Afterlives

Gurnah sets the novel in German East Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, opening with Ilyas being taken from his coastal village as a child and raised inside the German colonial school system, only to return years later as a soldier in the Schutztruppe, the same colonial force that suppressed the real Maji Maji rebellion with a scorched-earth campaign that killed hundreds of thousands of East Africans through violence and the famine it deliberately caused. Ilyas's identification with his captors, genuine rather than merely tactical, is some of the novel's most unsettling material, since Gurnah refuses to let a man who has survived what he survived read simply as either victim or collaborator.

Hamza, conscripted as an askari in the same German army during the First World War's East African campaign, and Ilyas's younger sister Afiya, taken in as a household drudge after her brother disappears and rescued from that arrangement by the shopkeeper Khalifa, are Gurnah's other two anchors, and their eventual marriage, built slowly across years of ordinary work and patience rather than any single dramatic event, is the novel's answer to Ilyas's story, survival that does not require identifying with the power that did the damage.

Gurnah threads the colonial East African material directly into Nazi Germany a generation later, since Ilyas eventually leaves for Germany himself in the 1920s in search of the acknowledgment his wartime service never earned him there, and the novel's late chapters draw an explicit line between the empire that took him as a child and the regime that would later murder him. His story deliberately parallels that of Bayume Mohamed Husen, a real former askari who settled in Germany, married, and was ultimately sent to Sachsenhausen, where he died, a historical afterlife of German colonial violence that outlasted the colony itself by decades.

Hamza and Afiya name their own son Ilyas after her vanished brother, and by the novel's final pages that younger Ilyas, now grown, travels to postwar Germany to try to trace what actually happened to his uncle, uncovering only fragments: a marriage, a factory job, an arrest, a camp. Gurnah lets the search stay genuinely incomplete rather than supplying the closure a lesser novel would manufacture for a reader who has followed the first Ilyas's disappearance the whole book; the not-knowing is presented as the actual, accurate shape of what colonial violence and Nazi genocide together left behind for the people who came after.