Kidzdoc's literary journey through the African diaspora
CharlasAfrican/African American Literature
Únete a LibraryThing para publicar.
1kidzdoc
CABO VERDE (CAPE VERDE)
Book #28: The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo by Germano Almeida
My rating:
The recently deceased Napumoceno da Silva Araújo was widely regarded as a pillar of the business community in the port city of Mindelo on the island of São Vicente, as he was perceived to be a self made man who emigrated to the city from the nearby island of São Nicolau as a poor orphaned boy with a few escudos to his name, but died a wealthy man who owned one of the largest and most successful trading companies in Cabo Verde. He was known to be a modest lifelong bachelor with no love interests who generously donated to the poorer residents of São Vicente, was free from corruption or excessive ambition, and kept mainly to himself, with few friends or visitors to his hilltop home.
In keeping with the law his last will and testament, numbering 387 pages, was read in the presence of a notary and witnesses who knew Senhor da Silva Araújo, including two acquaintances and his nephew Carlos, a driven and unscrupulous young man who stood to inherit everything as the only surviving relative, even though he openly mocked and privately despised his aged uncle. To everyone's surprise, Araújo left nearly all of his wealth to a young woman, Maria de Graça, whom he named as his daughter, and Carlos was only given a small piece of property.
As the testament is read the details of Araújo's secret life are slowly revealed, including Maria de Graça's conception, his other trysts, and the true love of his life, Adélia, who is known to no one. Maria de Graça takes it upon herself to find out who Adélia is, and to learn more about her father, who she believed to be only a godfather until his death.
The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo is set around the time of Cabo Verde's independence from Portugal in 1975, and it provides an interesting view of life in Cabo Verde, on the island of São Vicente, and in the port city of Mindelo, which grew rapidly due to the influx of immigrants from other Cabo Verdean islands due to famine in the 1940s and 1950s, and was unique in terms of its ethnic diversity and lack of established hierarchy and political structure.
Germano Almeida (1945-) is one of Cabo Verde's most celebrated authors, who was awarded the Camões Prize in 2018, the most prestigious literary award in the Lusophone world, which is given annually to an author of an outstanding oeuvre of work written in Portuguese. He received a law degree from the University of Lisbon, and he continues to write prolifically and practice law in Mindelo. The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo was chosen as one of Africa's best 100 books of the 20th century during the 2002 Zimbabwe Book Fair, the only book by a Cabo Verdean author on that list.
Book #28: The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo by Germano Almeida
My rating:
The recently deceased Napumoceno da Silva Araújo was widely regarded as a pillar of the business community in the port city of Mindelo on the island of São Vicente, as he was perceived to be a self made man who emigrated to the city from the nearby island of São Nicolau as a poor orphaned boy with a few escudos to his name, but died a wealthy man who owned one of the largest and most successful trading companies in Cabo Verde. He was known to be a modest lifelong bachelor with no love interests who generously donated to the poorer residents of São Vicente, was free from corruption or excessive ambition, and kept mainly to himself, with few friends or visitors to his hilltop home.
In keeping with the law his last will and testament, numbering 387 pages, was read in the presence of a notary and witnesses who knew Senhor da Silva Araújo, including two acquaintances and his nephew Carlos, a driven and unscrupulous young man who stood to inherit everything as the only surviving relative, even though he openly mocked and privately despised his aged uncle. To everyone's surprise, Araújo left nearly all of his wealth to a young woman, Maria de Graça, whom he named as his daughter, and Carlos was only given a small piece of property.
As the testament is read the details of Araújo's secret life are slowly revealed, including Maria de Graça's conception, his other trysts, and the true love of his life, Adélia, who is known to no one. Maria de Graça takes it upon herself to find out who Adélia is, and to learn more about her father, who she believed to be only a godfather until his death.
The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo is set around the time of Cabo Verde's independence from Portugal in 1975, and it provides an interesting view of life in Cabo Verde, on the island of São Vicente, and in the port city of Mindelo, which grew rapidly due to the influx of immigrants from other Cabo Verdean islands due to famine in the 1940s and 1950s, and was unique in terms of its ethnic diversity and lack of established hierarchy and political structure.
