[This 2020 novel is written in four sections, which I read one at a time. I wrote about each section before reading further. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
13 April 2023
ONE
This two-chapter section follows three lives in East Africa in the early years of the 20th Century. Gurnah uses a third-person limited narrative style, and in Chapter 1 any reader would guess that we will stay with the man we meet in the first sentence: ‘Khalifa was twenty-six years old when he met the merchant Amur Biashara.’ In a deceptively simple style, Gurnah fills in a lot of Khalifa’s back-story, in a country being colonised by Germany during the ugly European land-grab of the time. Whatever else it will be, this is a novel about the reality of colonialism. Khalifa isn’t anywhere near the different uprisings that take place, but everybody knows about their suppression by the brutal schutztruppe.
But we don’t stay with Khalfa’s point of view in Chapter 2. Instead, we meet first Ilyas and then a young girl in a nearby village. Before the end of the chapter all these lives are linked, but the point of view always stays firmly with one. Once we are with Ilyas, we stay with him, even when he meets Khalfa by chance and becomes his friend. Some time later, when Ilyas is living at Khalifa’s house, he goes looking for his past. He finds out that his parents are dead, and that a sister he knew nothing of had been taken away by another family… but before the meeting takes place, we’re suddenly in another life, that of Afiya, the sister. She has lived for some years with the people she calls her aunt and uncle, is effectively their slave, and is astonished when a smart stranger arrives to take her away.
But I’m going back to fill in some details. Khalifa seems like a pretty ordinary Indian, except that his father had married an African woman and he looks much more African than Indian. So far, he has always been able to make a joke of this, proudly speaking of a father who married his African woman, unlike most Indian men would do, and brought him up to do well in the Indian community. I’m sure his looks will come back to haunt him, but it hasn’t happened yet. The First World War has begun and, like other colonial powers, Germany is recruiting more askari from the conquered races
Through the kind of networking that happens among the Indians, Khalifa has an office job. There had always been easy passage between the west of India and East Africa, and there are enough Indians for there to be a sense of an ex-pat community. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody, and favours are done between families with only tenuous connections. Indians are mainly in low-level clerical jobs or, occasionally, in business in the Muslim African towns. Khalifa has been working dutifully when his bosses move away to expand the business, but there is a vague connection with the man whose name we read in the first sentence and Khalifa ends up working for him. He had expected to be some kind of PA, but Amur Biashara keeps all his dealings private, and it slowly emerges he is a ‘merchant prate.’ Khalifa is little more than a dogsbody.
But he is respectable, and Amur Biashara decides he would be the right person to marry Asha, a relative. Khalifa goes along with it—the house the woman lives in is a welcome dowry—and he only discovers later that Amur Biashara simply needs her out of his hair. She is his relative, and her father had been tangled up in debt to the merchant pirate. She is attractive, but more ambitious than he is, and restless for something else. And she isn’t at all keen to have children. They try, but she miscarries every time and soon she discourages his ‘ardour’ to prevent more unhappiness. Which is when Amur Biashara dies of that year’s virulent strain of malaria.
Khalifa discovers what happens when a cynical businessman fails to leave a will. After creditors insist on payment and those owing money keep quiet—there were no records kept, except in Amur Biashara’s head—things take a long time to sort out. The unwelcome outcome for Khalifa is that they discover the house had never been his wife’s, as she thought, and now belongs to the boss’s son Nassor. He had insisted on training as a woodworker and has no interest in property, spending all his time—he loves the smell of wood—running a carpentry business paid for by his father.
Amur Biashara is still alive when Ilyas arrives in Chapter 2. He hasn’t found a job through the usual connections, but through a happy accident when he was younger. After he had run away from his village before his sister was born, he had quickly been picked up to be used almost as a slave by a German askari. This is standard practice—Ilyas isn’t the only one caught that day—and he is taken away to the mountains. Somehow a German civilian takes pity on him and takes him to his coffee farm. He treats him well, and Ilyas is raised according to the system established by the German colonists. Khalifa is surprised how he considers himself a de facto German.
