Afterlives

 

Author: Abdulrazak Gurnah

Genre: historical fiction

Number of pages: 275

First published: 2020

Setting: colonial Tanzania in the early 20^th century

Rating: 4 stars

First sentence: Khalifa was twenty-six years old when he met the merchant Amur Biashara.

One sentence comment: The book offers a rarely explored history of the relationship between Germany and its colony, Tanzania (German East Africa).

 

Afterlives, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, is, in my opinion, significant more for its historical value than its literary merit. While the prose is concise and often subdued, and the plot is neither overtly dramatic nor broadly appealing, the book is a vital addition to African literature following foundational works like Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

 

The narrative highlights the critical role of German literacy for its African protagonists. Both Ilyas and Hamza are German speakers, a skill they acquire through favorable, if complicated, connections with German officers who showed them compassion. Similarly, the female protagonist, Afiya, benefits from her brother Ilyas's education, allowing her to read and write. This pattern continues with her son, also named Ilyas, whose German literacy enables him to travel to Germany to investigate his uncle's fate. These specific arrangements in the novel strongly suggest that, within the colonial context, only those who master the colonizer's language and literacy are ultimately positioned to narrate and preserve their own stories, ensuring their history is passed on. This appears to be a deliberate and accurate portrayal of the historical power dynamic.

 

I have wondered about the title: Why Afterlives? Perhaps it suggests that the survival skills acquired from the colonizer—such as speaking German and accessing elements of Western civilization like medical care—represent a kind of new, separate life. However, even with these adaptations, the characters remain profoundly restricted by their identity, haunted by the enduring ghosts of the colonial past.

 

This idea resonates deeply with Taiwan’s own post-colonial history. Following periods of European and Japanese rule, the island benefited from exposure to Western influences like modern construction and religious belief, which helped transform the tropical environment into a safer place (early Japanese colonizers, for instance, suffered more from disease than from indigenous resistance). After Japan’s surrender in World War II, Taiwan found itself protected by the United States. Crucially, this relationship led to many Taiwanese elites receiving US-based education. This educational exchange directly fueled the growth of the local chip industry, which has since become Taiwan's greatest asset for asserting its international identity and democratic strength among Chinese speakers. This history shows that Taiwan, while independent, remains deeply shaped by a specific kind of external, or "post-colonial," American influence—an arrangement made even more visible by its ongoing reliance on US protection against China's territorial claims.