Abdulrazak Gurnah: Afterlives
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Afterlives (2020) is (like most of Gurnah’s work) set within a wider East African area than his native Zanzibar and, as with much of his writing, resuscitates an earlier era and individuals as well as groups about whom little is known and much forgotten. Gurnah’s characters here, too, lead low-key lives, but are nevertheless described not only compassionately but with interest, evoking the complex and difficult circumstances and restricted choices within which people’s conduct often manifests what might be called “ordinary heroism” – with reference to the courage and kind concern for others they show in their behaviour.
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It is a pleasure and a lucky chance to have chosen Gurnah’s latest novel as the topic of this entry’s profile days before his selection as a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was announced. Afterlives (2020) is (like most of Gurnah’s work) set within a wider East African area than his native Zanzibar and, as with much of his writing, resuscitates an earlier era and individuals as well as groups about whom little is known and much forgotten. Gurnah’s characters here, too, lead low-key lives, but are nevertheless described not only compassionately but with interest, evoking the complex and difficult circumstances and restricted choices within which people’s conduct often manifests what might be called “ordinary heroism” – with reference to the courage and kind concern for others they show in their behaviour. The cover image indicates the novel’s focus on Africans dragooned into or having volunteered to join the colonial German war effort before and during World War I. This military contingent was known as the Schutztruppe or protective force. African soldiers who fought under the strict command of (and after rigorous and harsh training by) German officers were known as askari and became notorious and feared for the cruelty and relentlessness with which they fought – as they were required to do. They not only battled against Allied forces led by the British (which included men from British colonies in many parts of the world, though mainly Africa and India), but fought local African compatriots who hated German rule and villagers who refused them supplies. Settlements were razed and burnt and many thousands of both soldiers and “civilian” Africans killed in this brutal territorial conflict. Gurnah’s interest is in envisaging how circumstances like these came to impinge upon and were evaluated by East Africans – but he also delineates several of his German characters with considerable sensitivity. The major characters are deployed in turn, intersections among them emerging as the narrative moves along.
The account begins quite a while prior to the war and starts by providing the family history of the man Khalifa, who had a Gujarati father who had come out from India, and a mother initially referred to only as a “countrywoman” (3). As Khalifa explains his non-Indian (ie “African”) appearance to those Indian Muslims with whom he mixes and who employ him: his father, Quassim, came from a Gujarat village with diverse inhabitants (“even some Hubshi Christians”), and his own family were “Muslim and poor”, but his father “stayed loyal” to his East African wife (3). Quassim managed to get a reasonable education, enabling him to work as a tax collector in India and later as an accountant in East Africa. He ensured that Khalifa, too, got a decent education as well as “respectable” employment as a clerk – first to a couple of Gujarati bankers, and then to a cunning businessman he despised. The narrative style is somehow both leisurely and dense, capturing one’s interest and (despite its quite “low-key” tone) packing a great deal of vividly enlightening information into only a few paragraphs. Khalifa is sent to live (along with other boys) with a tutor in the small coastal city where his father formerly worked and trained in mathematics, bookkeeping and elementary English for five years. His schooling begins “the year the Germans arrived” (5), immediately imposing their harsh presence with a claim to be the region’s rightful rulers, and bloodily putting down various local revolts – the last and worst of these the notorious Maji Maji uprising. They name the area Deutsch-Ostafrika to redefine it politically as well as culturally.
Khalifa himself marries a recently orphaned woman named Asha, “recommended” to him by the slightly sleazy businessman who employs him. She is in fact his niece, but embittered against this uncle, whom she sees as having cheated her out of the family home, which he acquired when Asha’s father, his brother-in-law, was unable to repay the many loans the businessman had made to him (unbeknown to Asha’s mother). Khalifa is happy enough with Asha, but it turns out her temper was somewhat soured by her losses – her mother’s death and the uncle’s refusal to give her ownership of the home that she and Khalifa now occupy. They marry in 1907, when most Germans view the “hundreds of thousands dead from starvation and many hundreds more from battlefield wounds or by public execution” (16) – the human cost of putting down the Maji rebellion – quite calmly:
… [T]he empire had to make the Africans feel the clenched fist of German power in order that they should learn to bear the yoke of their servitude compliantly. … The colonial administration was strengthening its hold over the land, growing in numbers and in reach. Good land was taken over as more German settlers arrived. The forced labour regime was extended to build roads and clear roadside gutters and make avenues and gardens for the leisure of the colonists and the good name of the Kaiserreich. The Germans were latecomers to empire-building in this part of the world but they were digging in to stay …. (16)
Nevertheless, some among the occupying Germans realise that suppression alone won’t make the colony “productive” and that the health and lack of literacy and other training among Africans need addressing (16).