Ilyas has no idea how hated the Germans are. In Chapter 1, there had been frequent references to the reprisals taken against the many uprisings that had taken place. The famous Muslim leader of one of the first big rebellions had been hanged in as public a fashion as possible, while a later insurgency was met with a scorched-earth policy and the death through famine of over 300,000 people. Little of this appears to have had any direct impact on Khalifa’s community, but it’s common knowledge. To the conquered African nations, the white men are monsters. But what can you do?
When Khalifa asks Ilyas about any fighting he might have seen, he isn’t impressed by the answer: ‘I don’t know how much fighting there was before, but it was all over when I was there. It was very peaceful. There were new farms and schools, new towns as well. Local people sent their children to the mission school and worked on the German farms. If there was any trouble it was the work of bad people who like to make an uproar.’ There’s a particular reason why he feels such loyalty to the Germans: ‘The farmer who sent me to school, he wrote the letter that got me the job in this town. The manager of the estate is a relative of his.’ File that away for later.
As time passes, Ilyas is persuaded that however much he disliked his unimpressive father, he should seek out his own people and see if any of his family are still alive. In his old village, he finds out that his parents definitely aren’t, but that he has a living sister. And it’s now that there’s a line break. We are suddenly not only seeing the world from Afiya’s point of view, but how gruellingly constricted it is. The couple who took her in and their son, who is older than she is, treat her badly. She is dressed in rags, sleeps by the door, and learns nothing. The only thing she knows is that the hill above the house is full of evil spirits who come looking for her at night.
And then the stranger knocks on the door. Ilyas works on a German estate, where his education and translation skills are useful, and he is smart and official-looking. He tells the couple that he has come to get his sister, and they are more than happy to take his gift of money. He tells Afiya they should be paying her, in her filthy rags, having treated her like a slave all her life. ‘It did not feel like that at the time, only afterwards, after she started living with him.’ From the start, all is good for her. Ilyas makes sure she learns to read and write, and she likes his presence when he is around at the house where he rents a room with a family. She has never been treated kindly before, and is surprised that the daughters of the house seem to like her and treat her as an equal. She slowly begins to realise that this is how life should be…
…so she is frankly devastated when Ilyas tells her she must return to live with the same family as before. He has decided that in the war the Germans are now fighting somewhere far away, he should be doing his bit. He has no doubt that the clever, super-efficient Germans will beat any other nation, and once he has decided to enlist even Afiya’s pleas will not change his mind. Khalifa and his wife can’t look after her, and we follow her as she returns to the life she had before.
If anything, it’s worse. The sneering son gets into the habit of rubbing himself up against her when he has the chance, and she knows his parents will never listen to any complaints. Then things come to a head. After the woman discovers her practising her writing, she makes it clear it isn’t acceptable. Afiya doesn’t get the chance to act on her decision to do it in secret from now on. The man, always a tyrant, decides she must be taught subservience, and begins to beat her. He quickly loses all sense of restraint, and a particularly violent blow breaks some of the bones in her hand. He only stops when the neighbours come to see what all the terrible noise is about.
The local medicine woman can’t fix the hand, and fears Afiya might never be able to use it properly again. Now, she frankly fears for her life, and is desperate to escape. With her good hand, she manages to write a note. After the customary greeting in Arabic, the message is simple: ‘Afiya. He has hurt me. Help me.’ She sends it to Khalifa by way of the same donkey-cart that Ilyas has used in the past, and Khalifa comes to pick her up. She has been traumatised, but Khalifa is kind and takes her to live with him and Asha:
‘For a long time Afiya did not like to go anywhere in case they came looking for her. She was afraid of everyone except for her brother’s friend who had come for her and whom she was now to call Baba Khalifa, and Bi Asha, who fed her wheat porridge and fish soup to build her strength, whom she was now to call Bimkubwa. She was sure that if her Baba had not come, her uncle would have killed her sooner or later, or if not him then his son. But Baba Khalifa came.’
And that’s how Part One ends.
18th April
TWO
A new chapter, a new point of view. By the end of Part Two, Gurnah has efficiently steered us through the war and beyond, through five chapters. He gives us the experience of a volunteer recruit with a German troop fighting in the interior while, in other chapters, Khalifa, Asha and Afiya are make their way through four years of upheaval. The recruit isn’t Ilyas—by the end of the section neither we nor any of the characters know what has happened to him—but Hamza. He survives the war through strokes of good fortune that don’t seem like that at first, although he is left permanently weakened by a wound inflicted deliberately by a crazed member of his own troop. This attack fits into Gurnah’s larger theme of the crude dehumanisation of the population—it’s their stated aim—while the officers of the so-called ‘enlightened’ races remain aloof. Woven through these stories is a broad account of how, thousands of miles away, imperial powers force conquered peoples to fight their wars.
