Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah
It was forbidden, it was risky, and it was during Ramadan, yet Hamza secretly slipped a little poem into the hands of Afiya. He had written it on stolen paper, and then folded the paper so it wasn’t bigger than two fingers. It was the first stanza of Friedrich Schiller’s Das Gedicht:
Alijaribu kulisema neno moja, lakini hakuweza/Kuna wasikilizi wengi karibu,/Lakini jicho langu la hofu limeone bila tafauti/Lugha ghani jicho lake linasema.
Hamza himself had translated the poem into his native Kiswahili from a book he was given by a German officer during WWI. The atrocities Hamza had witnessed, committed, and suffered as an askari, an African soldier in the German Schutztruppe, still haunted him in his dreams. The German officer with the hard, almost transparent eyes had given his commands in German, and called the Africans Schweine. Pigs. He had sexually harassed Hamza, mocked and insulted him. But the same officer had also given Hamza a collection of German poetry, Schiller’s Musenalmanach of 1789.
My eye can see for certain/the language her eye is speaking.
“I can read what you’re eyes are saying, too,” Afiya replied the next day. Then she kissed the tips of her fingers and touched his left cheek.
Hamziz and Afiya are two of the protagonists of Afterlives, the latest novel by the newly minced Tanzanian Nobel laureate Abdullah Gurnah. Their budding romance is one of the tender moments in a troubling story set in what is now Tanzania, during the time it was the colony Deutsch Ost Afrika and its aftermath.
In the discussion of colonial history, the German presence in Africa has often been overlooked, despite its horrendous brutality. In Deutsch West Afrika, present day Namibia, German colonial power committed the first genocide of the twentieth century in their extermination of the Herero people. In East Africa they soaked the land in blood by installing the Schutztruppe, a mercenary army made up from black African soldiers famed for both their ferocious brutality against local people, as well as their loyalty with the German oppressor.
Like the rumbling of a distant thunderstorm, the cruelties of colonialism are omnipresent in Afterlives as Gurnah, with a witty but loving eye, tells the intertwining stories of the African lovers Hamza and Afiya, and of many seemingly insignificant little lives in an unnamed coastal town. Monsoons and ramadans, evening prayers and traditional mganga-rituals mark the passing of time as do the news of resurrections and wars. History is made up of little events and of many personal decisions, so Gurnah reminds us in this sprawling tale. There is always a choice, and a chance, to be good.
The book’s central character is Khalifa, a grumpy but good hearted clerk, who arrives as a young man in town at the same time as the Germans do. Half Indian half African, he can pass seamlessly between the different societal circles of the town: the Arab merchants, the Indian bankers, the African labourers. As Khalifa manoeuvres through changing colonial laws, quarrels with the merchant he works for and with Asha, his strong-headed, religious wife, his porch functions as a baraza – a meeting ground for the town’s men to socialise and philosophize, to exchange gossip and information. Open-minded, open-hearted, and not religious at all, Khalifa connects not only the many characters of this novel, but in his hard-shelled philanthropy he seems to incorporate the idea of the melting pot Swahili coast – even if this idea existed only in small porches of a rigorous and segregated society.
Khalifa did not look Indian, or not the kind of Indian they were used to seeing in this part of the world. His complexion, his hair, his nose, all favoured his African mother but he loved to announce his lineage when it suited him. Yes, yes, my father was Indian. I don’t look it, hey? He married my mother and stayed loyal to her. Some Indian men play around with African women until they are ready to send for an Indian wife and then abandon them. My father never left my mother.
In a world scarred by colonial suppression, displacement, and social exclusion, Gurnah zooms in on personal grandeur, and on the little gestures of hospitality and friendliness that offer warmth.
The many characters that pass through Afterlives represent the heterogeneity of East Africa. The hinterland stretching to the great lakes, Lake Tanganyika in the West and Lake Victoria in the North, was traditionally settled by Bantu tribes. This is where Afiya was born, into a world of extreme poverty, superstition and misogyny.
Behind the houses and the backyards were the fields, and beyond those rose the hill. As she grew older it seemed that the hill loomed even larger over the village, especially at dusk, shouldering over them like a discontented spirit. She learned to avert her gaze if she had to go out at night. In the deep silence of the night she heard soft hissing whispers creeping down and sometimes they came around and behind the house as well. Her aunt told her these were the invisibles which only the women heard, but however sad and insistent their whispers she was not to open the door to them. Much later she learned that the boys went up the hill and came back safely.