The businessman dies suddenly without leaving Asha the house or anything else (as he had half-promised he would), and his son, Nassor Biashara, succeeds him, still employing Khalifa. The next character to arrive in the town is called Ilyas. He comes with a letter of introduction to the manager of a large German-owned sisal estate; this secures him decent employment. A local schoolteacher, Maalim Abdalla, is asked to help him find lodgings and to meet a few people, among them the sociable Khalifa; these are two of a trio of friends who meet almost every evening on the veranda of the house where Khalifa and Bi Asha (as she is now known) live. This gathering, where both serious discussions of current affairs and exchanges of neighbourhood gossip take place, is known as a baraza. Khalifa and Ilyas soon become good friends; the younger man’s “effortless laughter and self-deprecating manner made people comfortable and won him new friends” (21). Khalifa (himself a “non-observing” Muslim – to Bi Asha’s irritation) soon finds out that Ilyas was “made” to become a Christian in order to be accepted as a school pupil, and teases his new friend about this – an aspect of his life Ilyas is somewhat shy about revealing. He tells Khalifa how he “ran away from home” as a child, was “kidnapped” by an askari and was “rescued” by a German farmer (it was he who sent Ilyas to school). Ilyas also tells Khalifa that he has realised that the town is not far from the home where he grew up, but to which he never returned. Khalifa went home to visit his own parents years after being sent away to work, only returning when the news came that his mother had died; four days after his arrival there, where he found his grieving father seriously ill, the latter also died – making him deeply regretful of delaying a visit to them far too long. Against this background, he insists that Ilyas should go search for his old home – so Ilyas complies with this persuasion, although recalling vividly “how mean and miserable” it was (23).
A surprise awaits Ilyas. He learns, as he expected, that his parents have both died, but also that he has a sister he never knew existed, who was born after he left home aged 11. His mother died first, and his father, dirt poor and very ill, asked neighbours to take in the little girl. They did so willingly, but worked her hard as a semi-slave; she is in rags when Ilyas arrives as if out of the blue to take her away with him to live in the town. He hides his indignation at her state, but to this “new” sister, Afiya, going away to live in town with a newfound, well-dressed older brother is utterly exciting and a huge adventure. “He was so clean and beautiful, and he laughed so easily” (34) is how the delighted Afiya sees him. “During the time Afiya lived with her brother she slept on a bed for the first time in her life” (35). Not only does Ilyas teach her to read and write, giving her lessons in their shared room every evening after his return from work, but for the first time in her life she has friends – the girl and boy who were the children of the family who took her in having been very mean to her, along with the fact that she had to stay home all day and do household chores as the unpaid “help” in the house. The friends are the daughters of their landlord, who invite her to join them upstairs whenever she pleases to talk, play and do small voluntary chores with them. They are a little older than Afiya, but extremely friendly and welcoming; their names are Jamila and Saada. Ilyas takes her with him one evening to meet Khalifa and Bi Asha, who are also friendly and hospitable and show her great kindness. But what Afiya especially treasures are the times spent with Ilyas when he tells her about his own life. He explains that he left their parents’ meagre dwelling as if unintentionally. He walked out one evening and just kept on walking till an askari grabbed him and pulled him onto a train; he wanted the boy to carry his gun, he said.
Ilyas tells Afiya that their parents were so poor that he does not know how they survived.
“Ba [their father] had sugar [diabetes] and was unwell and could not work. Perhaps the neighbours helped them. I know my clothes were rags and I was always hungry. Ma lost two of my younger sisters after they were born. I expect it was malaria but I was only a child and I would not have known about things like that at the time. I remember when they both came. After a few months they fell ill and cried for days before they passed away. Some nights I could not sleep because I was so hungry and because Ba was groaning so loudly. His legs were swollen and smelled bad, like meat that was rotting. It was not his fault, that was the sugar. Don’t cry, I can see your eyes are getting wet. I am not saying this to be unkind but to explain to you that perhaps these were the things that made me run away.” (36–7)
The squalor and misery evoked above help us understand why the German and Christian education he received and the order and cleanliness maintained by the kind farmer appealed so deeply to Ilyas and made him the German loyalist he became. The boy that he was, Ilyas relates to Afiya, took steps to escape from the askari who had kidnapped him. He reported to an (albeit unfriendly) Indian man that he had been taken against his will and brought to the mountain town. This man in turn told the story to the German officer in charge of the askari, who told Ilyas he was free to go, but when the boy said he had nowhere to go, the officer called another (non-military) German, who took Ilyas with him to the (German) farmer for whom he worked. To Afiya’s delight, Ilyas acts out all the roles in his narrative with suitable expressions, posture and gestures. The farmer objects to the boy being put to work on the farm; he is too young and must go to school, he insists. Ilyas, at this point, performs a German song for Afiya’s benefit – the adoring little sister “thought his voice was beautiful and got to her feet to applaud him” (39). It is no wonder she loves him as deeply as she does; his kindness and gentle care in communicating with a girl many brothers would consider and treat as an unwanted encumbrance to their lives is vividly evoked by Gurnah.
