Afterlives

The Three Lives

Ilyas was taken from his village as a small boy by German colonial troops passing through—the casual, unremarkable cruelty of colonial appropriation, too common to be documented. He grew up in German service, became a soldier, an askari—a local African recruited or conscripted to fight under German command—and is now, as the novel opens, returning home after years away, looking for the family he was separated from. He finds his sister Afiya, who has grown up in domestic servitude in their absence, handed between households, doing the work no one else wants to do, surviving with the particular resourcefulness of someone who has never been given the option of not surviving.

The third major figure is Hamza, another askari, who has been damaged by his years in German service in ways that are both physical and psychological. The German officer who commanded him—Hauptmann—left marks that Hamza carries in his body and his silence. When Hamza and Afiya’s lives converge in the small East African town where the novel is centered, the story of what German colonialism actually did to the people it touched—not the abstract historical account, but the specific, granular damage to specific people—becomes the novel’s subject.

Gurnah’s prose in Afterlives is quieter than in his earlier work. The novel does not announce itself; it accumulates. The historical specificity is embedded in the texture of daily life—in what people eat and trade and believe, in the languages they speak and the routes they travel, in the way the German colonial administration imposes itself on a world that existed before it arrived and continues to exist, in its own way, underneath the official history. Gurnah is not interested in the colonial officials’ perspective; they appear in the novel as forces, briefly characterized, then receding. The center is always the people the archives didn’t preserve.

The Forgotten History

German East Africa—the territory that is now mainland Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi—was a German colonial possession from 1885 until Germany’s defeat in the First World War. The German colonial administration was among the most brutal in Africa: the suppression of the Maji Maji uprising (1905-1907), in which German forces killed somewhere between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand Tanzanians through direct violence and induced famine, is one of the largest colonial atrocities in African history and one of the least known in the West.

The First World War in East Africa is also a largely forgotten campaign. The German commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck led a force of German officers and African askari soldiers in a guerrilla campaign that lasted until after the armistice in Europe, making him technically the last German commander to surrender in the war. The campaign is remembered in military history circles for Lettow-Vorbeck’s tactical brilliance; the experience of the African soldiers and civilians whose territory it was fought across, who bore the overwhelming share of the suffering, has been almost entirely absent from Western accounts.

Gurnah’s novel is not a war novel in the conventional sense—the fighting is not its center—but it is saturated with the war’s consequences. Characters are conscripted, separated, killed, and displaced by a conflict they did not start and cannot control. What the novel does that a history book cannot is give these consequences faces and names and interior lives: Hamza’s damaged silence, Afiya’s careful negotiation of survival, Ilyas’s search for a family that has been scattered by forces that had no interest in keeping it intact. The archives of German colonialism record the administrators, the officers, the commercial transactions. Gurnah records the people.

Gurnah After the Nobel

Afterlives was published in English in 2022, but it was written and first published before the Nobel Prize announcement in October 2021. In the week after the announcement, it became Gurnah’s most widely read novel almost overnight—not because it was his best-regarded work (that distinction belongs to Paradise and By the Sea) but because it was his most recent and therefore most readily available. Readers who came to Gurnah through the Nobel announcement arrived at a body of work that had been building for thirty years in relative obscurity, and Afterlives was their first encounter.

The Nobel citation praised Gurnah’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” Afterlives fits this description precisely, but so does everything Gurnah has written: the question of displacement, of people forced from one place and unable to fully inhabit another, runs through every novel. What distinguishes Afterlives is its historical reach—the displacement here begins with German colonialism, before the period of British rule that provides the backdrop for Paradise and By the Sea.

For readers new to Gurnah, the recommended order is: Afterlives first (the most historical and perhaps the most immediately accessible), then Paradise (his Booker-shortlisted novel, set in the period of German and early British colonial rule, probably his most formally accomplished work), then By the Sea (the most formally inventive, the novel that arrives in England, the refugee experience rendered from inside). This order moves from the historical past toward the present, tracing the full arc of what Gurnah is doing across his career: showing how the colonial past produces the postcolonial present, one individual life at a time.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Gurnah’s most historically specific novel fills a genuine gap in Western literary memory: German colonial rule in East Africa, told through three lives the official record never bothered to preserve, in prose that is as quiet and precise and devastating as anything he has written.