‘Afterlives’ weaves a tale of trauma and love in colonial-era East Africa

“Afterlives” is the latest novel from Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian-born British author and winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. The book takes place amid the backdrop of German colonialism in Tanzania in the late 19th and early 20th century. It revolves around three central characters whose lives entwine as Germany attempts to expand its imperialist ambitions in East Africa, brutally suppressing local uprisings while using African volunteers and mercenaries to fight against British forces during World War I. But the book also celebrates resilience as two people scarred by war and the loss of family find love and a future that transcends their intergenerational trauma. Joining us is author Abdulrazak Gurnah, Professor Emeritus of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, honored today to be able to spend the hour in front of an audience at Portland’s Ida B. Wells High School with a Nobel Prize winning novelist, Abdulrazak Gurnah. Abdulrazak Gurnah was born on the island of Zanzibar, a meeting point of goods and people for centuries, a multilingual, multicultural, multireligious trading port. He left Zanzibar when he was 18. He arrived in England where he lives and writes to this day. He’s the author of 10 novels in which he explores many of the most urgent issues of our time, migration and refugee, trade and debt, identity and family, the global and the hyperpersonal reverberations of colonialism. His latest novel is called “Afterlives”. It spans more than 70 years of East African history and it focuses on characters who are battered by, but survived, the violence and the callousness of European colonial jockeying. Last year. Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and I am thrilled to be able to welcome him onto the show today. Thanks very much for being here.

Gurnah: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

Dave Miller: I thought we could start with a passage from this new novel that comes in the middle of it, partly because it helps us set the scene for both trade along through the commercial world, centered around the Indian Ocean, but also your own childhood.

Gurnah: “It had been in the early stages of the Kusi, the summer monsoons, when Hamza arrived in the town on that swiftly darkening evening. By then, the traders from across the ocean had made their way home to Somalia and South Arabia and western India. He didn’t remember much about the weather from his time in the town many years before. And many years, many years after he left were arduous and spent flying the interior, a long way from coastal winds. Everyone told him that these months in the middle of the year were the sweetest, but he did not really understand that when he first returned. The land was still green from the long rains and the winds were mild. Later in the year, in the last third or so, it became drier and hotter. And then with the beginning of the winter monsoons, the Kaskazi, came rough seas and high winds at first, and then the short rains. And finally in the new year, the steady winds from the northeast. The winds brought the traders’ ships back from across the ocean. The true destination was Mombasa or Zanzibar, prosperous towns rich, with rich merchants ready to trade, but some of them straggled into other ports, including theirs. The arrival of the ships was anticipated weeks in advance and popular legends of captains and crew were revived and circulated once again, the chaos they brought as they sprawled over any empty space and turned it into a campsite. The fabulous merchandise they hawk through the streets, a lot of it trinkety but some of it valuable beyond the vendors awareness. The thick rugs and rare perfumes, the shiploads of dates and salted kingfish and dried shark that they sold as joblots to the merchants. Their notorious hunger for fruit and for mangoes, in particular, and their unruly violence, which in the past had led to open battles in the streets and forced people to lock themselves in their houses in terror. The sailors filled the mosques to overflowing and perfumed the air with their sea salted, sweat stained kanzus and kofias, which were often tarnished brown with grime. The area around the ports bore the brunt of their excesses. The timber yard, Al Khalifa’s house, was some distance into the town and the only travelers who came their way were the street hawkers with their baskets of gum and spices and perfume and necklaces and brass trinkets and thick woven cloths, dyed and embroidered in medieval colors. Sometimes high stepping Suri merchants who had lost their way came marching through the neighborhood swinging their canes high as if they were crossing enemy territory. Children trooped behind them, calling out mocking words the strangers did not understand and making farting noises with their mouths which the Suri were reputed to find especially insulting.”

Dave Miller: This book, your new one and it doesn’t focus on Zanzibar, it mentions it including in that passage, almost in passing. But how much of what you just read would have been true for Zanzibar itself?

