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Afterlives

by prudence on 09-Sep-2022
coffee

This was published in 2020. The author is Abdulrazak Gurnah, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, and it was excellently read in my audio-version by Damian Lynch. There's an excerpt here, and a very detailed summary here.

The (unnamed) town in which Afterlives is set lies on the east coast of Africa in the former Deutsch-Ostafrika. (This German colony included the mainland part of what is now called Tanzania, plus Burundi and Rwanda, while the German empire also encompassed Cameroon, Togo, and Deutsch-Sudwestafrika, whose territory became the modern-day Namibia.) Of course, it's not Deutsch-Ostafrika for that long. The novel spans a period from the 1880s, the early years of German rule, through the First World War and the British Mandate, right up to the independent Tanzania and the divided Germany of the 1960s.

According to Maaza Mengiste (author of The Shadow King, which foregrounds Italian colonialism), it is only recently that Germany has been included in discussions of the European colonial presence in Africa. For Florian Stadtler, too, Afterlives mirrors "the reality of a colonial experience of which many in Germany show little awareness". And Gurnah himself maintains that Germany, for a variety of reasons, has proved rather reluctant to discuss this part of its past.

3guys
Cote d'Ivoire, 1997/8. Not the area of the continent that matches the narrative, but heir to its own difficult colonial experience

After reading so many narratively complex and ambivalent books lately (White Tears, The Sense of an Ending...), it made a refreshing change to listen to something that was just straightforward, simple, and beautiful. I liked the way Vaishna Roy expresses this: "There is a gentle quality to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s prose; it makes no linguistic leaps or pirouettes but simply sits down, draws a deep breath, and slowly unfurls the tale." Gurnah manages to portray horror and suffering, while never allowing it to displace the ordinary people who are at the forefront of the story, and whose marriages, illnesses, births, deaths, businesses, and general way of life we follow closely through all their ups and downs.

There are four main characters, all moving against the background of this highly diverse part of the world, where the steady throughput of merchants, sailors, and soldiers has ensured the mingling of all sorts of nationalities, products, and ideas.

Khalifa -- half-Indian, half-African -- is the one we meet first. Brusque on the outside, he's fundamentally a kind man, with a smart mind, a love of coffee and gossip, a scepticism towards religion, and a keen understanding of the way the winds are blowing. He works for (and despises) businessman Nassor Biashara.

The next to be introduced is Ilyas, the book's cypher. He runs away from his poverty-stricken, illness-wracked family circumstances, and is promptly kidnapped to act as a servant for one of the Schutztruppe Askari. This was a German-run, African-staffed fighting unit that we hear quite a lot about during the course of the story. Gurnah describes it as "a highly experienced force of destructive power", and continues: "They were proud of their reputation for viciousness, and their officers and the administrators of Deutsch-Ostafrika loved them to be just like that." The callousness and cynicism of this European encouragement of excessive violence is reminiscent of that portrayed by David Diop.

Ilyas reveals his plight (via an intermediary) to the German officer in charge of his kidnapper, and he is freed. But as he has nowhere to go, the officer arranges for him to work on a German farm. The farmer insists he's too young to be a labourer, and not only helps him get some education, but also finds him a job in the sisal factory in the coastal town where Khalifa lives.

This whole experience leaves Ilyas pro-German, unable to distinguish between individual kindness and the systematic corporate cruelty of empire. At one point, with the war looming, he says to a group of men conversing in a cafe: "The Germans are gifted and clever people. They know how to organise, they know how to fight. They think of everything… and on top of that they are much kinder than the British." His interlocutors greet that statement with derision. One of them replies: "Listen, just because one German man has been kind to you does not change what has happened here over the years… In the thirty years or so that they have occupied this land, the Germans have killed so many people that the country is littered with skulls and bones and the earth is soggy with blood. I am not exaggerating." (And indeed, the quelling of the Maji Maji revolt alone is said to have cost 300,000 lives, largely as a result of the starvation that succeeded the Germans' scorched-earth tactics.) Ilyas concedes nothing, however, and this same critic concludes: "My friend, they have eaten you."