Hamza enlists not through loyalty like Ilyas, but because his life had been intolerable. He’s under-age and doesn’t realise how young and attractively good-looking he is. We are only getting his point of view, so it’s from the reactions of the other men that we come to understand this. The Feldwebel, the NCO, doesn’t like him from the start. He tells him he will never be a soldier, but still subjects him all the more gleefully to the deliberately brutal drills. They are going to be a part of the feared and hated schutztruppe we’ve heard about, apparently loving nothing better than ferociously carrying out orders. Their masters are intent on total conquest whatever the human cost, and by now the schutztruppe have a reputation for almost blind savagery.
We don’t know whether Hamza would ever have become one of them, because he is singled out for special treatment by the Oberleutnant. He is to be his batman but, as we quickly realise, he is to be more than that. The men, especially the sadistic Feldwebel, taunt him about his new status as the Oberleutnant’s plaything, and we are sure there’s some truth in their suspicions. Hamza must start every night on a mattress next to the Oberleutnant’s bed and, over time, we are taken through the growing intimacy of their relationship. The young and inexperienced Hamza doesn’t know what’s going on—but, it seems, neither does the reader. Hamza is clearly being groomed, but not in the way we’d guessed…
…because from the start, the most important thing for the Oberleutnant is for Hamza to become fluent in German. While they are still in camp, before the war comes close enough to involve them directly, he is given daily lessons in listening, then reading and writing. Even when the real business of war takes over and the troop spends the next months and years fighting the British and their Indian regiments, the Oberleutnant makes sure the lessons continue as seriously as ever. [We’ll have you reading Schiller] he muses, and we don’t know the significance of this yet. Only after a long time does he tell Hamza about the pointless death of his brother, a reluctant soldier who only enlisted to please their military father. We realise that the Oberleutnant has never got over the loss, and he tells Hamza he had reminded him of this brother, who was about the same age when he was killed.
As always in this novel, the concerns and behaviour of the Europeans are shown only through the eyes of people caught up in the consequences. Hamza survives, and really does learn German well enough for the Oberleutnant to leave him his copy of Schiller, but it’s only through the white man’s whim. The Oberleutnant is a sensitive man, might have been a good man under different circumstances, but the relationship is never equal. It’s a happy accident—as is the attack that brings about ‘the end of Hamza’s war’ when the Germans’ situation is hopeless. This is when the washenzi bearers desert, having never been anything other than beasts of burden. Those killed had never even been counted in reports. When the askari are ordered to carry the supplies, something that their place in the rigid pecking-order that had always been able to avoid, they come close to mutiny. It’s the desertion of the majority of these the next night that tips the Feldwebel into near-psychosis.
‘“This traitor whore of yours betrayed us. He incited them to go. He told them lies and they deserted,” Feldwebel Walther cried in rage. Then he stepped forward and with a wild swing slashed at Hamza who turned sharply to avoid the blow. It caught him on his hip and ripped through flesh and bone. He heard someone screaming and then his head hit the ground with jarring force.’
The next pages in his story describe, from the inside, the trauma and delirium he undergoes from then on. Only gradually does he realise, from within the pain and fever his terrible injuries have brought, that he is in the Christian mission they had happened upon some time before. He is dangerously feverish for days and perhaps weeks, unable to be certain whether what goes on around him is real or not. Did the Oberleutnant leave him a book before he left? Was he even there? Of course he was there, and we know what the book is going to be. The Pastor’s wife had hidden it, knowing for certain that Hamza would have no use for it. It’s only after a very long time, with Hamza still unable to move properly, that she and her husband realise that not only can Hamza speak German, but can read too.
