Armies, like writers, prey on orphans and misfits. Scenes of military recruitment have been a literary staple at least since Bulgarian soldiers kidnapped Voltaire\u2019s Candide, but few are more bleakly memorable than the one at the end of \u201cParadise\u201d (1994), by the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah. It\u2019s around the time of the First World War. Yusuf, a runaway servant in what\u2019s now Tanzania, wanders into a camp abandoned by askari, or local troops, who have occupied his coastal town in the name of Germany. He finds wild dogs eating the soldiers\u2019 excrement, and, when they return his gaze, experiences a shock of recognition. \u201cThe dogs had known a shit-eater when they saw one,\u201d Yusuf decides, and promptly joins the askari.<\/p>\n
The grotesque analogy poses a painful question: How did so many colonial subjects end up fighting for their conquerors, living, as it were, on the leftovers of empire? More than a million Africans served in the two World Wars, deployed both in Europe and in their own occupied continent. Gurnah, who grew up in Zanzibar, knew that one of his relatives had been conscripted as a porter into Germany\u2019s Schutztruppe. Another had enlisted with the British, in the King\u2019s African Rifles. Yet scarcely any testimony survived to account for the experiences of soldiers like them. In \u201cParadise,\u201d his lapidary fourth novel, he tried to envision what kind of life might lead to such an act of desertion.<\/p>\n
The novel centers on a rubber- and ivory-trading expedition led by Yusuf\u2019s \u201cuncle\u201d Aziz. He is, in reality, a sharkish merchant who has seized the boy from his parents through a predatory loan. Their imaginary bond keeps Yusuf complacent during their long march into the continent. But when the master\u2019s caravan fails\u2014spectacularly, in an ironic revision of Conrad\u2019s \u201cHeart of Darkness\u201d\u2014the slave takes flight, disgusted with a world where \u201cvengeful acquisitiveness had forced even simple virtues into tokens of exchange and barter.\u201d Yusuf\u2019s decision to join the Schutztruppe is a gloomy vision of exchanging one oppressive system for another at the dawn of colonial rule.<\/p>\n
Gurnah has spent more than three decades chronicling the Swahili coast and its diaspora, in wry, wandering fiction whose understated style belies its narrative sophistication. A novelist in the old-fashioned school of fateful separations and buried family secrets, he is interested not only in the experience of displacement but also in its myriad causes: debt, shame, misguided ambition, and, especially, the toxic entanglement of kinship and dependence. \u201cParadise,\u201d which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, exemplifies the typical arc of his novels, following a young man from provincial innocence to worldly disenchantment. But it also leaves Yusuf\u2019s fate as an askari entirely to the imagination. How did African soldiers fare in the wars between their colonizers? And, once the smoke had cleared and the borders had shifted, how did they face coming home?<\/p>\n
Gurnah\u2019s most recent novel, \u201cAfterlives\u201d\u2014published in the U.K. in 2020, and now available in the United States\u2014revisits the era in a spiritual sequel to \u201cParadise.\u201d It revolves around a love story between two young runaways. Afiya is an orphan from a rural village, whose brother entrusts her to cruel neighbors when he goes to fight for the Schutztruppe. Hamza, an escaped servant, also becomes an askari, joining a brutal brawl for the continent at a time when \u201cevery bit of it belonged to Europeans, at least on a map: British East Africa, Deutsch-Ostafrika, \u00c1frica Oriental Portuguesa, Congo Belge.\u201d Their search for a place in the world unfolds against the monumental absurdities of empire:<\/p>\n
As [the askari] told their swaggering stories and marched across the rain-shadow plains of the great mountain, they did not know that they were to spend years fighting across swamps and mountains and forests and grasslands, in heavy rain and drought, slaughtering and being slaughtered by armies of people they knew nothing about: Punjabis and Sikhs, Fanti and Akan and Hausa and Yoruba, Kongo and Luba, all mercenaries who fought the Europeans\u2019 wars. . . . It was astonishing to the askari to see the great variety of people whose existence they had not even known about.<\/p>\n