Gurnah: It would have been true for the part of town, as well, that I lived in, yeah, sure.

Dave Miller: What could you see from your childhood home in terms of the port and the comings and goings?

Gurnah: If you’re on the top floor of the house, you could see the port, you could see way out to sea as well. So we’re really right there in the port district, and in those days, because it wasn’t such a busy port, really, despite this description, these were all sailing boats. When the bigger ships came in, there weren’t quite so many of those, and there was a horn that the port, somebody in the port, I don’t know who, but somebody in the port will play this, this horn like, like I think I read this in Mark Twain, that as the steam, as the steam boats, those big, those big things with wheels.

Dave Miller: Big sternwheelers.

Gurnah: Yeah, yeah. That as they go through then, they like trains announcing their passage with this, that hooting thing. It would be like that, so you would hear that all the way, ships coming in.

Dave Miller: What did that mean to you as a little kid to have a ship come in?

Gurnah: Well, not such a great deal because you grow up with it, but on reflection, what it meant was that this is the world, the world is coming to us, kind of thing. It actually did mean that many of those places across the ocean were at least familiar names. And of course from that kind of description. There is also a familiar presence, that is to say merchants and sailors and so on who would descend on us every year.

Dave Miller:  What languages might have been spoken on the street?

Gurnah: Simply, people were coming from Somalia. So you’d hear Somali spoken. In fact there was a Somali presence anyway along the coast because they’re just up the road from us. You would hear Arabic, of course, because the travelers from South Arabia, but they’re all slightly different versions of Arabic. They dressed differently so not only do they speak differently, but you see people dressed in different ways and you would recognize them by either the way they dressed or how they grew their beards or whatever. You, of course, would have heard Indian languages because they’re travelers from India, Farsi, Iranians. I guess those would be the languages that you would hear. And of course, many of them because they’re regular travelers, regular visitors, I mean, so some of them would also be able to speak Swahili as well.

Dave Miller: In that passage, there’s mention of the different seasons and the different winds. What did that mean for the rhythm of the year?

Gurnah: It’s very important that there were these regular winds. So there’s, from November till around about January, February, you get what are called the Northeast Monsoons. You may be familiar with this word monsoon and for you it may be something that’s to do with the rains in India or something like that. But in fact it’s a system of winds and currents and the, okay, let me start again because the Northeast first, let me tell you about the Northeast. So the Northeast is the one that blows from the north and blows down there towards the East Coast of Africa. So the east is coming from the northeast. So that comes down, if you were to look at the Indian Ocean, it really basically comes across the southern South Asia and then down along the coast, which means if you’re a half decent boatman or sailor, you could just fill up your boat, be ready for the wind and it will take you to Zanzibar, more or less in those months. Of course you have to know what you’re doing as well. And so that’s the northeast monsoon and then the southeast monsoons, beginning around about April, May and so on, and they blow from the south, sorry, southwest, southwest, which is somewhere along where we are, across the Indian Ocean towards south Asia, in that direction. And those are the..

Dave Miller: That just is the …

Gurnah: Does that mean that’s enough?

Dave Miller: You have five minutes to get to, no - you have 40 minutes left. Just get to your class if you’re a student, you’re past that right now.

Gurnah: All right, so the southwest then are the winds that take the rain to India and South Asia, but they also of course take those travelers back in the other direction as well.

Dave Miller: I’m curious about something you mentioned just before that, that all these different cities, even if you hadn’t been to them at that point in your life, you’d heard about them and you were, you might very well see people who’d come from them. There’s this idea now that the 21st Century version of globalization and global trade that it’s, it has shrunk the world. That’s the phrase I’ve heard a lot. Did the world seem big to you, despite the fact that so many people from so many places, speaking so many languages of different religions, you might see them outside your window?

Gurnah: No, it didn’t actually because I guess it was familiar from more or less before consciousness arrived. So these things, these people were coming every year. So even before you knew how to speak, you’re already seeing these people, coming and going, and so it didn’t seem like, it’s more of a reflection that you, that I think, yes, that was probably my first idea of the world and its variety and its difference, that kind of thing.