The fatherly German farmer is also the person who helped Ilyas to obtain employment at the sisal factory in town; he gave him a letter of recommendation to the manager. Ilyas describes him as “deliberate” in his behaviour, “never shouting at or abusing his workers. He looked,” Ilyas says, “like a … ein Schüler [scholar; learned man], a restrained man” (39). Khalifa and Ilyas often stroll down to one of the town cafes where conversation at this time centres on the impending war. Most of the other men there agree with Ilyas that the British are the likely losers. He adds: “The Germans are gifted and clever people. They know how to organise, they know how to fight. They think of everything … and on top of that they are much kinder than the British.” The last point provokes derisive laughter among the men, and one who is named Mahmudu analyses Ilyas’s stance:
“Listen, just because one German man has been kind to you does not change what has happened here over the years …. In the thirty years or so that they have occupied this land, the Germans have killed so many people that the country is littered with skulls and bones and the earth is soggy with blood. I am not exaggerating.” (41)
Ilyas sticks to his guns (!), insisting that the Germans are “honourable and civilised”, upon which the debate participant Mangungu pronounces: “My friend, they have eaten you” (42). The remark means that Ilyas has been brainwashed and/or duped. Soon hereafter, Khalifa is mightily surprised and furiously indignant when Ilyas announces his decision to join the Schutztruppe: “Are you mad? What has this to do with you?” Both the British and the Germans, he says, are “violent and vicious invaders”; in joining up, Ilyas will be merely another of the “mercenaries renowned for their cruelty” (42). Ilyas ignores these sensible warnings, concerned only about making arrangements for Afiya. She is devastated at the news. Moreover, she will have to return to living with the unpleasant family who treated her so badly. Ilyas thinks that, because they know he’ll come back for her, things will be different, but Khalifa kindly advises her that, should she need anything while away in the countryside, she need only send him a note.
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Of course, things soon go badly awry. When the couple discover that Afiya can write, the husband’s misogynist sensibilities are aroused; no girl or woman should be literate, he believes.
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Of course, things soon go badly awry. When the couple discover that Afiya can write, the husband’s misogynist sensibilities are aroused; no girl or woman should be literate, he believes. He proceeds to give Afiya, helpless against this bull-like oaf, a violent beating that ends only when he has exhausted himself and broken her hand. The cry for help she sends to Khalifa results in the girl’s second rescue from the same family, as Khalifa and Bi Asha take her in. Ilyas, at this early point, disappears from the narrative as a physical presence, though he is a permanent resident of Afiya’s mind and memory and can be said to haunt the text and the family and friends most closely associated with him. He never writes to Afiya or Khalifa, and no news of or from him ever reaches them during or subsequent to the war. The British victory, of course, puts them in command of the region, while in private homes life goes on much as before. Khalifa and Bi Asha (whom Afiya calls Bimkubwa) treat her kindly, and slowly her injured hand heals, although she does not recover full use of the wounded hand (it is fortunately not her writing hand). Bi Asha gives Afiya religious instruction, teaches her to read the Koran and sends her to a rudimentary school so that her literacy improves further.
The next chapter introduces the person who is actually the central experiential consciousness in the text. He is a youngster of 17 who has joined the Schutztruppe as a volunteer on a whim; his name is Hamza. Gurnah gives the chapter an arresting opening: “He picked him out with his eyes during the inspection on that first morning. The officer” (51). The German officer referred to is never named in the narrative. This complex man remains a major presence in Hamza’s awareness and a concern of his (for reasons to be explained) during his wartime experiences. Hamza had some idea of what he was letting himself in for, by enlisting for training as an askari, for “everyone knew about their stone-hearted officers”. Despite his qualms, he was desperate “to get away” (53). The training is demanding to the point of brutality, and the military discipline maintained often viciously punitive, but Hamza is never inclined to desert.