Living in her uncle’s house after her parents’ death, Afiya lives as in indentured servant – a common fate among the poor. When her brother Iliyas, a run-away, reappears for a short while, he teaches her to write, which he himself has learned working at a German coffee farm. Enraged about Afiya’s newly found skill, her uncle beats her with a cane, and hits her so hard he breaks her arm.
Literacy is a central theme of Afterlives. Bantu culture was never expressed in writing, but in performing arts: in music, dancing, and oral storytelling. Gurnah remains vague as to whether this outburst was simply a case of domestic violence, or punishment in defense of traditional Bantu culture. Yet the beating happened, and it was Kahlifa who saved Afiya and brought her to the coast.
The coastal strip, peppered with busy harbours, was a colourful hodgepodge of Arab, Indian, Omani and Persian people, who had brought with them the written word – and ledgers and lists to keep track of their trades – resulting in Kiswahili being the only written Bantu language. And of course they brought capitalism: as merchants in copper and spices, but most importantly ivory and slaves they amassed tremendous wealth.
Both ivory and slaves were acquired in the hinterland by the great lakes, bought from remote tribes, and walked to the coast along ancient trading routes. By use of unspeakable violence some of these slave and ivory traders had risen to power, (such as Al Bushiri on the mainland, or the Omani dealer Said Ibn Sultan residing in Zanzibar), and governed the land as semi-legal landlords.
The gap between the class of literate land- and tradeowners, and the working class of illiterate African labourers was jarring, and the inhuman system of slavery and indentured servitude not only petrified the injustice but was long engrained in local mentality. Here Gurnah makes an interesting and novel point in processing European imperialism in Africa. It was the abundance of elephants and diamonds that attracted the European imperialists, but it was a pre-existing system of injustice and hierarchy that paved the way for oppression and the Schutztruppe.
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1942 in Zanzibar, when it was still a British protectorate. Following a violent resurrection in 1960, he emigrated to the UK where he became a professor for literature. The Nobel committee praised his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” Gurnah is the fourth black nobel prize winner, the fifth African, and the second black African, of 118 laureates so far.
Gurnah claims not to believe in pidgeonholes like “Western literature” vs. “Worldliterature.” His voice is needed complete the literary canon. Despite spending most of his life in England, as a former refugee, Gurnah keeps coming back to the themes of exile and fractured identities. On occasion of the announcement of his winning the Nobelprize, Gurnah was asked his take on the current refugee situation in Europe:
“People, of course, have been moving all over the world. I think, this phenomenon of particularly people from Africa coming to Europe is a relatively new one, but of course the other, Europeans streaming out into the world is nothing new. Centuries of that we’ve had.”
In his acceptance lecture last Tuesday, December 7th 2021, Gurnah recounted how he had started writing “in refusal of the self-assured summaries of people who despise and belittle us,” following the realization that ”a new, simpler history was being constructed, transforming and even obliterating what had happened.” His urge to reveal and educate can be felt throughout Afterlives, as he provides ample background information and historical details.
It was 1907 when Khalifa and Asha married. The Maji Maji uprising was in the final throes of its brutality, suppressed at a great cost in African lives and livelihoods.
The Maji Maji uprising of 1907 features greatly in Tanzanian national identity. As thousands of men and women of different Bantu tribes unified to fight the German colonial regime, it was a first act of solidarity among people, who had traditionally fought against each other; a first act of Klassenkampf. At first successful, the Maji Maji lasted three years until it was ultimately supressed by the Germans, costing the lives, as historians estimate, of up to 300,000 people.
The Germans have killed so many people that the country is littered with skulls and bones and the earth is soggy with blood.
The German Empire had colonialized Deutsch Ost Afrika following the Berlin conference of 1885, at which European Imperial powers had congregated to peacefully cut up and distribute the African continent among themselves like a chocolate birthday cake. Building roads and railways for incoming settlers, the Germans battled the slave traders like Al Bushiri for dominance along the ancient trading routes. These were costly undertakings, which the local populations had to finance: hut taxes, head taxes and expropriations drove the local population to the point of starvation. Frequent riots were quelled with utmost cruelty: with public hangings, burning of fields and poisoning of town wells.
Yet the Germans didn’t do the killing themselves. To this end, they enlisted a mercenary army, the notorious Schutztruppe.
In the region that had risen, the schutztruppe treated everyone as combatants. They burned villages and trampled the fields and plundered food stores. African bodies were left hanging on roadside gibbets in a landscape that was torched and terrorized.
To the question, why Africans troops would fight with such fervour on the side of their own oppressors, Gurnah offers new, and rare insight, as few works of fiction or non-fiction do.