Dave Miller: But there’s also the, I guess an example in front of you of the porousness of, of the world and of borders. I’m curious how you think growing up in that kind of a commercially based port city, how it affected your understanding to this day, of nations and lines between nations.

Gurnah: Yes, sure. And particularly in the aftermath of colonialism, because one of the major consequences of European colonialism in Africa, but not only in Africa, in other parts as well, is the map making. So in order to suit the administrative convenience of a colonial administration, they drew maps which made sense to them, which suited them, as they were. And these were not always logical or sensible or even really viable, in some cases, as administrative territories. And as you know, the result is that when colonial powers decided it was time to go, or when they were forced to go, what they left behind were territories which became nations and much of the consequence of this is the constant strife that is going on in so many African countries because they’re not nations in any organic sense, where it might be that these are actually antagonists, historically, or it might be that one has more control than others. So there is an unequal distribution of the resources of the nation and so on. So, and also it broke up, shall we say, kind of traditional or ongoing cultural webs and connections. So if you think of the coast of East Africa, in a way it’s quite reasonable to think of it as not the coast of East Africa, but the western Indian Ocean, because historically its connections has been with cultures and people across the ocean.

Dave Miller: As opposed to lands 50 miles inland?

Gurnah: As opposed to the interiors and so even the language spoken, which is now of course spoken by millions and millions and millions of people in Africa, Swahili, means literally the language of the coast. And it’s spoken not only on the east coast of Africa, it is spoken in Somalia, is spoken in South Arabia, is spoken in the Persian Gulf and so on. Large numbers of people, sort of like in Iman, 40% of the people speak Swahili, as well as Arabic. So it literally is a language of the coast, of the literal, of the Indian Ocean. Of course, now it’s become also the national language of Kenya, of Tonga, Tanzania and further afield, Uganda, it’s spoken in Congo, Zambia and so on. But its origins were, its origin was on the coast.

Dave Miller: Let’s take a question from our audience. Go ahead. What’s, what’s your name? (Bell rings) That pernicious bell, go ahead.

Avalon Whitney: My name is Avalon Whitney.

Dave Miller: You have a question for Abdulrazak Gurnah?

Avalon Whitney: Yeah, what does community mean to you?

Gurnah: Community? Well, where, where I grew up, community means something different of course from where I am now living. Yeah, the community would have been people around the area you lived in, in the first instance of course, but also in a larger sense of, we’re a small island. It would have meant people in the larger area and then you can do it in concentric circles as well, and the whole community to a different degree. In the first instance is your family, in the next instance is your neighbors and so on, and you can just keep growing out that way, but it felt and it still feels like my community is Zanzibar, and what it meant to me is that every time I go up there, I feel like I’m at home.

Dave Miller: As you answer, at the beginning of your answer, you said, well, it’s different when I was growing up, it was this. And then by the end of your answer, it seemed like you’d actually, right at a different place, that your understanding community in the end, it actually hasn’t changed significantly.

Gurnah: This is the interesting thing as well, because as a result of the revolution in 1964, very soon after independence, large numbers of people either were, well, in the first instance, large numbers of people were killed, and large numbers of people were detained and terrorized, one or another. And many of them left, either voluntarily or in some cases because they were forced to, by circumstances, which is of course the usual circumstance that generally triggers refugee movement. It’s not always voluntary, but sometimes it is, but very often it’s a result of violence. But then, as things kind of calmed down, people started to go back and certainly for me, it took something like 17 years before I could go back. But when you go back, it’s still the same old place, in most ways. Of course that changes but in most ways it’s recognizably so. Especially because people recognize you.

Dave Miller: Before we get to going back, after 17 years in the U. K., I’m curious a little bit about your departure. So you were about 14 or 15 when the revolution started. How did your own life change in those years?