In this part of the story, Gurnah offers another snapshot of the closed European mind. The Pastor is a good man—by this time, the mission’s medical centre has reopened for the benefit of the local population—but he is as certain as any other German of their right to govern Africa: ‘it is a landscape where you know that nothing of any importance has ever happened. It is a place of no significance whatsoever in the history of human achievement or endeavour. You could tear this page out of human history and it would not make a difference to anything. … The people here all share one quality, they cannot hold an idea for long. At times this can seem deceitful but it is really a lack of seriousness, an unreliability, a failure in application. That’s why it is necessary to repeat instructions and to supervise.’ It is as though the landscape hadn’t really existed before the European imagination created it, and taught the people how to be fully human.
Hamza hasn’t fully recovered after the war has been over for some time, doesn’t know if the Oberleutnant survived, and we don’t know how his story will end. The Pastor has given him the Schiller, having been convinced by his wife that he had always underestimated him. These small epiphanies are rare amongst the colonisers. This might be the only one in the book.
Meanwhile, in the town, there’s a different war going on. Nothing really changes for the local people until a bombardment of the coast by the Royal Navy and a British attempt to land. This is early on, and the attempt is efficiently repulsed. The navy is forced to withdraw, but trade along the coast will be severely restricted for as long as the war lasts. Of course, everybody thinks this won’t be for long because Germany will roll over any nation as easily as they did in conquering East Africa. This is the irony of the conquered population’s mindset—it’s as blinkered as that of the conquerors.
Since long before the war started, Khalifa’s job has been as the Nassor Biashara’s clerk. It had always been difficult. Khalifa has no respect for him as a businessman, and Nassor resents the cheerfully offhand way he makes this absolutely clear. The business, already in straitened circumstances after some poor decisions, begins to shrink almost to nothing when the near-blockade begins. There is little for Khalifa to do as a clerk, and Nassor finds a makeshift desk space for him in the warehouse, but effectively, Khalifa is no more than a warehouseman now. He fears he will need to look for another job soon, and is only able to avoid this when one of their suppliers tells of a plan he has. He can promise regular business through some covert trading in timber from one of the islands, if Khalifa can persuade Nassor to agree. Nassor doesn’t agree, but Khalifa accepts the supplier’s offer, and persuades Nassor that only he, Khalifa, will bear the risk. They will share the profits equally, because even after some haggling Nassor realises it is the only way for the business to survive. Which is how, through smuggling, Khalifa is able to keep his little family comfortable enough right through the war.
Which leaves Afiya, the only other character whose point of view we follow in Part Two. She is no longer the ‘little girl’ that Asha continues to call her, to Afiya’s annoyance every time. She’s sixteen, in fact, according to the birthday she has chosen for herself after a conversation with Khalifa… and he isn’t happy about Asha’s determination to marry her off so young. Asha has seen her in the dress handed down to her by Jamila, and couldn’t deny how attractive it had made her look.
It’s from then on that Afiya gradually finds the norms of their society closing in on her. It starts with her having to report to Asha where she has been, then asking her permission before she leaves the house, then having to wear a head covering whenever she is out in public. Gurnah isn’t sneering at the way it is the woman of the house who is the arbiter of this. Khalifa, whose lack of such concern she treats with disdain, would have Afiya change nothing, while Asha is constantly thinking about the danger Afiya would be in if she didn’t take care. She insists on the most modest of behaviour because—well, we know why. It’s in the nature of patriarchal societies that women conspire to forge the bonds that tie them.
There’s no overt point being made about how close this self-censoring behaviour might be to the deference everybody shows to the powerful in a subjugated country. It’s the British who rule now, but it makes no difference to the way things are. They go about their business, and nobody talks about it… because, why would they? They know exactly where the boundaries lie.
19th April
THREE
I’m starting to find this book something of a plod. Hamza, now the main focus, is a likeable kind of bloke, and we know exactly why he’s self-effacing to the point of near-invisibility… but it doesn’t make him fascinating enough to spend so long in his company. And whatever the go-to main character trait of the other characters—Khalifa, Asha, Afiya, Nassor—none of them are anything but ordinary. This would be fine if their lives were interesting, but they’re not. Gurnah received a Nobel Prize a couple of years ago, and I imagine it must have been for the subject matter of his novels. It’s ‘important’ work, no doubt, but that doesn’t always make for riveting reading. I described Gurnah dealing with the war efficiently in Part Two, and he gets the job done in this section too. He covers the next three or four years, presenting a plausible, even convincing picture of life in what had been renamed Tanganyika, and a plausible story for some of the people in it. Life goes on, because what else would it do?