Germano Almeida (1945-) is one of Cabo Verde's most celebrated authors, who was awarded the Camões Prize in 2018, the most prestigious literary award in the Lusophone world, which is given annually to an author of an outstanding oeuvre of work written in Portuguese. He received a law degree from the University of Lisbon, and he continues to write prolifically and practice law in Mindelo. The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo was chosen as one of Africa's best 100 books of the 20th century during the 2002 Zimbabwe Book Fair, the only book by a Cabo Verdean author on that list.
2kidzdoc
ANGOLA
Good Morning Comrades by Ondjaki, translated from the Portuguese by Stephen Henighan
My rating:
Ndalu, the narrator of this novel, is a schoolboy in Luanda, the capital of Angola, in the spring of 1991, a time in which the country was led by President José Eduardo dos Santos of the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), who rode in public in a bulletproof Mercedes surrounded by heavily armed guards, as the country was in civil war against the Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), led by Jonas Savimbi. The MPLA was supported by Cuba and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union, and between 1975 and 1991 400,000 Cubans served as teachers, physicians and soldiers there. UNITA was mainly supported by the United States, especially during President Ronald Reagan's two terms in office, along with the apartheid South African government, as both feared the spread of Marxism to other sub-Saharan countries, including South Africa itself. The MPLA held control of Luanda and the urbanized coastal areas of Angola and were supported by the Mbundu people, whereas UNITA's power was in the north and less populated interior of the country and were favored by the Ovimbundu, Angola's largest ethnic group. Due to the strength of MPLA and the large presence of disciplined Cuban soldiers Luanda at that time was relatively safe especially after 1988, when the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale repelled a South African/UNITA armed invasion, cemented Cuban/MPLA control of the country, and led to the downfall of South African President P.W. Botha. Guerrilla attacks on schools and other establishments was a constant fear, although a questionable reality.
The title of this novel refers to the use of the word comrade to formally address nearly everyone in the MPLA controlled territory; Ndalu's favorite visitor at home is Comrade António, and his primary teachers are Comrade Teacher Maria, the wife of Comrade Teacher Ángel, both from Cuba. Ndalu and his schoolmates are in the last few days of their classes, and are good kids although somewhat rebellious and apt to get into mild trouble, even though they love the school and their teachers, although they find them and other Cubans to be somewhat inscrutable and overly idealistic. Through Ndalu's eyes the reader views the everyday life in Angola in the early 1990s, which is marked with frequent mass rallies, socialist holidays, and speeches at school in opposition to imperialism, Ronald Reagan and apartheid, along with the use of ration cards to purchase goods. Most of Ndalu's classmates and their families are relatively well off in comparison to their Cuban teachers, and they sit alongside each other in an ethnic melting pot of Blacks, mixed race mestiços, and white Cubans and Portuguese.
At the end of the school year the children are saddened to learn that their teachers would soon return to Cuba, leaving their future education in charge of native Angolans. Soon they would learn that a peace agreement between MPLA and UNITA had been reached, and Cuba withdrew its presence from the country. What they could not foresee is that the presidential election held the following year kept President dos Santos and MPLA in power, and led to a vicious resurgence of the Angolan Civil War after Jonas Savimbi and UNITA, who were assured that they would win the election, lost instead.
Good Morning Comrades is a valuable insight into Angola during the end of the Cold War, and what appeared to be the end of the Angolan Civil War, which is mainly drawn from the Ondjaki's own childhood in Luanda. The afterword by the book's translator, Stephen Henighan, provides valuable context to the novel, which is essential for those unfamiliar with the country's history, and his comments bumped my rating of the book from 3½ to 4 stars.
Good Morning Comrades by Ondjaki, translated from the Portuguese by Stephen Henighan
My rating:
Ndalu, the narrator of this novel, is a schoolboy in Luanda, the capital of Angola, in the spring of 1991, a time in which the country was led by President José Eduardo dos Santos of the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), who rode in public in a bulletproof Mercedes surrounded by heavily armed guards, as the country was in civil war against the Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), led by Jonas Savimbi. The MPLA was supported by Cuba and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union, and between 1975 and 1991 400,000 Cubans served as teachers, physicians and soldiers there. UNITA was mainly supported by the United States, especially during President Ronald Reagan's two terms in office, along with the apartheid South African government, as both feared the spread of Marxism to other sub-Saharan countries, including South Africa itself. The MPLA held control of Luanda and the urbanized coastal areas of Angola and were supported by the Mbundu people, whereas UNITA's power was in the north and less populated interior of the country and were favored by the Ovimbundu, Angola's largest ethnic group. Due to the strength of MPLA and the large presence of disciplined Cuban soldiers Luanda at that time was relatively safe especially after 1988, when the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale repelled a South African/UNITA armed invasion, cemented Cuban/MPLA control of the country, and led to the downfall of South African President P.W. Botha. Guerrilla attacks on schools and other establishments was a constant fear, although a questionable reality.