Hamza found unexpected satisfaction in his own growing strength and skills, and after a while he no longer winced at the shouts of Schweinen [pigs] and “washenzi” [Swahili for barbarians] or the German words he did not yet understand, which their trainers spat at them constantly. Unexpectedly, he began to feel pride at being part of the group, not rejected and mocked as he had feared …. (61)
Hamza is soon singled out as a possible candidate for training as a signalman, since he is one of the few literate recruits. He is summoned to an interview with the Oberleutnant – the commanding officer – the German who earlier “picked him out with his eyes”. The officer sneers at Hamza for his ignorance of mathematics. Supposedly, this “requires a mental discipline you people are not capable of”, the officer says. The man’s Swahili is excellent, although he speaks it a little haltingly: “‘We have come to bring you this and many other clever things that you would not have without us. This is our Zivilisierungsmission,’ the officer said, … our cunning plot, which only a child could misunderstand. We have come here to civilise you. Unafahamu [do you understand]?’” Hamza is not trained in signalling techniques, but learns that he is to be the Oberleutnant’s batman, as a “personal servant” (like a valet) is called in the military. The mockery from Hamza’s fellow (perhaps envious?) askari trainees is immediate: “[H]e [the officer] will need someone to keep him warm at night, just like a little wife. What are you doing here? Anyone can see you are too pretty to be a soldier” (65). Hamza is humiliated by the cruel teasing and feels expelled from the group. He can do nothing but resign himself to his new situation and make the best of it.
Gurnah intersperses chapters depicting Hamza with those showing the small community of Khalifa, Bi Asha, Afiya and their friends and associates. When Khalifa starts taking the girl with him to work, where she can sit practising her writing at a desk that is free, his employer takes notice of her. He is Nassor Biashara, the cousin of Bi Asha who has taken over the business from his late father – the uncle whom Bi Asha detests for cheating her family out of their home (as she sees it). When the girl has a coughing fit one day, he kindly takes her upstairs to his private quarters, where his pregnant wife gives Afiya a glass of water and something to eat. These visits become regular and foster a type of semi-maternal friendship. The young wife (named Khalida) and her privileged friends allow Afiya to listen to their frequently scandalous gossip, sometimes attempting to hide the more salacious details from her, though she usually works out what they are talking about. In this way, the little country girl is acclimatised to her present setting and learns more about “the ways of the world”. Her old friends Jamila and Saada (Ilyas’s former landlord’s daughters) are still very fond of her, and she often spends time with them. They are illiterate and impressed that she can read; they, in turn, are skilled seamstresses, and she helps them with small tasks in doing this work. When Khalifa decides that Afiya is sufficiently at home with him and Bi Asha and has more or less overcome the physical and emotional trauma of her treatment by the previous foster family, he clears out the storeroom inside the home compound for her, so that she has her own bedroom for the first time in her life. Getting this at age 12 is (according to a half-smiling Bi Asha) perhaps “spoiling” her (73), but an initially nervous Afiya is soon delighted with the new arrangement. Nassor Biashara donates a brand new bed, and Khalifa and Bi Asha get her mattress restuffed, also purchasing a sparkling white mosquito net for the girl’s room. When Khalifa tells Afiya how, at her age, he had to sleep on a mat under the stairs in his teacher’s home with several other boys, Bi Asha cuts him short, telling Afiya: “He is starting with his Indian stories again.” Khalifa merely “smile[s] indulgently” (73).
In the meantime, Hamza is being taught German by the Oberleutnant. The man seems polite in his manner, visibly “pleased” that Hamza “was so responsive and quick” in learning. “‘I will have you reading Schiller soon,’” he teases, “his eyes alight with mischief.” But it is those same, more often cold, blue eyes that frighten Hamza with a sense of the man’s alienness, for he has sensed that the Oberleutnant is capable of great cruelty.
