Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

2022, Riverhead Books (Penguin Random House)

Afterlives is Abdulrazak Gurnah’s first book since he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2021. It’s a novel, but not the kind we are used to, the kind that puts us inside the principal character, whom we meet in the first chapter, and which has many scenes conducted through dialogue. Instead, it’s a narrative that mostly tells, not shows, and it seems to relate as much to African oral story-telling as to European fiction.

The story is set in Germany’s colony of East Africa (Tanganyika) at the start of the 20th century, and it’s told entirely from the point of view of the native inhabitants. We meet the principal protagonist, Hamza, on page 55, as he starts his training in the native army raised and officered by the Germans, the schutztruppe. But we begin with Khalifa, a man trying to make his way as a merchant’s clerk, and then we meet his friend Ilyas, and Ilyas’ little sister, Afiya, whom Ilyas rescues from the abusive family that took her in at her dying father’s request after her mother died. Ilyas had run away from home before Afiya was born, been kidnapped by the schutztruppe, and educated by a German settler who took him away from the army unit that caught him. The intricate relations between the people and their German colonizers are the warp of the story, and its woof is World War I.

If, like me, you know little about that period in eastern Africa, you will learn a great deal about the way people lived in the towns and countryside, about the workings of the area’s economy in daily life, and the way the war affected everyone. To me, it was quite fascinating. We get only summaries of the characters’ reactions, but in this kind of storytelling, that restraint is suitable. The restraint is even more strongly felt in the story’s dealings with the horrors of colonialism and war: it avoids gory details, saying, for example, that there were many corpses, and leaving the rest to our imagination. The ending is unexpected but, in a way, hopeful.