A crop of recent narratives has explored Africa\u2019s overlooked role in the World Wars. Scholastique Mukasonga\u2019s \u201cKibogo\u201d is set in a Rwanda that\u2019s being starved to feed the Allies in their struggle against Nazi Germany. David Diop\u2019s \u201cAt Night All Blood Is Black\u201d follows two Senegalese tirailleurs into the trenches of no man\u2019s land. \u201cAfterlives\u201d focusses on the East African campaign of 1914-18. Those who fought in it came from all over Africa\u2014men torn from their communities who tore up others in turn. But the Schutztruppe could also be a realm of social opportunity, where \u201caskariboys\u201d from the ranks of the poor and the powerless could become big men.<\/p>\n
Gurnah\u2019s novel interrogates the costs and rewards of this violent, cosmopolitan world and its circumstantial solidarities. When Hamza learns German from a lieutenant who recognizes him as a kindred spirit, their closeness elicits suspicions of treachery in the ranks. A postwar return to his coastal home town brings new struggles for acceptance, especially once Hamza meets Afiya and the childless couple who have rescued her from abuse. For everyone, a longing for togetherness is bedeviled by old shames and secrets. \u201cI\u2019m not sure there is a benign form of belonging,\u201d Gurnah has said. \u201cEven if you stay put.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Gurnah won last year\u2019s Nobel Prize in Literature, there was little consensus on how to categorize his dark-horse victory. He was the fourth Black writer to win the award, but the universe of his fiction was far removed from familiar histories centered on the Atlantic. He was only the seventh African-born laureate, but some cavilled that he was, more pertinently, one more Anglophone writer based in the U.K. Others wondered why he\u2019d edged out a fellow East African and a longtime favorite, Ng\u0169g\u0129 wa Thiong\u2019o, known for his insistence that writers from the continent should use their indigenous languages. Even in Tanzania, people struggled with the meaning of Gurnah\u2019s achievement. Could they claim a writer whom their country had in many ways driven out?<\/p>\n
Zanzibar is a small island that is also a major crossroads for Africa, Asia, and Europe. It is one of the historic centers of Swahili civilization, a loose network of coastal societies stretching from Somalia to Mozambique, whose language serves as East Africa\u2019s lingua franca. Swahili cities were shaped by more than a millennium of trade with the Arabian peninsula, embracing Islam and developing a distinctive mixture of African, Arab, and South Asian cultures. Their wealth also attracted the envy of empires overseas. Portugal seized Zanzibar in the sixteenth century, but later lost it to the Sultan of Oman, whose descendants turned the island into a base for conquering swaths of the mainland.<\/p>\n
Under the Omanis, Zanzibar grew rich selling spices, ivory, and slaves, mostly non-Muslims from the interior, whom the island\u2019s \u00e9lites derided as washenzi, or uncivilized. The island reached the peak of its power in the late nineteenth century, when the legendary trader Tippu Tip\u2014Uncle Aziz from \u201cParadise\u201d writ large\u2014established armed settlements as far west as present-day Congo. His colonial designs ran afoul of rivals in Europe, as they launched their Scramble for Africa. Zanzibar lost its territory to the Germans and then to the British, who reduced its once mighty sultan to a figurehead. \u201cNew maps were made, complete maps, so that every inch was accounted for, and everyone now knew who they were,\u201d Gurnah writes, sardonically, in \u201cBy the Sea\u201d (2001). \u201cOr at least who they belonged to.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Abdulrazak Gurnah vividly captures colonial and post-colonial histories of abuse and dispossession, but also startling acts of reclamation and renewal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12963,"featured_media":20290,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,12],"tags":[7,30,14],"class_list":{"0":"post-20293","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture","8":"category-entertainment","9":"tag-apie-project","10":"tag-culture","11":"tag-entertainment"},"yoast_head":"\n