26. October 18' 2021
“Sometimes I think it is my fate to live in the wreckage and confusion of crumbling houses.” — Abdulrazak Gurnah
Among the great many historical loose-ends dangling out of that ball of diplomatic wool called the Treaty of Versailles—signed in 1919 by major European powers at the end of World War 1—was a rather strange demand. Article 246 declared that, “Germany will hand over to His Britannic Majesty's Government the skull of the Sultan Mkwawa which was removed from the Protectorate of German East Africa and taken to Germany”. It is not entirely clear how this clause about a decapitated skull was snuck into a document about post-War reparations and territorial exchanges. From what I can make out, much of the world didn’t seem to care either and this little detail of history has largely slipped us by. In fact, it was not until 1954 that the skull was eventually returned to Tanzania—although whether the skull was indeed that of Sultan Mkwawa or not is still open to question. In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s last novel, ‘Afterlives’—published in 2019, before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021—there is an unassuming line that refers to this event: “In their triumph, the Germans cut off the head of the Wahehe leader Mkwawa and sent it to Germany as a trophy.” Gurnah doesn’t dwell on this macabre incident or its afterlife. He is not a novelist who propagandizes or seeks to shock. Instead he writes plainly, without ostentation, almost reluctantly, patiently accumulating his sentences that serve the story as opposed to the story serving the brilliance of sentences, and as the pages pass by, he lets a great many inflections and psychological nuances steadily gather in the antechambers of a reader’s consciousness, like dust secreting into a room through under a door, till they create a thin-film of ambient anxiety.
The result of this narrative strategy is that as the novel progresses, every action begins to acquire a moral urgency that on its own it would not possess. This is because each event on the page carries upon its shoulders—even if unmentioned—the weight of three principal historical themes which are not explicitly articulated in the novel but nevertheless pervade, especially now that we know—at least intellectually—considerably more about European colonialism in Africa than ever before. One, the story of European colonization of Africa is a story of extraordinary cruelties and savageries which was often masked by the charade of sophistication which played out in the perfumed chambers of European capitals; second, the use of Africans as subjects for experiments, anthropometric measurements and racialist theories spared no one—from Sultans of now-forgotten kingdoms and principalities to everyday people who were transformed into slaves—the bodies of Africans were often desecrated and nearly always devalued; three, the telling of these treatments, even by the most scrupulous of non-African narrators, often had an anthropological quality to it—in which the inner lives of those suffering from sustained colonial brutalities was reduced to a position of subservience or effacement. We could know of them, but them itself. To say all this explicitly in a novel would make it a bore, more of a didactic screed than a work of art that seeks to elevate the individual experience. But these themes are nevertheless omnipresent, like the three witches of Hamlet, forever watching and inspiring, seducing and exhorting the protagonists in ways they themselves don’t understand and even we, as readers, can only recognize if we pause to watch the clues that Gurnah scatters freely, like some priest who goes about sprinkling the holy waters of history. History is everywhere and yet nowhere in Gurnah’s writings.
From afar, ’Afterlives’ is the story of four contemporaries: Khalifa, Ilyas, Afia and Hamza who live in the regions of modern day Tanzania—or more accurately, their imaginations travel in the Swahili cosmopolis, if you will—at the beginning of the 20th century. If we are to think of these characters as stand-ins for something larger than themselves, we could resort to the following sort of schematic. Khalifa, who is a bookkeeper and a man about town, embodies a form of proto-capitalism as colonization ushers in a new network of capital flows and spatial imagination in which ‘Mogadishu, Aden, Muscat, Bombay, and Calcutta’ figure as places of legend, commerce, and the romance birthed by globalization. Ilyas, meanwhile, is a smooth-talking African Muslim who finds himself as a beneficiary of German missionary-colonial education system, who lives a curiously dual Christian-Muslim life (including, as we learn towards the end of the novel, a name change that transmutes him into ‘Elias Issen’). More important however is Ilyas’ abiding commitment to the German colonial project so much so that he signs up to be part of the ‘askari’ forces for the German schutztruppe forces—military men who violently put down three bloody anti-German conflicts: the Abushiri Rebellion in 1888-1890, the HeHe War in 1891-1898, and the Maji-Maji Revolt in 1905-1907. Despite their brutal reputation, Illyas repeatedly articulates his preference for German colonialism over British colonialism because he has received “nothing but kindness from them”. Perhaps, echoing a taunt that has been heard in every colonized society across Asia and Africa, whereever native loyalists undermined incipient nationalisms, one of Ilyas’ interlocutors reminds him, “My friend, they [the Germans] have eaten you.”