Hamza arrives in the town, never named, made familiar to us through the stories of Khalifa and the others. It ought to be familiar to Hamza, too, because it’s where he spent his childhood. We only come to understand later why he was unhappy enough to run away, because he was essentially given up into slavery to a merchant whose name Khalifa recognises well. As I said, this only emerges fully much later, and between them Khalifa and Hamza are able to piece together the story of how the merchant was practically ruined when another indentured worker ran off with his wife and all his money. The young man had always been good to Hamza and he regarded him as his best friend. Both he and Khalifa hope they were able to survive the war, although Khalifa feels the need to say solemnly that it would not be right to be sorry if they ever paid for their crimes.
Is this Khalifa’s sop to Hamza’s religion? They are both Muslims, of course—the calls to prayer and other features of Islam punctuate the narrative—but the others always believe Hamza to be more devout than he really is. He is a believer, but has developed the habit of regular visits to the mosque for company, and in order to clean up. His room in the yard of Khalifa’s house has no facilities, and Asha is too unfriendly for him ever to come indoors as a matter of course. Religious practice is an important part of any Westerner’s understanding of Islam in Africa, not that I would say Gurnah is simply going through a checklist of the features of ordinary life there a century ago…. But sometimes I wonder.
But I’m not telling you the plot. A young man, having done his best to work through the continuing pain of a severe war wound, arrives at the only town where he had spent a large part of his life. He finds it unrecognisable, mainly because his life had been so restricted he only knows a tiny part of it. Worse, the house and business he remembers seems no longer to be there. (He later learns that it was demolished by a British businessman, newly arrived and part of a push to rid the country of Arab influences. If we read novels to learn stuff—we all do, obviously—this is all good.)
The man is lucky although, as always with this man good fortune never seems like that at first. The man the reader soon recognises does not shoo him away when he comes looking for work. He meets the clerk, whom we also recognise, who strikes him as rude and ill-tempered. He comes to realise this is all a front, and I suppose Gurnah is making a (fairly straightforward) point about both first impressions, and the different faces we present to the world. Maybe Khalifa, for it is he, is as wrong about Nassor Biashara as Hamza is about Khalifa himself. It would tie in with the story about Hamza’s friend and the boss’s wife. Khalifa’s anecdote about the unfortunate merchant, now greatly enriched through the new information Hamza has been able to add, was really only little more than gossip. Notoriously in the town, Khalifa is a great gossip.
Nassor Bashara, though offhand and certainly as tight with money as Khalifa always says, is kind to Hamza. The job he offers is almost insultingly low-grade at first—but then, as Hamza realises later, he had come across almost as a simple-minded vagabond. He had had so many knocks since he had to leave the mission a year or two previously that he had opted for the path of no resistance at all. He offers little or no response to anything said to him. But it all gradually changes—there had been something about Hamza that Nassor, as so many others before him, had liked about this quiet, modest man. He is soon deemed capable enough to perform general duties in the carpentry workshop. The man before him had been forced to leave when his excessive drinking and fighting in the town had got him into real trouble, and Sulemani, the devout master carpenter, is gratified that Hamza couldn’t be more different. He sees straight away that Hamza is a lover of wood, and he is soon offering him impromptu lessons.
It’s all good, literally. Sulemani accidentally finds out that Hamza reads and understands German, and gets him to translate the few verses from the Koran that he can write himself. Education, especially literacy, is a touchstone both for the aspiring members of this society and for Gurnah. He always seems to reward it in the end, whatever the obstacles. Prejudice, the ignorance of others? They can be overcome… and life in and around his basic lodging is good too. Khalifa’s friends like him, and even Asha stops being so suspicious. What could be more agreeable? A wife would be too much to ask for, surely?
In fact, the romance between Hamza and Afiya couldn’t go more smoothly. Literally. It starts with furtive glances, and… and, basically, it follows all the stages you might expect of two self-conscious, retiring people. Is there any jeopardy at all? Not really. When the take the extraordinary risk of making love for the first time while Asha is out, there has to be some unwanted outcome? She’s actually Khalifa’s second wife, and this is adultery? Discovery and denunciation? Pregnancy? Nope, none of them. She isn’t sixteen any more, and Khalifa can see that they are good for one another. Over-protective, censorious Asha won’t be easy to persuade, but they get their way and marry. (Why does Gurnah continue to insist on presenting Asha as so full of bitterness? Maybe Gurnah’s point is that a clever woman like her needs to be occupied, otherwise small resentments grow out of all proportion. Maybe.)
