I’ve read scores of novels dealing with the damage caused by colonial ambitions in India and south east Asia, but until recently, little that related to Africa.

Though I know Germany had a significant presence in South Africa and Namibia, I hadn’t appreciated they were so active in East Africa (the region that is now Tanzania) nor the level of brutality they exacted on the local population.

Afterlives, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s ninth novel doesn’t flinch from showing the violence and exploitation used to seize land and quash rebellions in this part of the continent. I understand now why the Nobel Prize for Literature jury highlighted
Gurnah’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between culture and continents,” when they named him as the 2021 award recipient.

Uncompromising it certainly is, but it’s also more nuanced than a “brutal colonisers versus good colonial citizens” perspective. Afterlives shows the relentless determination of the Schutztruppe (German troops) to prevail but also indicates that the most unspeakable cruelties were enacted by their Askari battalions formed from native soldiers. Some were coerced into joining, others did so freely and by the time they realised their mistake it was too late.

The askari left the land devastated, its people starving and dying in the hundreds of thousands, while they struggled on in their blind and murderous embrace of a cause whose origins they did not know and whose ambitions were vain and ultimately intended for their domination.

It’s a weighty political novel within which Gurnah tells a story about love, friendship and resilience.

At the centre of Afterlives are Ilyas and his sister Afiya, two children separated when Ilyas is taken away to serve as an askari solider. Years later, he returns to find his sister living as little more than a servant with the family he thought would be her protectors. Beaten so badly for her ability to read and write she seeks help from Ilyas’s friend, Khalifa and moves to live with him and his wife.

Meanwhile another akari soldier returns from the conflict, carrying with him the scars — physical and otherwise — of that service. It’s through his friendship with Khalifa and his growing feelings for Afiya that he learns to rebuild his life.

The emotional heart of the novel lies in the slow coming together of
Hamza and Afiya. Gurnah doesn’t idealise it or make it easy. Both characters carry damage from their pasts, and the novel is honest about how that damage doesn’t simply dissolve in the warmth of another person’s attention. But it can, perhaps, be endured.