The third character in this quartet of memorable presences is Afia, who is Ilyas’ long suffering sister who is forced to live with relatives. She briefly enjoys the freedoms her progressive minded brother brings into her life which includes a bed, a mosquito net, and, most transformative of all, literacy. The thinly veiled irony that burbles up, thanks to Gurnah’s style, is that Afia’s experience of liberation, of modernity, comes through her brother, his naive militarism that embraces German colonialism that had “killed so many people that the country [was] littered with skulls and bones and the earth [was] soggy with blood”. Meanwhile her traditionalist relatives see her ability to read and write as a prelude to prostitution (“Why does a girl need to write? So she can write to a pimp?”) and duly inflict physical punishment on her. Gurnah doesn’t seek to resolve these tensions—it is their existence that washes the novel in an omnipresent palette of gray—and, in fact, after finishing the novel, one can’t but wonder if what Gurnah seems to be suggesting is that modernity can arrive only by spilling the blood of traditional mores. But amid these historical concerns that slosh about, and offer any writer an opportunity to pontificate, we see glimpse into Gurnah’s extraordinary powers to observe everyday life, especially the inner lives of his characters. About a young Afia, whose body and mind grows more curious about the world as she grows older, he writes, “she learned to avert her gaze if she had to go out of the house at night.”
The fourth, and perhaps the most complex of characters, is Hamza who becomes the thread that connects various strands of the story—he becomes Khalifa’s acolyte and friend, he marries Afia, and eventually their son, also called Ilyas, discovers that the senior Ilyas (Hamza’s brother-in-law mentioned earlier) had been duly rewarded for his ferocious commitment to Germany with a deportation to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he dies an anonymous death. The rewards of loyalty to the colonial project, Gurnah seems to suggest, for the native is always a sort of flattening of his identity in which he is just a number, occasionally rewarded with plumes and pendants, but inevitably is shorn of all the accoutrements that traditional societies granted him, and ultimately is chewed down by the violent excesses pregnant in the very same system he helped father. More directly, the story of Ilyas also seems to suggest—the history of 20th century midwives this reading—that while the periphery may suffer from barbarisms and violence, at the center of the colonial enterprise lay violence in its most crystalline form for all who are outsiders. Gurnah doesn’t mention this but among the experiments of the Germans in southern Africa was the concentration camp—a technique to control populations that they learnt from their arch rivals, the British, who set up the barbed fences and sequestered prisoners during the Boer War. The irony that Ilyas should perish, along with his son, in this invention most associated with Germany in the 20th century, is hard to miss. As events lead up to this tragic end of Ilyas, the lives of Hamza and Afia become the spindle around which the second half of the novel is spun. They embody all that is noble in life despite despair and diseases everywhere (malaria, bilharzia, typhoid—these ailments are minor but powerful characters themselves, which kill and decimate at will). Hamza and Afia make love on the sly before marriage, lovingly raise a son despite their impoverished lives, and show deference to African beliefs in spirits and voices. As the novel telescopes time—Gurnah’s compositional strategy to straddle time is almost breathtaking its simplicity: he simply asserts, without much hand wringing, that the years or months have passed—Hamza and Afia’s world slowly transforms thanks to the trickle of 20th century inventions that arrive into their lives. Vaccinations, furniture stores and, perhaps the most radical of all, the radio. The airwaves now allow them to hear about the world and its tumults including the violent Mau Mau rebellion in 1950s Kenya. Afia, who at the beginning of the novel, experiences a donkey-cart ride with a wonder that I suspect much of the world today might experience a ride on the Shinkansen trains in Japan, by the end of the novel has a son who is a radio technician. This transformation—of not just the physicality of her circumstances but also of the expansion of the emotional world within her—is one that a reader can only marvel at. The 20th century was a glass house of horrors but it was also an age when a great many of those who survived saw themselves as individuals, however fractured the image may have been, for the first time.
Gurnah’s ‘Afterlives' spans nearly seventy years—from late 1890s to early 1960s—by which time Germans had ceased to matter in Africa and Julius Nyerere and his Tanganyika African National Union loomed on the horizon. The novel ends at the precipice of the great wave of decolonization that would sweep across the African continent when colonial rulers would return to Europe but their legacies would remain in languages, religions, infrastructure, bureaucracies and even how Africans saw their own past. To see beyond this seemingly insurmountable colonial past and discover “real” Africa would become the pet project of many nationalists, anti-colonialists, and revivalists across the continent. This is another way of saying, ignoring or erasing inconvenient histories such as the life of Ilyas becomes politically necessary to such history-writing enterprises. To understand however what it means to have lived through an age of domination and subjugation, as individuals and societies, when conflicted loyalties and foolish attachments abound—we are forced to look towards novels and novelists. It is only novels and novelists who can help us intuit what it means to fail at distinguishing between the kindness of individuals and the barbarism of political projects to which those very individuals subscribe. To write about the inevitable melancholy that arises from this breach of faith has been Gurnah’s life’s work. His oeuvre, now finally recognized in such spectacular a fashion on the global stage, reminds us that while the contexts and names may change, human efforts and stratagems to survive in face of vast institutional violence—which rarely leaves the dignity of an individual unmolested—remains surprisingly universal. We can only be grateful to Gurnah for having given his life to the patient reimagining of those melancholy years. []