The title of this novel refers to the use of the word comrade to formally address nearly everyone in the MPLA controlled territory; Ndalu's favorite visitor at home is Comrade António, and his primary teachers are Comrade Teacher Maria, the wife of Comrade Teacher Ángel, both from Cuba. Ndalu and his schoolmates are in the last few days of their classes, and are good kids although somewhat rebellious and apt to get into mild trouble, even though they love the school and their teachers, although they find them and other Cubans to be somewhat inscrutable and overly idealistic. Through Ndalu's eyes the reader views the everyday life in Angola in the early 1990s, which is marked with frequent mass rallies, socialist holidays, and speeches at school in opposition to imperialism, Ronald Reagan and apartheid, along with the use of ration cards to purchase goods. Most of Ndalu's classmates and their families are relatively well off in comparison to their Cuban teachers, and they sit alongside each other in an ethnic melting pot of Blacks, mixed race mestiços, and white Cubans and Portuguese.
At the end of the school year the children are saddened to learn that their teachers would soon return to Cuba, leaving their future education in charge of native Angolans. Soon they would learn that a peace agreement between MPLA and UNITA had been reached, and Cuba withdrew its presence from the country. What they could not foresee is that the presidential election held the following year kept President dos Santos and MPLA in power, and led to a vicious resurgence of the Angolan Civil War after Jonas Savimbi and UNITA, who were assured that they would win the election, lost instead.
Good Morning Comrades is a valuable insight into Angola during the end of the Cold War, and what appeared to be the end of the Angolan Civil War, which is mainly drawn from the Ondjaki's own childhood in Luanda. The afterword by the book's translator, Stephen Henighan, provides valuable context to the novel, which is essential for those unfamiliar with the country's history, and his comments bumped my rating of the book from 3½ to 4 stars.
3kidzdoc
The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans by Jonathan Scott Holloway
My rating:
Being American is, in part, an act of declaration, rooted in the principles that guided the establishment of this country and that have been rearticulated at different moments in its history: a faith in the idea of freedom and a pledge to respect liberty and justice for all. Relatedly, being American means, for many, membership in a community of citizens who believe in the rights of assembly, speech, and unfettered access to the ballot box. With an unsettling consistency, however, being American has also been defined in a negative way: not being black.
Dr Jonathan Scott Holloway, the current president of Rutgers University, my undergraduate alma mater, and the first African American to serve in that capacity in the school's 255 year history, is a U.S. historian and university administrator who was educated at Stanford and Yale, and taught and served as dean of Yale College and provost of Northwestern University before being chosen to lead Rutgers last summer.
in The Cause of Freedom, Dr Holloway provides a compelling and very readable account of the story of this country's Black residents, dating from the first known arrival of a Black man to this country in 1528, when Estevanico, a Moroccan member of the Spanish Narváez expedition, was one of four survivors who landed on the west coast of Florida, to the initial importation of slaves to Jamestown in August 1619, through to the Black Lives Matter movement. His primary aim is to determine what it means to be an American, a question that can have different answers depending on the respondent's ethnic and religious background and personal and family history in this country.
The book highlights the historical moments, themes and individuals, White and Black, who played major roles in the history of people of African descent in this country, with a particular focus on the Civil Rights Movement and the post-Civil Rights era, along with the Harlem Renaissance and the two most important public intellectuals in early 20th century America, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. From my past reading I was familiar with most of the information in this book, but there was also plenty that I didn't know, both about the people within it and information about those who I thought I knew.
The Cause of Freedom is an absolutely superb and essential addition to the written history of African Americans, which has 150 pages of text and can easily be read in one day. It would be an outstanding book for high school and college students to read, along with anyone else within and outside of the United States who desires a primer and a start off point to learn more about this perpetually timely and important topic.