Gurnah: Well, I was actually 13 and a bit. Yeah, just started what we call secondary school, which I guess must be the equivalent of your high school, I don’t know. Well, it was terrifying, to put it simply, to begin with, because there was such chaos. And it seemed there were a lot of guns and people in ragged uniforms wandering about, ordering people around and so on.

Dave Miller: I’ve heard you say before that you hadn’t seen guns like that before, and so all of a sudden they were very public in a way that they had never been before.

Gurnah: No, no, they weren’t. The police were not armed. There wasn’t an army or anything like that. And so this sudden appearance of people who are sometimes in uniform, sometimes not in uniform, but carrying guns and that’s it, and this, there was just chaos in this way and they would. were able, whoever they were to you, you didn’t even know who they were, might walk into a shop and just take what they want. It was just chaos for several months. And in the meantime there were also these really totally unpredictable announcements. This is forbidden, that is not allowed, etcetera, etcetera. The kind of thing you would expect when you have a chaotic situation of that kind. Schools are closed, which you might think is a good thing, but after a month or so, and you don’t know when they’re going to reopen. Teachers were arrested, some of them were killed. You just don’t know what’s going to happen. It was that sort of situation. In a very personal sense, I mentioned the port and where we lived and so on and the kind of merchandise that was coming across the ocean. Well, my father traded in that, it was his work, so he basically bought shiploads of dried fish or preserved fish and then sold it to various outlets, so he didn’t sell it himself. All that kind of business was forbidden as it were. So he was out of work and he basically remained out of work till he passed. So big transformations.

Dave Miller: Did you see any future for yourself as you got into your later teens in Zanzibar?

Gurnah: I didn’t think of myself as wanting to do anything but be around in Zanzibar. But after finishing school, which I would have been just a year or so older than you, the government said that’s it. Normal schooling, you don’t need any more schooling. School is closed. And this at that age, at 18. In fact what you had to do was to become what they call the national service and then you’re sent to wherever it was that the government thought you should go and you’re paid almost nothing. But at that age to be told you can’t, you can’t continue studying, you can’t do anything else. But whatever you’re being told at 18, you think no, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to obey. But the only way you could disobey was by getting out illegally, as you were, by escaping. That’s why it took 17 years to go back, because it was actually impossible to return.

Dave Miller: My understanding is that in leaving the country, which as you say, had to be done illegally, you couldn’t return, at least at that time, there was no expectation of being able to return, what did your parents, and it was you and your older brother who left, what did they think about your departure?

Gurnah: So they understood that it felt necessary. And so they were willing to agree to it if they knew about it, they didn’t all know about it. We’re an extended family. You don’t sit around and talk about these things because the fear of, this again will give you an idea of the kind of situation, it was because the fear was also that it would imperil other people’s lives if they knew about these plans to do something illegal. So you didn’t talk about it and in some cases they didn’t find out till: where he is? Oh he’s gone, like that.

Dave Miller: And that wasn’t uncommon in those days?

Gurnah: Well it wasn’t, I don’t know what happened. We were kind of, quite a lot of people did leave in similar ways, people of our age. But we, I think, were amongst the earliest, so I don’t know what we left behind, what the circumstances were. I look at a picture of my graduation years, where in class and at one point anyway, not so much now, at one point there was I think one person from that class who was still in Zanzibar. Many have now returned.

Dave Miller: How much did you accurately know about where you were going to?

Gurnah: No, you don’t know anything, like you guys, you don’t know anything. Especially when it comes to something like that. It’s really a desire to get out and to go, it wasn’t the U.K. in particular that I was interested in. The only reason why it became the U.K. is because my cousin, who was a very close cousin, as I said, we lived as an extended family, was actually in the U.K. completing his PhD, at the time. So you think, well there we go, we’re coming, all right? And he said yes, okay, come, and this they called, anthropologists call it, the chain of migration. This is how people migrate. They migrate somewhere where they know someone. So I didn’t know very much apart from, remember we were, we went through a colonized education. So I did know something about Britain, but it wasn’t what I found when I got there.