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He and Khalifa become friends, and the latter urges the young man to go and find out what happened to the family he ran away from. Ilyas's parents have died, but he discovers that he has a little sister, Afiya (the third key character), who was born after he left. He rescues her from the situation of semi-servitude into which -- as an orphan -- she had been delivered. He provides her with a home, some basic education, and opportunities for friendship. So when, with the First World War looming, he decides to join the Schutztruppe, and send Afiya back to the family that had never been particularly nice to her in the first place, we're somewhat shocked. Khalifa, utterly unable to understand why Ilyas should regard the clashes between two colonial powers as remotely his business, is horrified: "Are you mad?" he asks, "This is between two violent and vicious invaders, one among us and the other to the north. They are fighting over who should swallow us whole."

As it turns out, Ilyas has indeed been "eaten". He never returns to his sister or his home, but his shadow lingers in the background throughout the book, living on in Afiya's thoughts, and for a while supernaturally troubling Afiya's son who has been named Ilyas in his honour. It is only at the end of the book that Ilyas the nephew goes in search of his forebear's story. After the First World War, he discovers, Uncle Ilyas went to Germany, and stayed there. He married a German woman. But the times were changing. His subsequent relationship with an "Aryan" brought him into conflict with Germany's newly upgraded brand of racism, and he ends his days in a concentration camp (Stadtler points out the analogies with an actual figure: Bayume Mohamed Husen, a former Askari who lived in Berlin, and died in the camp at Sachsenhausen).

But that's jumping ahead. The people charged with taking care of Afiya in Ilyas's absence spiral downwards in their treatment of her. Suffering physical abuse, she follows the advice her brother had given her, and writes to Khalifa. He and his wife, the prickly Bi Asha, take her in. And it's in this household that she eventually comes into contact with Hamza, the last of the key characters.

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Hamza, too, has a tough past to overcome. His father, to offset his debts, sold him, while he was still a boy, to a "merchant pirate". Hamza runs away to join the Schutztruppe, and is picked out by the (never named) Oberleutnant to be his batman. The officer is a highly complex character. He is not entirely devoid of kindness (he teaches Hamza German, and shields him in some situations), but his eyes convey both cruelty and an insolent intrusiveness. His mind, while never free of outspokenly racist attitudes, is still also sharp enough both to evaluate the central colonial reality -- "We lied and killed for this empire and called it our Zivilisierungsmission" -- and to see sufficiently far enough past ethnicity to find reflected in Hamza something of his gentle, Schiller-loving late brother.

Annie Gagiano [litnet.co.za] notes the delicacy with which Gurnah treats "the strange, ambivalent relationship" between Hamza and the Oberleutnant, in contrast with the vulgar teasing that Hamza has to put up with from his peers and the odious Feldwebel. Nothing is made explicit, but imbuing the whole relationship is the sense of a vast imbalance of power.

Towards the end of the war, there is a sharp deterioration in the Schutztruppe's circumstances, and Hamza is attacked by the now out-of-control Feldwebel. The violence and chaos of the Germans' retreat, and its catastrophic effects on the local population, are described here. The brutality inflicted on Hamza is just a microcosm of this. At least in his case the Oberleutnant's protection extends to ensuring that his severe wound is treated at a German missionary station.

Hamza eventually returns to the home town on the coast where Khalifa lives. He finds employment with Nassor Biashara, which is how he meets Khalifa -- and Afiya, whom he eventually marries. Their son is Ilyas, named, as we saw, after his missing uncle. He it is who eventually sets out to find out the rest of the uncle's story.

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Gurnah, coolly and calmly, paints a very complex picture, illustrating at least four propositions. Firstly, there are good and bad individuals in every community; secondly, many systemic evils predate colonial oppression (slavery, domestic violence, the terribly circumscribed role of women); thirdly, colonialism was an absolute catastrophe for Africa; and fourthly, the colonized are not merely statistics and victims, but real people and masters of resilience.

This last facet is perhaps what makes the book so distinctive. One interviewer suggests that it can be summed up like this: "I found myself at the end of Afterlives thinking that the dramatic tension that pushed it forward was, how do we change the world into which we are born but still find happiness and fulfillment in the lives we have right now?" Gurnah agrees: "That would be one way of seeing it... How do you live with whatever it is that, you know, circumstances and accidents and life has handed to you? How do you get on and make something of it?"

In another interview, he expands on this: "My interest was not to write about the war or the ugliness of colonialism. Instead I want to make sure the context in which war and colonialism happened is understood. And that the people in that context were people with entire existences. I want to show how people who are wounded by the war and by life itself cope in these circumstances. Using the unexpected kindnesses in the story, I wanted to show that there is potential for kindness in people and sometimes circumstances can draw such kindness from us."

Which makes a good note to end on.

ananas