My rating:
Being American is, in part, an act of declaration, rooted in the principles that guided the establishment of this country and that have been rearticulated at different moments in its history: a faith in the idea of freedom and a pledge to respect liberty and justice for all. Relatedly, being American means, for many, membership in a community of citizens who believe in the rights of assembly, speech, and unfettered access to the ballot box. With an unsettling consistency, however, being American has also been defined in a negative way: not being black.
Dr Jonathan Scott Holloway, the current president of Rutgers University, my undergraduate alma mater, and the first African American to serve in that capacity in the school's 255 year history, is a U.S. historian and university administrator who was educated at Stanford and Yale, and taught and served as dean of Yale College and provost of Northwestern University before being chosen to lead Rutgers last summer.
in The Cause of Freedom, Dr Holloway provides a compelling and very readable account of the story of this country's Black residents, dating from the first known arrival of a Black man to this country in 1528, when Estevanico, a Moroccan member of the Spanish Narváez expedition, was one of four survivors who landed on the west coast of Florida, to the initial importation of slaves to Jamestown in August 1619, through to the Black Lives Matter movement. His primary aim is to determine what it means to be an American, a question that can have different answers depending on the respondent's ethnic and religious background and personal and family history in this country.
The book highlights the historical moments, themes and individuals, White and Black, who played major roles in the history of people of African descent in this country, with a particular focus on the Civil Rights Movement and the post-Civil Rights era, along with the Harlem Renaissance and the two most important public intellectuals in early 20th century America, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. From my past reading I was familiar with most of the information in this book, but there was also plenty that I didn't know, both about the people within it and information about those who I thought I knew.
The Cause of Freedom is an absolutely superb and essential addition to the written history of African Americans, which has 150 pages of text and can easily be read in one day. It would be an outstanding book for high school and college students to read, along with anyone else within and outside of the United States who desires a primer and a start off point to learn more about this perpetually timely and important topic.
4kidzdoc
Cape Verdean Blues by Shauna Barbosa
My rating:
Shauna Barbosa was born in Boston to an Cape Verdean father and an African American mother. She received her MFA at Bennington College in Vermont, and currently teaches in the Writers' Workshop at UCLA Extension. Her poems have been published by numerous sources over the past decade, and her first collection of poems, Cape Verdean Blues was released by Pitt Poetry Press in 2018, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Voices Award the following year.
Cape Verdean Blues is named for the 1966 album The Cape Verdean Blues by the famed jazz pianist Horace Silver, which itself was composed in honor of Silver's Cape Verdean father John Tavares Silva. This book similarly honors her father's homeland, along with her personal life and loves, the lives of working class people of Cape Verdean descent whom she encounters, and the beauty of that lush country.
One of my favorite poems in this collection honors the late Cape Verdean morna singer Cesária Évora, which is available on her website, https://www.shaunabarbosa.com/:
To the Brothers of Cesária Évora
I’m at the jazz bar
staring at the saxophonist
looking for the entry wound.
My curated movements
are all pretend
darkness don’t equal depth.
He’s looking for mind, too.
Me too is not the same
as hang in there. All rhythm
no blue like swinging
arms are all form of measurement.
The sax to body position, dead skin
cells to household dust
flying across the world
doesn’t compare to noticing
your only bookmark is a pair
of scissors, to cut
means leaving the big tune.
No more pretend this place
smells how it looks outside
at dawn on September’s first
fresh
turning from hopeful to who
can I talk to alive or six-feet under.
Curated sendoff,
one last wound tune
for my brothers, all colors ranging
bread, coffee, blood sausage, and
gaslight. No one wants
a black mouth brother
I know, you don’t want to be
cause it’s difficult to be
black, and
brown mouth with a hopeful open
no more pretend not knowing
that speaking Portuguese
at the traffic stop
won’t save you.
________________________
The poems, like Cape Verde itself, are quite lyrical in their use of language, but unfortunately I did not fully connect with many of them on a first or second reading. As a result, I've given Cape Verdean Blues a 3½ star rating for now, but I'll return to this collection and possibly increase my rating after I give her work another try.
My rating:
Shauna Barbosa was born in Boston to an Cape Verdean father and an African American mother. She received her MFA at Bennington College in Vermont, and currently teaches in the Writers' Workshop at UCLA Extension. Her poems have been published by numerous sources over the past decade, and her first collection of poems, Cape Verdean Blues was released by Pitt Poetry Press in 2018, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Voices Award the following year.
