Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah review – living through colonialism

This compelling novel focuses on those enduring German rule in East Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century

Until recently, most conversations about the European colonial presence in Africa have excluded Germany. Established in the late 19th century, the German empire on the continent included colonies in present-day Namibia, Cameroon, Togo, parts of Tanzania and Kenya, and eventually claimed the kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi. German colonial rule was brutal, as colonial enterprises were; in an arena known for its oppression and violence, it is Germany that perpetrated the first genocide of the 20th century in the 1904 extermination campaign to quell the Herero and Nama uprising in Namibia. Across the continent in East Africa, or Deutsch-Ostafrika, Germany’s military tactics were equally deadly. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s sprawling yet intimate new novel Afterlives is set against the backdrop of these atrocities. Unfolding in what was then Tanganyika, now mainland Tanzania, it opens with a gentle and unassuming sentence: “Khalifa was twenty-six years old when he met the merchant Amur Biashara.”

Khalifa marries Biashara’s niece, Asha, in 1907, as the Maji Maji uprising is “in the final throes of its brutalities”. Gurnah recounts the horrifying consequences of resistance to German rule but then pivots back to the lives of the young married couple. By the time confident, affable, German-speaking Ilyas arrives at the unnamed coastal town where Khalifa and Asha live, the uprisings and colonial reprisals have faded from the story. Instead, Gurnah pushes aside the larger sweeps of colonial history to focus on those who have managed to carve out a relatively calm existence. But though their lives may be quiet, this does not mean they have escaped the physical and emotional ravages of colonialism. One character remarks wearily that “the Germans have killed so many people that the country is littered with skulls and bones and the earth is soggy with blood”. When Ilyas, who was sent to a mission school by the same Germans who owned the coffee farm where he worked since childhood, speaks up in defence of the colonisers, “His listeners were silent in the face of such vehemence. ‘My friend, they have eaten you,’” someone eventually replies.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mXV8eB