Dave Miller: Let’s take a quick break. There’s so much more to get to, including becoming a writer and a conversation about your latest novel. But if you’re just tuning in, we are talking this whole hour right now with Abdulrazak Gurnah and we’ve got a lot more coming up after a one minute break.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller coming to you today from Portland’s Ida B. Wells High School in Southwest Portland. We’re spending the hour with a Nobel Prize winning writer, Abdulrazak Gurnah. Let’s take another question from our audience. Go ahead. What’s your name?

Emily Fenza: My name is Emily Fenza and my question is, what exactly inspired you to start writing?

Gurnah: Well I’m not sure if inspired is the right word, exactly. We tend to think of writing as inspired. I think it was more troubled by the circumstances in which I found myself and I didn’t start writing thinking I’m gonna sort this out, but writing sometimes helps. I’ve always enjoyed writing. It’s always been something I liked to do in school. It’s something that I like to do as a kind of, I was gonna say, pastime, but sometimes just scribbling things and so I started to do this because sometimes writing things down clarifies things. So it allowed me to reflect on where I found myself and what I was encountering, what I’d left behind and so on. So it started like that, just writing things like that, they were not intended for anybody. But as time passed, then I found that I was actually fictionalizing, telling as if it was somebody else’s story. And that grew. It took several months and so on. It grew. And then as the pages mount in the book, journal, or whatever it is that you have, I began to say, what am I doing? Am I writing a short story and then it still grows and think, oh, maybe it could be a novel and so on. So, it was like, that was a slow process of gradually building up a body of writing, secretly, because it seems such an aspiration to say I’m going to be a writer, until eventually it’s undeniable, it’s there. What is it? It’s a novel, let somebody see it.

Dave Miller: That is such an internal process you’ve just described. I’m curious when it was that you got, or if it was even necessary to get external validation or commendation or suggestions to continue, when the outside world said yes, you’re on the right track?

Gurnah: Well, it took them a long time to get to that. I suppose there were more private things, that, showing it to a friend or a partner but very, very, very few people, because it just seemed such a great thing to aspire to, to be perfectly honest. It just seemed no, no it’s not, it’s not gonna be possible.

Dave Miller: Did it also seem impractical compared to say buying and selling dried fish, compared to trade or something commercial?

Gurnah: Not really, no, because the buying and selling of dried fish was never ever going to be what I was going to do for a career as you will.

Dave Miller: Well, I don’t mean to imply that that was going to be your future when you were a kid or even certainly when you left, but that it seems like a very concrete way to imagine one’s life as opposed to a maybe more scary version of being an artist.

Gurnah: That’s what I’m saying when I say it was such a big thing to aspire to. So of course I was also studying, at some point when I was studying English, because at the beginning I didn’t think I would be studying English, but when I was studying English, I had a pretty good idea that the likeliest thing I’ll be doing when I finished would be to teach. So I was aware that this was going to be my destination, and at some point I recognized that for me the great ambition, the greatest ambition for me would be to be both, to both write and to be an academic. By then I decided I want to teach in the university, if I could, rather than teach you guys here.

Dave Miller: Why is that?

Gurnah: Well partly I think it’s because I wanted, I became so interested in the study of literature, that I wanted to be able to teach it at the most demanding level. I did teach in a secondary school while I was, well when I started, as a after I finished, after I graduated and started my postgraduate studies, which I had to do part time, because I didn’t have the funds. Then I was a teacher for a couple of years while that was going on and then went on to do my PhD full time and then was able to work in the university. So I thought, I really did think that that would allow me to sort of, to both explore literature at a level, which I found really interesting, but also of course, universities allow you research time, which means you can write academic work as well. So for me, those were the two ambitions to be an academic in literature and to also be a writer.

Dave Miller: And you achieve them, obviously.

Gurnah: And I was very grateful to be able to achieve them.