Cape Verdean Blues is named for the 1966 album The Cape Verdean Blues by the famed jazz pianist Horace Silver, which itself was composed in honor of Silver's Cape Verdean father John Tavares Silva. This book similarly honors her father's homeland, along with her personal life and loves, the lives of working class people of Cape Verdean descent whom she encounters, and the beauty of that lush country.
One of my favorite poems in this collection honors the late Cape Verdean morna singer Cesária Évora, which is available on her website, https://www.shaunabarbosa.com/:
To the Brothers of Cesária Évora
I’m at the jazz bar
staring at the saxophonist
looking for the entry wound.
My curated movements
are all pretend
darkness don’t equal depth.
He’s looking for mind, too.
Me too is not the same
as hang in there. All rhythm
no blue like swinging
arms are all form of measurement.
The sax to body position, dead skin
cells to household dust
flying across the world
doesn’t compare to noticing
your only bookmark is a pair
of scissors, to cut
means leaving the big tune.
No more pretend this place
smells how it looks outside
at dawn on September’s first
fresh
turning from hopeful to who
can I talk to alive or six-feet under.
Curated sendoff,
one last wound tune
for my brothers, all colors ranging
bread, coffee, blood sausage, and
gaslight. No one wants
a black mouth brother
I know, you don’t want to be
cause it’s difficult to be
black, and
brown mouth with a hopeful open
no more pretend not knowing
that speaking Portuguese
at the traffic stop
won’t save you.
________________________
The poems, like Cape Verde itself, are quite lyrical in their use of language, but unfortunately I did not fully connect with many of them on a first or second reading. As a result, I've given Cape Verdean Blues a 3½ star rating for now, but I'll return to this collection and possibly increase my rating after I give her work another try.
5kidzdoc
The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed
Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize
My rating:
The setting for this novel is Tiger Bay, a dockside neighborhood in the current Welsh capital of Cardiff that is filled with a rich blend of people from several dozen countries across the world. One of its residents was Mahmood Mattan, a man in his late 20s who was born in British Somaliland and emigrated to Cardiff after the end of World War II, in order to pursue a better life in the Mother Country whose ideals he admires and embraces. Mattan was gainfully employed as a longshoreman and a seaman upon his arrival in Cardiff, but after he suffered an injury he took on odd jobs that did not pay well. He wooed and married a young Welsh woman with whom he had three young boys, but after he became an unreliable provider and engaged in petty crime his wife divorced and left him, although she still loved Mahmood and believed in him.
Mattan was a man of few words, who was inscrutable and untrustworthy, and he had no close friends, even amongst his fellow Somali.
On 6 March 1952 a shopkeeper, Violet Volacki, was brutally murdered in her shop by a man who appeared to be Somali, according to witnesses, although no one saw the crime take place. The police engaged in a sweeping manhunt, and on the basis of a shoddy investigation, his past criminal history, and unreliable witnesses motivated by a sizable reward, Mattan was arrested and charged with the murder. He is outraged at being accused of a violent crime he did not commit, yet certain that the British justice system, which he views as fair and unbiased toward all of its citizens, will quickly exonerate him.
The case comes to trial, to Mattan’s surprise, but he remains confident that the true murderer will be found by the authorities, and that he will soon be freed, and be able to put his life back together and return to the wife and sons he cherishes.
The Fortune Men is a powerful and evocative novel, which paints a rich portrait of its characters, and of Tiger Bay, the city of Cardiff, and the failures of a British society which showed little concern or respect to the African and Caribbean immigrants whose love of the motherland was not returned to them. Nadifa Mohamed spent 20 years researching and writing this book, and its attention to detail was quite apparent to this reader. It is a deserving choice for this year’s Booker Prize shortlist, and I would not be disappointed if it won the award.
Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize
My rating:
The setting for this novel is Tiger Bay, a dockside neighborhood in the current Welsh capital of Cardiff that is filled with a rich blend of people from several dozen countries across the world. One of its residents was Mahmood Mattan, a man in his late 20s who was born in British Somaliland and emigrated to Cardiff after the end of World War II, in order to pursue a better life in the Mother Country whose ideals he admires and embraces. Mattan was gainfully employed as a longshoreman and a seaman upon his arrival in Cardiff, but after he suffered an injury he took on odd jobs that did not pay well. He wooed and married a young Welsh woman with whom he had three young boys, but after he became an unreliable provider and engaged in petty crime his wife divorced and left him, although she still loved Mahmood and believed in him.