Will it all come crashing down? Or will Hamza become a model of honest good citizenship? Is he a future president? The opening of Part Four, which I glanced at, suggests things are looking rosy. ‘It was a time of ease for Hamza compared to preceding years….’ Will Gurnah change his habits, and bring some real jeopardy into Hamza’s life? Or not?
21 April
FOUR
Not. Any jeopardy is short-lived in the ever more placid life of Hamza in his almost impossibly happy marriage. They are like jeopardy stubs—although there is one that lasts a little longer before being very happily resolved. When their lovely son—of course they have a lovely son—is about twelve, Hamza and Afiya wonder if he is going mad. The whole neighbourhood wonders, because a lot of the symptoms seem to be there. Not good. But after an exorcism and some news about his long-lost uncle Ilyas, he’s fine. He grows up to be a principled and hardworking teacher and writer—the whisperings and voices were just stories waiting to be told—and then… I’ll tell you later about the cute twist Gurnah is able to have him bring about. It ties up the loose end of the forever missing Ilyas, that isn’t a loose end at all. Gurnah was clearly just waiting to set up the big reveal, and not in a way that anybody might have expected.
For this longed-for denouement to take place, Gurnah has to scamper through decades of both family history and the decolonisation of East Africa. At the beginning of Part Four Hamza and Afiya, now married, are still living in the grounds of Khalifa and Asha’s house. It isn’t really their house, of course. Asha never gets over her resentment of Nassor’s determination to retain full legal ownership, his ‘s reference to it as a dowry no more than a carrot to dangle before Khalifa. Her bitterness about everything and everybody—it’s become her leitmotif—contributes to her never making Hamza and Afiya feel at home.
But Gurnah has a lot of stuff to get through in sixty or so pages. There are two generations close together, and the little social circles they move in. Khalifa carries on working for the man he continues to diesrespect. He talks about changing his job, perhaps to become a teacher, but we know by now that he is all talk. There’s much more talk with him when he’s with his three or four friends, and he has opinions on everything. Is he usually wrong? Certainly, he knows nothing about business, continually underestimating Nassor. Perhaps the lucky break Khalifa had in the war, meeting a merchant who came up with a ready-made plan to smuggle goods, makes him think he has good ideas himself. He doesn’t, in fact. He mocks the risky purchase of a boat propellor that Nassor makes, but it’s a good investment and means they can carry more goods.
However, more and more, this isn’t Khalifa’s story. We’re always with Hamza and Afiya now. Will she be able to have children? When she becomes pregnant a few months after the wedding, Asha warns her that first pregnancies often fail. Which it duly does after three months. Afiya thinks that Asha had put a curse on her unborn child, but Hamza, always the conciliator, tells her she did no such thing. When she becomes pregnant again a few months later all goes smoothly, as things tend to for them. But things aren’t so happy for Asha. Over just a few months, pains in her sides become unbearable. First a Muslim healer, then a local wise woman, can do nothing for her. When she is finally examined by a proper doctor, he finds a tumour straight away. It is malignant, on her kidney and surrounding tissue, and it’s inoperable. She dies in hospital—and at almost the same time, Afiya’s child is born. She and Hamza decide to call their new son Ilyas.
Asha’s death allows the new family to move into the house, while Khalifa will move out into their outside room. He is perfectly content with this arrangement, and so is Gurnah. Khalifa continues to be a presence, but he isn’t at the centre of anything now. Except he can be a loving adoptive grandfather, just as he always did his best for his adopted daughter. Most usefully for Gurnah’s purpose, he becomes the fount of stories for the child. The young Ilyas is very bright, but he is also very quiet. At school—years pass very quickly now—he always remains on the margins, never joining in the other boys’ games. He is happy in his own company and going for walks alone. His parents don’t worry, until… ‘Ilyas was eleven years old when the whispers started.’