Then as they marched out into the countryside and the heat rose and the sun clamped down on his neck and shoulders, and the sweat poured off his face and streamed down his back, Hamza’s returned. He had volunteered on impulse, fleeing had seemed intolerable, but he was ignorant of what he had now sold himself to, and off whether he was up to what it would demand of him. He was not ignorant about the company he had chosen to keep. Everyone knew about the Askari army, the Schutztruppe, and their ferocity against the people. Everyone knew about their stone-hearted German officers. He had chosen to be one of their soldiers, to get away, and as he sweated and tired, and they marched along the dirt road in the heat of the day, his anxiety about what he had done surged so powerfully at times that he grew short of breath.
Hamza, before joining the army, was an indentured labourer, with no perspective, or hope. For him, like many young men, the army was an only way to respectability. One that seemed attractive at first. The bomas, the fortified camps, the drill at the Exerzierplatz, the growing muscles on their emaciated body, the fear in people’s eye’s as askari troops marched and raided the villages, as they robbed women and children to keep as camp followers and their own servants, boosted their egos, and heightened their brutality. But within the Schutztruppe, the African askaris remained second class soldiers.
Uniforms and shoes were often reserved for the higher ranking German officers, and the African askaris didn’t get to sleep inside the boma. If they got to see the officers’ beds with mosquito nettings, the mess, and the crockery at all, it was as their personal servants, often very personal. Operating in a state of constant alcoholic intoxication and homoerotic actuation, the German officers were equally sexually attracted and repulsed by African men.
As batman for the German Oberleutnant, Hamza has an ambiguous relationship with his superior. The German officer teaches him German as his private student, and there are moments of tenderness, or at least friendliness among the two men. But in the end, for the Oberleutnant the tutoring only is only a game, proving the point that no matter what training, an African will never be able to appreciate Schiller.
“You have lost your place in the world. I don’t know why it concerns me but it does. Well, perhaps I do know. I don’t suppose you know what I’m talking about. I don’t suppose you have any idea of the jeopardy that surrounds you.”
The Germans famously lost WWI and, after massive bloodshed on all sides, with it their African colonies. Deutsch Ost Afrika was re-named Tanganyika and fell under the rule of the League of Nations, then turned into a British colony. The Schutztruppe was dissolved and the azaris, now enemies of state, ordered to disperse.
Hamza, after being nearly fatally wounded by another German officer, finds refuge in a German mission where he secretly receives medical treatment, and is presented with another book. The pastor’s wife offers him Heinrich Heine as a farewell present, as the Germans now flee the country.
In the midst of all the terror, Hamza experiences the transcendent beauty of literature in the works of two enlightened German writers. It’s a beauty above the distinctions between one culture or another.
It was surely not by coincidence that Gurnah turned Friedrich Schiller and Heinrich Heine into Hamza’s spirutual liberators. Both writers focused on human rights and political and universal freedom. Despite their farreaching popularity in Germany, however, both were writers were forbidden under the in Nazis.
The last part of Afterlives is dominated by the disappearance of another azkari. Iliyas, Afiya’s brother, who, stolen as a boy stolen by an askari, had also joined the Schutztruppe, but never returned. Iliyas had literally fallen for the Germans – a devout askari he had fled to Germany and become a member of the NSDAP, the Nazi Party, only to be eventually executed at a concentration camp. Gurnah here refers to a true biography – that of the Sudanese askari Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed.
This is powerful ending of Afterlives, and the story of German colonialsim, but – to prove the German philosopher Hannah Arendt’s point – another chapter’s beginning: The beginning of the holocaust lay in the acts of German colonialism. And it’s the beginning of Tanzania.
In 1964, after a long struggle, independence was won, and the republic of Tanzania, unlike most other African states, was born in peace. Its first President Julius Nyerere, a Western trained intellectual, had created a new word, by taking the first syllables of Tanganyika (the mainland) and Zanzibar (the archipelago) and melted them into Tan-zan-ia. And he created a new nation by ordering one common language, Kiswahili, and promoting it through literature, drama and poetry. And by introducing compulsory schooling in Kiswahili. In other words, following Heine’s war cry, he demanded Zuckererbsen für jedermann! Literacy for everyone.
Literally, the word Tanzania reflects the ethnically and culturally diverse make-up of its population. It is also a reminder how a common language comes in as the glue to bind people together. Or, as Abdullah Gurnah says, how literature can create a world community. Literature for everyone.
Abdullah Gurnah is the recipient of the 2021 Nobelprice for literature, Afterlives is his tenth novel and sequel of his masterwork Paradise (1994)
Photos were taken in Tanzania 2018