His eyes. Sometimes while Hamza was making the bed or sweeping the front veranda or ironing a shirt, he glanced round to find those transparent blue eyes fixed immovably on him. The first time it happened, he thought the officer had said something and was waiting for a reply, but the eyes did not move and the lips did not open. Then Hamza moved away in confusion, troubled by the intensity of those eyes. He came to sense a certain stillness at times when he was near the officer, and knew that if he looked, he would find those eyes fixed on him in that same way. It was an insolent and intrusive inspection, leaving him no choice but to allow himself to be scrutinised at such length, to be viewed as if he were incapable of returning that gaze. He learned not to look. (78)
Sometimes, the officer “interrupted his own work to have a few minutes’ conversation with Hamza (84). This is not conversation as in friends chatting, or strangers of the same culture and status – when finding themselves seated next to each other at the bar counter – exchanging a few words, but what is more usually referred to as “conversation classes”. And the two men remain widely separated by race, culture and status, with their respective stances steeped in condescension and often contempt on the German’s side, and in fear and incomprehension on the African’s. Nevertheless, Hamza is now “visibly under the Oberleutnant’s protection, and while he was not spared the bullying and abuse that was regular military practice in the boma [gathering place], he was at least safe from the floggings and hard labour which were inescapable for many of the troops” (84). Especially wounding are the nasty remarks of the lower ranking “Feldwebel” [the non-commissioned officer, a man of lower class, who is himself despised as such by Julius, Hamza’s fellow but far more experienced batman]. “‘You are [the Oberleutnant’s] pretty toy, little … plaything, aren’t you?’ he said, wagging a finger in disdainful warning and once reaching out and squeezing Hamza’s nipple” (84). The Oberleutnant himself, in his recurrent gloomy moods, when Hamza looks up enquiringly at the man’s apparently self-mocking German words, says “cruel or scornful” things to him. Hamza attempts to keep his distance under these circumstances, constantly having to deploy his own emotional survival skills. “Hamza dreaded these dark moments when he was vulnerable to any humiliation the officer wished to inflict on him.” Much earlier, Hamza sensed that “the officer was capable of violence. He had seen it in the light in his eyes, which glistened involuntarily, and in the tightening of the skin at his temple, as if he were suppressing a burning urge” (84).
On one occasion, the officer asks Hamza, half-wonderingly: “What are you doing here? What is someone like you doing in this brutish business?” (85). Though the questions apparently resemble the Feldwebel’s cruel sneers, they come from a different place. Gurnah’s depiction of the conflicted Oberleutnant and of the strange, ambivalent relationship between Hamza and the officer is one of the great triumphs of this beautifully written novel, the narrator never putting a foot wrong to spoil the delicacy with which it is evoked – in contrast with the vulgarities of the gossip that surrounds the officer’s protectiveness towards Hamza. Gurnah never sentimentalises the situation, however, but remains true to the brutal realities of the time and place within which these men on opposite sides of the earth spend years in close proximity. Only much, much later will Hamza learn of the deeper source of the man’s conduct towards him. On one occasion, the officer tells Hamza roundly that he “like[s] people to be afraid of [him] because it makes [him] strong” (86). The “only way to rule [people] is to strike terror into them,” he says. Because the Schutztruppe is the instrument by means of which to achieve such cowing, “we want you to be thick-skinned heartless braggarts who will do our bidding without hesitation. … Except – you are not one of them. You tremble and look and listen to every heartbeat as if all of it torments you. I have watched you from the beginning …. You are a dreamer” (86). At some level, then, the officer is sensitive to his batman’s nature, quite likely despite himself. “At this stage of the war,” a historical aside states, “most of the soldiers engaged in [East African] combat were Africans and Indians: troops from Nyasaland [present-day Malawi] and Uganda, from Nigeria and the Gold Coast [now Ghana], from the Congo and from India, and on the other side the African Schutztruppe” (91). At this stage, “the officer lost much of his scornful and satirical aura as their difficulties increased and now he was often cold and withdrawn” (93), hiding the toll taken on him by leadership responsibility and by anxiety. The British gain ground; two years after Ilyas’s departure, they have “control of the coast” (100).
During the terrible “last few weeks of the war” (111), a dangerous deterioration of relationships in Hamza’s group and rising tensions eventuate firstly in luggage carriers (unpaid for months) fleeing, followed by a large desertion of askari – humiliatingly ordered to carry goods. The Feldwebel, by now more or less “out of control” and in a “frenz[y]” of rage at so much going wrong and with the impending sense of doom and defeat, takes out his rage upon his African subordinates. He has “a deep loathing of Hamza” (93). He is particularly resentful of the Oberleutnant’s protectiveness towards Hamza, and, at an especially anxious moment, erupts in a violent expression of his hatred: viciously slashing Hamza’s thigh with his sabre. It is a life-threatening injury causing massive blood loss; they are medicinally so under-resourced at this point, that the only way to save Hamza’s life is to have him carried to a German mission station where they run a clinic. Few other askari would have been so assisted at this point. As Hamza lies in a semi-coma, the officer sits at his side, soon to leave (Hamza will never see him again). The Germans’ final defeat is imminent. Bitterly, though now speaking “slowly, soothingly”, the Oberleutnant remarks: “We lied and killed for this empire and called it our Zivilisierungsmission.” He divulges something of his family history, perhaps because he knows the injured Hamza can in his state only half-hear and may not remember. He is from a military family, the officer says, and had a younger brother, “a beautiful boy” (118) who was ill-suited to be a soldier and was killed at 18 in a barracks fire; he, too, “was a dreamer” and had loved [the poetry of] Schiller. After the remaining askari come to greet the still very ill man, the Oberleutnant does so, too, leaving Hamza a keepsake: his brother’s copy of Schiller. Perhaps this man could not overcome his inbred racism to love Hamza – his parting comment, after all, is that the British are likely to “intern [German POWs] with nigger criminals … to humiliate” them – but it is impossible not to notice the half-hidden tenderness he shows towards the young African; especially at the last.