Dave Miller: I was really struck by the opening line of your Nobel prize lecture or speech. You said, writing has always been a pleasure and then you went on to describe how it has evolved over the years. At first it was, as you sort of note, kind of a schoolboy’s pleasure and you would just write without editing or thinking too much about it, after you’d written. And now, obviously, it’s very different. It’s a craft. It is more meticulous, highly edited, but I’m wondering how you’ve been able to retain that sense of pleasure as it has become a very different kind of work, as it has become work?

Gurnah: Yes, well it’s a different kind of pleasure, as you say, but whereas the pleasure in school boy writing, it was uninhibited. The only person who’s going to read it is going to be the teacher unless you want somebody else to read it, which is unusual because they’re all too busy with other things, football and hockey, and who wants to read your classwork? So that was different. That was just the pleasure in the doing, and of course the grade that the teacher gave you. The other kind of writing is because you know you’re communicating, this is going to be, you’re trying to discuss, to reflect on, to advance an idea. And therefore, even if you, even if you or I don’t have a particular reader in mind, you know this is something that is going to be read by an unknown person. The teacher you know, and you can sometimes perhaps bribe him or her by putting in the little things that he or she likes, but you can’t do that when you’re writing in this way, because you can’t predict who’s going to be reading this. So you’ve got to be able to write in a way that can stand on its own, that can make sense and that can survive scrutiny by others who might not be even sympathetic to the kind of conversation you wish to conduct. So, you’ve got to be assured that what you’re doing makes sense, is persuasive, is interesting, is as beautifully written as possible, so that it can stand on its own in this way, and there’s a pleasure in doing that, in kind of, well, you don’t know if you’ve achieved it, but you hope you’ve achieved it and you think, yes, that’s okay.

Dave Miller: I wonder if you could read us a section from your latest novel, it’s called “Afterlives”, as I mentioned before, and it spends a big chunk of time roughly following the brutal rise and then the bloody fall of Germany as a colonial power in East Africa, and in terms of the movement of the book, it more or less starts with a revolt against German rule. I wonder if you could, maybe this needs more setup or else you can just read.

Gurnah: I will just say a couple of things, which is that it wasn’t so much a revolt. It was just the redrawing of maps that I spoke about earlier, which happened largely in 1884-85 at the Berlin Conference, although there were little adjustments later on, just cut up the whole continent and said, you can have this, you can have that, even though there has been no previous contact with that place. So Germany acquires this territory which is called Deutsche Ost Afrika, German East Africa, in 1880-something, like 1884-85 and it basically goes there to claim this territory and from the moment they arrive until 1918, so, 30 years or so, when it was taken away, the colonies were taken away as a result of the Versailles Treaty, after the end of the 1918 war from Germany, I mean the colonies were taken away from them. Those 30 years were constant wars in Deutsche Ost Afrika, one war after another because nobody wanted to be the subject of this new German colonial force that was arriving, but because it was not a nation that was being invaded, the nation was created on a map. It wasn’t a nation that was being invaded. So it was, it was kind of easier in a way for the Germans to do it because they could fight, one at a time, of these different people. And then in the biggest of these, okay, rebellions, but the biggest of these wars of resistance, rebellion suggests already, a place that is kind of like under control, which then, those are rebellions. But these, these were wars of conquests, really. And the biggest rebellion, after apparently the conquest has been completed, was what was called the Maji Maji rebellion, which is this passage here:

