Published 2020 by Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 978-1-5266-1589-3
275 pages
Grade 5/5 stars
Genre: African history early 20th century
Keywords: German colonization of East Africa of today’s Tanzania; colonization, war, family history, education
This book is divided into 4 parts and 15 chapters, each chapter focuses on one of four persons in the story and the interactions between them.
We are introduced to East Africa at the beginning of the 20th century before and after the first world war with multi-cultural society of trades men of Indian, Arab and Chinese background and of course the local African population. It is after the African Scramble where European Empires divided Africa into different colonies or interests. Germany was engaged in wars against local tribes. This history runs as a background to the story.
‘The German administration made a public spectacle of al Bushiri’s hanging, as they were to do with many other executions they carried out in the coming years. As a fitting token of their mission to bring order and civilization to these parts (page 8).’
The main person is Khalifa with an Indian father and an African mother, we hear how getting an education, learning to read and write Roman letters, was the gate to permanent work but only with family or tribal connections. Learning was not in a school, but a private tutor, far away from the family under horrible conditions. But it did ensure him work in an Indian Bank. After German take-over many merchants moved to British controlled Mombasa. Khalifa got work with a merchant, Amir Biashara; who arranged a marriage for Khalifa and his niece, Asha, after she lost her parents, but it will save the family honour and name, that somebody will look after her; so, she has no choice. She is more religious and wants to go to Mecca; Khalifa let her do as she wants but to go Mecca. He has a much more relaxed view of his religion.
Over the book we follow Khalifa and his interactions with his friends:
‘to think of Khalifa as someone who took a share of responsibility for other people’s troubles and for wrongs done in his time (page 199).’
His good friend Ilyas and his younger sister, Afiya. Ilyas was born a Muslim but pretended to be Christian, when he attended a German school. He starts to work with Khalifa, but enlisted to fight for the Germans in the first World War, to which Khalifa told him:
‘Are you mad? What has this to do with you? This is between two violent and vicious invaders, one among us and the other to the north. There are fighting over who should swallow us whole (page 42).’
Ilyas tried to find his parents but they had died, he was surprised to learn of a little sister that had been given away, actually she was a slave in the family that took her. Ilyas took her with him to town but when he enlists Afia was taken back to that family; when they find out she can read and write, the father beats her very seriously. Afiya wrote to Khalifa what happened and he brought her to live with them. Afia has a lifelong search to find her brother, Ilyas, who did not return from the war.
Through the story of Hamza, the soldier, we learn about the horrors of war; he was a servant to a German officer from whom he learned German, another officer wounded him so seriously he almost died, but was cared for by a German missionary. After the war he gets work at Khalifa’s office and came to live with Khalifa.
Hamza and Afiya’s son Ilyas will eventually find out what happened to his uncle, Afiya’s brother.
Evaluation:
This is a storytelling at a very high level, told in a very catching way, it was impossible to put the book down. The persons described become very real and realistically, all the time I wanted to learn more about these four persons.
I learned a lot about an era and location I knew nothing about. War is ugly and cruel. European colonization was horrible exploitation of land and people; with a stark contrast between ‘bringing civilization’ but by endless killing and slaughter of the local population.
Religion puts a severe limitation on women’s lives.
There is a love story with a happy ending, a thing that works in all languages and all cultures.
Although Khalifa, Ilyas and Hamza were all sent away at a young age or ran away or was kidnapped, they were all very interested in finding their families, their roots, to find out who their parents were; Ilyas even takes personal responsibility for his younger sister whom he did not know about. Family is important, Asha did not have a child but brings up Afiya. Small things perhaps but positive and important on the background of general devastation that war and colonization caused.
I warmly recommend the book and will look for other books by this author.
On the author:
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born 1948 on the Sultanate of Zanzibar, today’s Tanzania, to a family of Arab Yemen back ground; his mother tongue was Swahili. After the 1964 revolution, he became refugee and came to England in 1968, switching to English as his literary language. He studied at London University and continued at University of Kent, where he earned his PhD 1982 with a thesis titled ‘Criteria in the Criticism of West African Fiction’. From 1980 to 1983 Gurnah taught literature at Bayero University Kano in Nigeria. From 1984 to 2017 he was a professor of English and postcolonial literature at the University of Kent.
In 2021 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2021 "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents". As is very clear in ‘Afterlives’.
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