Uncomplicated by conflictual feelings, the pastor’s wife is kind to the injured man; “when she left Hamza always felt better than he really was” (122). The pastor, by contrast, is a cold man, though committed to fulfil his Christian duties. He apparently took charge of the book the Oberleutnant had left for Hamza, he explains when Hamza enquires, because he thought the officer was being “reckless” to give him this valuable book: “that it was that kind of … solicitude that had provoked the Feldwebel to violence” (128). It was his wife, he says, who insisted that he return the gift to Hamza. Eventually recovered, Hamza returns by boat to the town where he used to live, of which he has little memory:
There were lights on ashore and a few people moving about on the quay, their elongated shadows stretched out ahead and behind them in the gloom. Beyond the quayside warehouses the town sprawled and the sky was amber from the setting sun. Further to the right the dimly lit shoreline road shaped away towards the headland. … [He] remembered that from the time before, how the road ran past the house where he lived, and how then it narrowed down to the tight aperture that opened out into the interior. (133)
This dreamy, delicately evoked scene has all kinds of lightly symbolic resonances. A solitary man, Hamza has nowhere else to go, but no relatives or friends here, where a vague instinct has brought him. Once disembarked, “he walked aimlessly” (155), trying to spot anything familiar. He is also in need of employment, having neither food nor money, and is in some pain from his injured leg. Hours later, he spots a workshop with open doors on the outskirts of town; he can ask for work here. Remarkably, the owner or manager decides to take on this “unlikely” employee: exhausted, emaciated, unkempt and almost in rags, but educated and soft-spoken. Without any immediate opening for employment, the man (who will turn out to be Nassor Biashara) gives the quite slightly built Hamza (of all things) the job of nightwatchman at his warehouse – provoking mocking comments from the senior employee, in whose charge he leaves Hamza.
With nowhere to go, Hamza soon locates the nearest mosque to wash; that night, he sleeps on the ground outside the warehouse. The man placed in charge of him is Khalifa, who exclaims at finding him there in the early morning. This is Khalifa’s exasperated reaction: “Who are your people? You can’t sleep in the streets,” he said angrily. “You’ll get hurt. … Don’t you have any money?” (151). Yet this bluff exterior, as Hamza will soon realise, hides the proverbial heart of gold. Sensing Hamza’s hunger, Khalifa “took hold of Hamza’s right wrist and slapped a coin in his palm”, ordering him to go and get something to eat. That evening, Khalifa takes Hamza home with him, giving him a meal and a place to sleep “temporarily”. “It made Hamza take another look at Khalifa, this generous offer, … all that kindness alongside his irritable manner and sour looks” (153). The quiet stranger goes off to the nearest mosque to wash and to be among other people, not to speak to them, but to pray alongside them, happier in their comforting presence. At night, he is still troubled by post-war nightmares, but relieved and grateful to have safe shelter. “Hamza lived quietly in his store room, slipping in and out with the minimum of fuss” (165), not only because he is shy and unassuming, but because Bi Asha is unfriendly towards him, angry with her husband for taking in a stranger. Khalifa remains friendly; he drops in on Hamza occasionally and invites him to sit in on his (still ongoing) baraza sessions, which Hamza sometimes does, listening from the “outskirts” of the group to their talk and laughter. Hamza, one evening, notices the young woman (he assumes that she is the household servant) who brings the three older men their coffee; he sees concern in her eyes at his limp when he gets up to take the tray from her at the door and stumbles inadvertently. The young woman has made an impression on Hamza, which Gurnah describes unusually: “[Hamza] had seen in his brief glimpse of the slight figure someone whose eyes and face had the clean look of honesty. … It made him … feel sad for the loveless years of his own life, and for the episodes of gentleness in it that had been so brief” (167). At night, often unable to sleep, he takes out books from his bag – sometimes the Schiller – although the dim light allows him only to “go over the pieces he already knew” (170).