“It was early 1907 when Khalifa and Asha married, the Maji Maji uprising was in the final throes of its brutalities, suppressed at a great cost in African lives and livelihoods. The rebellion started in Lindi and spread everywhere in the countryside and towns of the south and west of the country. It lasted for three years, as the widespread extent of the resistance to German rules sank in. So the response of the colonial administration became more relentless and brutal. The German command saw that the revolt could not be defeated by military means alone and proceeded to starve the people into submission. In the regions that had risen, the chutes troopers treated everyone as combatants. They burned villages and trampled fields and plundered food stores. African bodies were left hanging on roadside gibbets in a landscape that was scorched and terrorized. In the part of the country where Khalifa and Asha lived, they only knew of these events from hearsay. To them, these were only shocking stories because there was no visible rebellion in their own town. There had not been any since the hanging of Albashiri, although threats of German retribution were all around them. The steadfastness of the refusal of these people to become subjects of the Deutsche Ost Afrika Empire had come as a surprise to the Germans, especially after the examples that had been made of the Wahehe in the south and the Wajaga and the Wameri people in the mountains of the northeast. The Maji Maji victory left hundreds of thousands dead from starvation and many hundreds more from battlefield wounds or by public execution. To some of the rulers of Deutsche Ost Afrika, this outcome was viewed as unavoidable. Their passing was inevitable, sooner or later. In the meantime, the 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. With each passing day, that German power was pushing that yoke firmly on the necks of its reluctant subjects. 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 labor 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 Kaiser Reich. The Germans were latecomers to empire building in this part of the world but they were digging in to stay for a long time and wanted to be comfortable while they were about it. Their churches and colonnaded offices and crenelated fortresses were built as much to provide a means for civilized life as to all their newly conquered subjects and impress their rivals.”

Dave Miller: By the time you were in school, the British had taken over from Germany as a colonial power. How much of this earlier history would have been taught in school?

Gurnah: No, no, it wasn’t taught in schools. It was present in the stories that we heard. It’s interesting to think about, that the British, we were a protectorate of the British, they were protecting us day and night. The British were just there, when I was growing up. You didn’t have any actual encounters with them, you could maybe see somebody driving past, but we knew they were there, because their names were heard on the radio. They made the laws, the areas of town where they lived and so on. But the Germans were not there, Germans were mythic. There were just stories and myths that have this, this propensity to become enlarged as time passes. So the ferocity, the efficiency, the cruelties that we grew up with, these stories of, of the now long gone German presence. Added to this was the fact that, this is the 1950′s, a long time ago, when I was growing up. So this is the 1950′s and so there’s people alive, who would have been alive, at the time that we’re talking about here. So 1914, including my grandfather, I should say a grandfather is not exactly right, but we were rather generous with our relatives. So cousins became brothers and he was actually my mother’s uncle, but we don’t have a word for really, for my mother’s uncle. So he was a grandfather. Anyway, he was conscripted into the Chutes Trooper Kario Core. So he was the first person I heard talking about these things.

Dave Miller: These are the people who would have been behind the warriors, providing for the infrastructure of war?

Gurnah: No, no, not exactly, because the roads were not good enough really for wheel transport. Well they’re not, there were not always roads, so material military as well as personal material, clothes, equipment, etcetera had to be transported basically on people’s backs. So you might have, if you were to see a photograph of a ChutesTrooper column marching, in fact, there’s a description in “Afterlives”, but anyway, if you actually see a photograph, you might have a troop of, say, 150 soldiers, who incidentally would have been African soldiers, with maybe four or five German officers, some at the front, some behind. Behind them, you probably would have had something like 1000 carriers, people carrying the equipment for both the soldiers as well as the officers, as well as, for supplies and so on and behind that, you would have the families of the soldiers because because the Chutes Troopers were mercenary soldiers, many of them were in places which were not their homes and and they refused to go to war unless their families came with them. So in a kind of like, a medieval marching column, it would stretch your 150 Chutes Trooper, the whole column would probably stretch for more than a mile because like three quarters of the people on that march, were not actually the soldiers, so they weren’t so much left behind to look after things. They were on the march.

Dave Miller: Yeah, the, you noted that the vast majority of the soldiers were Africans, some of them, and I think if I remember correctly from the novel, many of them had volunteered, including two of the main characters in the novel, when one of those characters says he’s going to fight for the Germans. Another character is enraged, he says, “Are you mad? What has this to do with you? This is between two violent and vicious invaders. One among us, meaning Germany, the Germans and the other to the north meaning English, they’re fighting over who should swallow us whole.” What did you want to explore here in terms of the psychology of joining with Germany?

