![]() ‘My friend, they have eaten you,’” someone eventually replies. When Ilyas, who was sent to a mission school by the same Germans who owned the coffee farm where he worked since childhood, speaks up in defence of the colonisers, “His listeners were silent in the face of such vehemence. One character remarks wearily that “the Germans have killed so many people that the country is littered with skulls and bones and the earth is soggy with blood”. But though their lives may be quiet, this does not mean they have escaped the physical and emotional ravages of colonialism. Instead, Gurnah pushes aside the larger sweeps of colonial history to focus on those who have managed to carve out a relatively calm existence. ![]() By the time confident, affable, German-speaking Ilyas arrives at the unnamed coastal town where Khalifa and Asha live, the uprisings and colonial reprisals have faded from the story. Gurnah recounts the horrifying consequences of resistance to German rule but then pivots back to the lives of the young married couple. Khalifa marries Biashara’s niece, Asha, in 1907, as the Maji Maji uprising is “in the final throes of its brutalities”. Unfolding in what was then Tanganyika, now mainland Tanzania, it opens with a gentle and unassuming sentence: “Khalifa was twenty-six years old when he met the merchant Amur Biashara.” Abdulrazak Gurnah’s sprawling yet intimate new novel Afterlives is set against the backdrop of these atrocities. Across the continent in East Africa, or Deutsch-Ostafrika, Germany ’s military tactics were equally deadly. German colonial rule was brutal, as colonial enterprises were in an arena known for its oppression and violence, it is Germany that perpetrated the first genocide of the 20th century in the 1904 extermination campaign to quell the Herero and Nama uprising in Namibia. Established in the late 19th century, the German empire on the continent included colonies in present-day Namibia, Cameroon, Togo, parts of Tanzania and Kenya, and eventually claimed the kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi. U ntil recently, most conversations about the European colonial presence in Africa have excluded Germany.
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