she most wants the project to be remembered by. She runs a luxury travel agency, Jet Black, which specialises in itineraries to African destinations, with the explicit goal of redirecting Black American leisure spending toward Black-owned operators across the continent. She has not stopped travelling, but she has slowed. The phrase she uses now, in talks to college audiences who ask her how to follow in her footsteps, is that the record is the easy part. The harder thing is to keep walking through doors that someone, in your absence, would have closed behind you.