Hamza’s unostentatious nature is evoked with great sensitivity, for example, when Nassor Biashara, their employer (whom Khalifa believes to be a hard and greedy man), reveals how thoroughly he understands the liking which the older carpenter, Mzee Suleman, with whom he now works, has for Hamza:
He puts great faith in the truth, though that sounds more pompous than I meant it to. Perhaps it would be better to say he has faith in frankness, openness, something like that, without noise or show … you’re like that too. And courteous – he likes that. That is what he meant when he said you have manners. He won’t say any of this to you himself so I’m telling you. (176)
Knowing that Hamza pays no rent, Bi Asha has taken to sending him on small errands. He also gets his lunch from the main house. One day, when Bi Asha is out and Khalifa has not returned from the warehouse, the young woman (he thinks she’s about 20) who lives in the house strikes up a conversation with Hamza – something a “good Muslim woman” is not allowed to do, and at which Bi Asha would be furious and horrified, as she has grown anxious to get Afiya “safely” married; Bi Asha also suspects that Khalifa may have designs on her as his second wife. Hamza, too, had thought she might already have been taken to wife by the older man. Her conduct on this occasion, however, makes clear that she is single and likes him, while he, too, has been trying to see and learn more of her. Like him, he discovers, she is an orphan living on others’ charity. He has hopes of taking the very tentative relationship further, but is timorously conscious that he has so very little to offer Afiya: he is precariously employed and does not have a home of his own, with no wealthy or even just respectable family to intercede for him. “There was no talking himself out of his excitement, though, even as he also feared he did not have the will to fulfil his desire” (183).
Afiya “longed for the small moments she saw him”. She touches his hand once, to give him a sign. She knows that “the moment was coming when what needed to be said would be said but she was not sure if she should press matters forward or wait for him to act” (185). Wondering how to do this discreetly, Afiya devises a brilliant strategy. As if merely chatting, she says admiringly that she has heard that he knows German, and asks Hamza to choose and translate a German poem (into Swahili) for her. Taking the gentle hint, Hamza, of course, chooses a beautiful love poem – one by Schiller, from the Oberleutnant’s book. The last two lines of a stanza from this poem (titled “Das Geheimnis” – meaning “The secret”, translated for the reader’s benefit into English) state: “My eye can see for certain/ the language her eye is speaking” (192). Responding to the secretly transferred note with the cited lines, Afiya tells Hamza that she, too, has read his heart in the way he looks at her. Soon after this, bringing Hamza his breakfast, “she slipped into the room and into his embrace” (193). The young couple rapidly overcome the obstacles to their union, particularly aided by Khalifa’s “happy” approval, responsible appraisal and practical assistance (199), and are married. Khalifa even insists that they continue to live with himself and Bi Asha (who is, as expected, less enthusiastic about this plan) – now inside the dwelling, in the room Afiya has been occupying.
Hamza now learns of Afiya’s “lost” brother, Ilyas, and what close friends he and Khalifa had been, so that Khalifa saw himself as the girl’s guardian and accountable to Ilyas for her welfare. Hamza, who is usually so reticent, trusts Afiya with the painful details of his wartime life, just as she informs him about her two periods with the abusive foster family in the countryside. He knows, too, of her deep longing, if not to be reunited with or hear from Ilyas, at least to find out what has happened to him. The spouses have several similarities in their backgrounds – both are children of terribly poor parents; both have suffered abuse, from which both of them carry permanent marks of injury: Afiya with her injured hand and Hamza with his scarred leg and (by now slight) limp. They are well suited, and their marriage is a deep and fulfilling union. For both of them, the security they feel in their committed union is new. After all, Afiya was given to terrible people by her desperately ill father when very young – a family who made her their servant and treated her brutally – while Hamza, as a boy, was “bonded” [more or less given into slavery] by his father to a “merchant pirate” who “treated [him] as his property”, “to secure my father’s debts or something like that” (205), as he tells Khalifa to explain why he has no known relatives. Like Ilyas, he ran away and became an askari.
Life settles into greater ease for the young couple; Nassor Biashara’s business is set to expand as the opportunities for selling his wooden furniture expand under British rule, especially for furnishing schools and offices, and Hamza expects a pay rise after being given charge of a second workshop. Although Afiya’s first pregnancy ends prematurely, the second brings them a boy who is named Ilyas after his maternal uncle. Bi Asha has been seriously ill for a long time, her condition exacerbated by her refusal to seek proper medical care. Three days after the birth of the second Ilyas, the always so outspoken Bi Asha “passed away in unaccustomed silence”. Khalifa is not devastated, since his wife’s death had so evidently been on the way for a long time. Nevertheless, “some puff seemed to have gone out of him” (234). Even so, his old, irrepressible mischief soon reasserts itself. He also takes Bi Asha’s passing as a calling for an adjustment in the household’s arrangement, generously insisting that he take to staying in the outside room (formerly Hamza’s), so that the young family have the run of the whole house. Only two disappointments shadow their life; the first is that Hamza and Afiya have no further children, and the second is that, six years after the war’s end, there is “still no word from or about” the older Ilyas. “It caused Afiya so much anguish that she could not decide whether to give up hope and grieve or keep thinking of him as alive and on his way home” (238).