It starts harmlessly enough. ‘In his games he made a variety of blameless objects play major roles in his stories … he told their stories in an intimate voice only audible to him and his playthings.’ As ever, Hamza finds common-sense explanations. ‘He was used to playing alone, he was an only child. Maybe his temperament inclined him that way anyway, his contented silences….’ But on his way back from somewhere, Hamza happens to see where Ilyas ahead of him and overhears him whispering animatedly to himself. Again, that’s OK: ‘after he … had time to reflect on the sight, he guessed the boy was practising a recitation for class.’ In fact, he decides that this is definitely what is happening. Fine.
Until the next thing. Khalifa tells Hamza that people have begun noticing Ilyas on his walks, whispering, and that he always stops as soon as he realises he has been seen. Hamza explains that the boy is simply practising his recitations, but Khalifa will have none of it. Home early one afternoon, not his usual time, he had overheard ‘an unfamiliar voice, a woman’s voice. I could not hear the words, but the tone was grieving.’ Afiya is out, so who can it be? When he goes to look, he finds only Ilyas, who immediately goes quiet. When asked who he was talking to, he says ‘Nobody.’ Hamza isn’t worried: ‘He must have been pretending to be a grieving woman in a story he was making up.’ This is plausible to the reader, even after we know that Afiya has also heard Ilyas more than once, taking all the parts in a story when he doesn’t know she’s there.
But we don’t know it all yet. She is determined to make Hamza listen. ‘One night when you were sleeping, I heard a noise from his room and found him wincing and turning and moaning in that voice.’ Khalifa joins in: ‘Something is troubling that child,’ and Hamza faces him ‘with a look of rage on his face.’ But he pauses before replying. ‘Maybe he was having a bad dream. Maybe he has a rich imagination. Why are you talking about him like this, as if he is … unwell?’
I’ve already written about the eventual outcome, but I’m interested in what Gurnah does with this thread. Ilyas, in fact, really does become more and more troubled. The nightmares continue, often focused on his namesake, the uncle he has never met. His distress starts to leach out into daylight hours, and he refuses to go to school. Are Khalifa and Afiya right? Is the boy unwell? A Western reader—that is, a member of Gurnah’s target demographic—might speculate about the beginnings of psychosis, possibly even of a more serious mental illness. But this is the superstitious world of Islam in East Africa. A local Muslim elder or seer decides that Ilyas is inhabited by an ‘Invisible,’ possibly one that passed from Asha into the newborn child as she was dying. Eventually, a woman known for exorcisms is called for and, together with her entourage and helped by Afiya—Hamza is sceptical, and Khalifa is openly scornful—she performs rites on Ilyas that last for hours.
It’s nonsense, yes? We saw how Asha’s superstitious reliance on such people simply delayed the diagnosis of her illness, so why on earth would an exorcism work? The truth is—thank you, Abdulrazah Gurnah—we will never know. Before things became so serious, Hamza had. ecided to write to the pastor’s wife in Germany. She had always been good to him, and he wonders if if she can find out what happened to Ilyas senior. Before he left the mission, she had given him a copy of Heine’s philosophical writings. She had written her address in it, and luckily both the British and German postal services in the late 1930s are up to the task of delivering both Hamza’s letter and her reply. There’s the tiniest of jeopardy stubs when Hamza has to go with a police officer to be quizzed about why he’s writing to a German woman, but he gets the letter anyway and finds out—guess—that Ilyas is alive. He writes again, gets an address… then nothing. Britain is at war with Germany, so there’ll be no more letters—but the news has, or might have had, a healing effect on the younger Ilyas. He’s fine.
Those little stubs and bits of background story allow Gurnah to give us some snapshots of life in Tanganyika under British rule. There’s little difference from when the Germans were in charge, except the British have taken over a conquered country and there’s no need for the iron fist. The British hardly figure at all in the lives of ordinary people, so it’s useful to see inside a police station and encounter the smart-casual uniform of Empire. As we knew he would be, the British official is certain of his own superiority talking to the dark-skinned specimen he sees before him. It’s part of a broader theme that runs through these pages. We already know about the British desire to squeeze the Indian and Arab merchants out, and this never goes away. After WW2, British settlers in Kenya, also a part of the former East Africa, lobby for all Indian and Arab residents to be thrown out entirely. A white elite will lord it over a servile Black population. But we know the winds of change are blowing, and only fifteen or so years after the war there is Independence.
