Abdulrazak Gurnah and the afterlives of German colonialism in East Africa

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  • https://africasacountry.com/2022/01/abdulrazak-gurnah-and-the-afterlives-of-german-colonialism-in-east-

    Abdulrazak Gurnah and the afterlives of German colonialism in East Africa

    Tom Menger

    When Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 2021, the jury honored “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism.” With East Africa being central to much of Gurnah’s work, German colonialism is a regular presence in his novels, more precisely the colony of German East Africa, the biggest German colony of all, which comprised modern Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda. Although the history of this territory has been thoroughly studied, it still very much stands in the shadow of contemporary public debates on the German genocides perpetrated against the Herero and the Nama, as well as the debate on the continuities between that genocide and the Holocaust.

    German East Africa is especially prominent in two of Gurnah’s novels: the early Paradise (1994) and the recent Afterlives (2020). They invoke several themes. The first, perhaps unsurprisingly, is colonial violence. Though such violence is not always in the foreground of Gurnah’s books, it is always present. When Gurnah’s characters refer to the Mdachi, the Germans, and their African soldiers, the askari, they often use terms like merciless, viciousness and ferocity. German colonial rule in East Africa began with violence, when Hermann von Wissmann waged war on the coastal populations from 1889 to 1890, after these had resisted the attempt of the German East Africa Company to run the colony as a private enterprise. The hanging in 1889 of one of the revolt’s leaders, Al Bushiri, which the Germans orchestrated as a grand spectacle, recurs as an incisive event in Afterlives. [continue reading]

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