Little Ilyas is a boy “drawn to silence” (239), much like his father. Khalifa dotes on the boy, referring to him as his grandson. Khalifa helps shape the child emotionally, morally and intellectually, though drawing the line at encouraging Muslim beliefs and practices; he is an unofficial co-parent – a role he relishes. He and Ilyas have a shared love of the folktales that Khalifa tells with delightful skill. An opportunity arrives for Afiya to train for a profession; midwife assistants are needed, and the fact that she is literate, as required, helps, so this brings a new side to her life. A disturbing development affects the household’s tranquillity when Ilyas is 11 years old, for that is “when the whispers started” (243). The expression does not refer primarily to ugly gossip (though that soon follows), but to the boy strangely and for long periods whispering to himself in the voice of an unknown woman. Hamza is extremely reluctant to accept that there is anything “wrong” with his son, but Khalifa is convinced that “something is troubling that child” (249), and Afiya shares his concern. Hamza delicately raises the matter of the gossip with the boy, and the whispering subsides for some months, only to resurface violently, at night – giving young Ilyas terrifying nightmares during which “the voice” insistently demands of the boy, “Where is Ilyas?” (251), clearly referring to his uncle. Afiya is convinced their son has been “visited” (meaning something like “possessed by a spirit” – possibly Ilyas’s late mother’s?) and that a shekhiya (a healer) must be urgently consulted. Khalifa is dismissive of the idea and Hamza sceptical, but Afiya persists. An elaborate cleansing ritual takes place, and, to their relief, Ilyas recovers equanimity. A new school year starts with a new English teacher – a man who encourages creative writing – and Ilyas develops a flair for writing vivid stories, to his parents’ and Khalifa’s delight.
When Hamza, after the war’s end, left the German mission station where he had been nursed back to health, the pastor’s kindly “Frau” had written her and her husband’s address in Berlin in one of the two books he now owned, and suggested he write to them. This is possible after the cessation of hostilities between the warring nations, and – Afiya’s anxiety about her missing brother perhaps lying at the root of their son’s “disturbance” (he has, after all, been named for him) – Hamza writes to the Frau to ask whether she might be able to discover his whereabouts. Months later and subsequent to questioning by a British colonial officer (there is still uneasiness about connections with Germans), Hamza is handed the letter in which the Frau replied. She provides important information indicating that Ilyas is probably still alive and residing in Germany. Soon afterwards, WWII erupts, with postal connections with Germany coming to an end. Khalifa dies quietly in 1946, aged 68. He was always vehemently opposed to young Ilyas joining the military, but the young man now does so, fortunately coming through unscathed and able to take up the British authorities’ promise that military veterans would be given free further education opportunities. He qualifies initially as a teacher; he keeps up his writing, and some stories are accepted for broadcasting. Ilyas eventually becomes a broadcaster himself and gets the opportunity (two years after Tanzanian independence, gained in 1963 when he is 38) of further training in West Germany. The award he has been given requires him to create a research project for broadcasting. Ilyas decides that his will concern tracing the history of his uncle in Germany. He informs his parents about what he discovers. Ilyas (the elder) remained a devotee of German and eventually Nazi causes, but the passing of race laws forbidding cross-race sexual relations with non-Aryans impinged badly upon “Elias Essen” (as he became). Such relations had still been permitted when Ilyas had married his German wife, with whom he had three children, but he had an affair with another local woman later on. He was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he died in 1942 – with his son, Paul, who voluntarily joined him. So, Ilyas the younger writes to his parents that, at least, “someone loved Uncle Ilyas enough to follow him to certain death” (275).
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This ending fittingly rounds off the bitter-sweet story that Afterlives tells. The novel is moving and, like all accounts of war, often confronts one with terrible facts, but its resuscitation of life at a distant time and in an area far from where most readers live, is profoundly valuable in honouring the suffering of that time. As an aesthetic achievement, it roundly confirms Gurnah’s worthiness as the world’s – and our continent’s – latest recipient of literature’s highest accolade.
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This ending fittingly rounds off the bitter-sweet story that Afterlives tells. The novel is moving and, like all accounts of war, often confronts one with terrible facts, but its resuscitation of life at a distant time and in an area far from where most readers live, is profoundly valuable in honouring the suffering of that time. As an aesthetic achievement, it roundly confirms Gurnah’s worthiness as the world’s – and our continent’s – latest recipient of literature’s highest accolade.
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