Meanwhile, Gurnah’s everyday story of East African folk carries on. Hamza has a new role as Nassor’s business expands, managing the new factory that will supply, for instance, the desks and chairs needed in the expanding British-run school system. Afiya, meanwhile, isn’t going to live her married life in the way Asha did. She has never lost touch with the girls she and her brother Ilyas lived with. Jamila, married and a mother before Afiya, starts up a small dressmaking workshop at home. Afiya enjoys the work, and the purpose it gives her is more important to all of them than the small amount of money they earn. Meanwhile Khalifa, unsurprisingly after his unremarkable life, dies quietly in his sixties.
All the interest is now focused on the life of young Ilyas. I’ll hurry past his surprising transition from troubled child to successful student, his prosperous years in the British army, the chance he has as a veteran to train as a teacher. This is the British version of colonialism, proud of the paternalistic care it takes of the unfortunately less enlightened races. We should remember that this is a self-promoting narrative. British virtue-signalling—in the 21st Century it is still proud of its ‘Commonwealth’—ignores attitudes which had always been founded on the certainty of racial superiority. A generation before, when British forces beat back the Germans on its own territory in Chapter 7, Gurnah decided it was time to offer the reader a lesson in how things were then:
‘The German civilians were treated with the courtesies befitting citizens of an enlightened combatant nation and were taken away to Rhodesia or British East Africa or Blantyre in Nyasaland where they could be interned by other Europeans until the end of hostilities. It would not do to have Europeans watched over and restrained by unsupervised Africans. The local Africans, who were neither citizens nor members of a nation nor enlightened, and who were in the path of the belligerents, were ignored or robbed and, when necessity required, forcibly recruited into the carrier corps.’
Now, in the 1940s, a dark-skinned man can be given responsibilities, even a respectable career. But the attitudes are still there. When a Swahili newspaper is to be published, it is entirely managed by the British. And it’s an English army man with no relevant qualifications—he’s an engineer, if I remember rightly—who assesses the suitability of Ilyas’s stories for broadcast on radio. The British like to enlist willing talent into their projects, and one thing leads to another in Ilyas’s career. He understands the process of radio, and is chosen to receive training as a producer. Part of the passing-out process—stay with me, this really is going somewhere—is to make a trial feature programme about whatever he thinks would interest listeners…
…all of which is Gurnah’s way of giving Ilyas the time and opportunity to follow the paper-trail Hamza started before the war. He is allowed to go to Germany, where employees of an open, liberal post-war government make things as easy as they can for him. Gurnah doesn’t make it too hard either, and every bit of evidence, starting with the pension application for WW1 soldiers the pastor’s wife had mentioned, leads to a new line of enquiry. There’s information about him being an entertainer, which leads to a newspaper cutting with the (fully captioned) photograph of him in Nazi uniform.
Yes, really. This is how we are moved towards that unexpected denouement. We aren’t there yet, even though we now know that while Ilyas Junior was fighting for the British, his uncle was a Nazi sympathiser in Germany. Information about the photo presents another lead, and another… until the truth emerges. Ilyas married a German woman some years before the passing of new race laws, and this remained legal because it predated them. But his affair with another woman in 1938 is different. Loyal, brave ex-soldier that he is, when the affair is discovered he is sent to a concentration camp. Not only that. His son chooses to go with him, and they both die there. It feels like the final atrocity of an indifferent colonial mindset curdled into obsessive racism.
It’s the novel’s coup de grace. Really, nothing else matters once Gurnah has finally brought to closure a story arc he began in Chapter 2. Independence has come to what becomes Tanzania, and the small cast of characters can carry on with their lives. The truth about Ilyas Senior is a shock, but some wise person offers them the comforting idea that at least his son loved him enough to stay with him to the end. Gurnah doesn’t touch on how Afiya might feel about a brother who left her with people that he knew treated her as a slave—and who preferred to follow his German comrades back to their own country. But that’s colonialism for you. It plays havoc with loyalty, duty, even identity. Ilyas didn’t know who he was, and didn’t find out who his chosen people were until it was too late.
We can read it for you wholesale 