Gurnah: There is something rather ironic that the wars, there’s the various different places where the war in 1914-1918, was fought in Africa. It’s not just Africa, as well as Cameroon, as well as what was Southwest Africa, what is now Namibia and in most of those cases, apart from Southwest Africa, the combatants were Africans, on both sides. So there are Africans fighting for the British, Africans fighting for the Germans, Africans fighting for the French, Africans fighting for the Portuguese, for the Belgians, etcetera and they’re killing each other. So it was worth reflecting, why did they do that, why did people join up or agree to fight these colonial wars, to be mercenaries of colonial administrations? For me, it was one of the reasons for wanting to think about the novel and write the novel. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time and I think there are many reasons for it. In the first place, I suppose in the first place, the idea of being African wasn’t yet present, that people didn’t think of themselves in this continental way, but thought of themselves as who they were. Your question about the community, they thought of themselves in that way, as a people, as a community who might even have long standing disagreements with their neighbors. And that’s the first thing. The second thing is that very often these mercenary forces were not always local. As I was saying, the Askaris usually marched with their families because they didn’t really live there. And this, throughout colonial warfare, has been a strategy. You don’t make people fight against their own people, you take them somewhere where they’re fighting for you, but against people they don’t know, so a lot of the original Chutes Troopers for the Germans were Sudanese because they were okay, sorry they wanted, they’re okay with being mercenaries and so on. In this way, the 2nd, 3rd thing is quite simply the prestige of the conqueror, that this new powerful force has arrived and is taking over and you know the seduction, if you like, of joining this power, being one of it, rather than being one of the oppressed by this power, also is this attraction. Then there’s a uniform, right? They were uniforms and the authority that that gave you the uniform makes you an agent of, of this new power and therefore you share in that power. And then finally there would have been payment, as well. Actually, maybe not finally, because there is yet another one, which is that there was a degree of coercion which would work in various ways by saying, for example, going to an area and saying, ‘Okay, we want 10 from you, and if not then we will withdraw this from you or will punish you.’ So there is a degree of coercion in other words, saying we want people to come forward, so it’s a complicated thing. But yes, people did volunteer.

Dave Miller: That’s the war side of this novel, which is a huge part of it. There’s also a love story, which the development of its, its tentative and then secretive and then sort of explosive and and one of the most moving parts of, of the novel. Reading it, it felt like a kind of bomb after a lot of violence. What was it like to write those scenes?

Gurnah: It was always going to be, the two alongside each other as it were. It was always going to be, how do people continue living, in the midst of or among, disruption and violence, especially if it’s nothing to do with them as they see it. But in any case, how do people live alongside events like these, like, like war going on? So, in my original thought, it was going to be somebody who returns to the town, as you gathered there, that said something about, he didn’t remember the wind and all of that from when he lived here before, then he returns to the town and he’s traumatized by war. So that’s what, but I also wanted somebody traumatized by different circumstances, a girl who grows into a woman, because then it also allows the the investigation and reflecting on the idea of the oppressions that have gone within the community itself, against women, against children and so on and that somehow the other, to see how these two people would retrieve something of their lives after trauma and there’s nothing better than to bring them together and see how they can help each other.

Dave Miller: Gurnah, thanks very much for joining us. It was an honor talking to you.

Gurnah: Thank you.

Dave Miller: That’s Abdulrazak Gurnah, who is the 2021 Nobel Prize winner for literature, the author, so far, of 10 novels. Thanks also to our audience here at Ida B. Wells High School in Southwest Portland. And thanks to Cassie Lanzas, the librarian here. And thanks to Olivia Jones-Hall, the Director of Youth Programs for Literary Arts. If you don’t miss any of our shows, you can listen on the NPROne app, on Apple podcasts or wherever you like to get your podcasts. Our nightly rebroadcast is at 8p.m. Thanks very much for tuning in to Think Out Loud on OPB and KLCC. I’m Dave Miller. We’ll be back tomorrow.

Think Out Loud is supported by Steve and Jan Oliva, the Rose E. Tucker Charitable Trust, Ray and Marilyn Johnson and the Susan Hammer Fund of the Oregon Community Foundation.

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