Mattan was a man of few words, who was inscrutable and untrustworthy, and he had no close friends, even amongst his fellow Somali.
On 6 March 1952 a shopkeeper, Violet Volacki, was brutally murdered in her shop by a man who appeared to be Somali, according to witnesses, although no one saw the crime take place. The police engaged in a sweeping manhunt, and on the basis of a shoddy investigation, his past criminal history, and unreliable witnesses motivated by a sizable reward, Mattan was arrested and charged with the murder. He is outraged at being accused of a violent crime he did not commit, yet certain that the British justice system, which he views as fair and unbiased toward all of its citizens, will quickly exonerate him.
The case comes to trial, to Mattan’s surprise, but he remains confident that the true murderer will be found by the authorities, and that he will soon be freed, and be able to put his life back together and return to the wife and sons he cherishes.
The Fortune Men is a powerful and evocative novel, which paints a rich portrait of its characters, and of Tiger Bay, the city of Cardiff, and the failures of a British society which showed little concern or respect to the African and Caribbean immigrants whose love of the motherland was not returned to them. Nadifa Mohamed spent 20 years researching and writing this book, and its attention to detail was quite apparent to this reader. It is a deserving choice for this year’s Booker Prize shortlist, and I would not be disappointed if it won the award.
6kidzdoc
TANZANIA
Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah
My rating:
The latest novel by last year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is set in the former colony of German East Africa, or Deutsch-Ostafrika, beginning in the immediate aftermath of the Maji Maji Rebellion (1905-07), in which an armed insurrection by local residents against harsh demands and working conditions imposed on them by the colonists was met with brutal and overwhelming force, and the resultant genocide by the Germans cost approximately 300,000 Africans their lives.
Khalifa is a half African, half Indian young man who is hired as a bookkeeper by a cunning and largely unscrupulous merchant in a port city in German East Africa. After he agrees to marry the niece of the merchant, a match which benefitted the merchant but did not bring happiness to Khalifa or his new wife, he meets and befriends a younger man, Ilyas, who enters town with a letter of recommendation by his German overseer. Ilyas was orphaned at a young age and rescued from bondage by his master, who taught him both the language and the customs of the mother country. Once he is settled Ilyas returns to his home village and rescues his beautiful younger sister, Afiya, from the family who has kept her as little more than a house servant. After the two settle in a peaceful existence in town Ilyas suddenly decides to enlist as a soldier in the schutztruppe, the colonial troops which were tasked to crush any rebellious activities or behaviors by the resentful and downtrodden subjects of the Germans. Afiya is left unprotected, but is rescued from a life of abuse and bondage by Khalifa and his wife Asha.
The schutztruppe in German East Africa is used to fight against the askari, Africans of other countries who were often forcibly recruited to engage in war against enemy colonies during the First World War, under inhuman conditions and with heavy loss of life. One survivor of the war is Hamza, who returns to the port city that he escaped from by joining the schutztruppe. He is hired by the son of the merchant who employed Khalifa, and he gradually gets to know, and ultimately fall in love with, Afiya, who remains unmarried and available.
The primary focus of Afterlives is the growing relationship between Afiya and Hamza, and their story is beautifully conveyed by the author, with rich portrayals of the young lovers and the other major characters in the novel. The brutality of colonial rule under the Germans between the end of the Maji Maji Rebellion and the end of World War I is also compelling and evocative, particularly Hamza’s often harsh treatment by his commanding officers. However, the end of the book is quite rushed, underdeveloped and somewhat unconvincing, as if Gurnah wanted to be done with the book. As a result I knocked down my rating of Afterlives by half a star to four stars, but it is still a superb novel and one well worth reading.
Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah
My rating:
The latest novel by last year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is set in the former colony of German East Africa, or Deutsch-Ostafrika, beginning in the immediate aftermath of the Maji Maji Rebellion (1905-07), in which an armed insurrection by local residents against harsh demands and working conditions imposed on them by the colonists was met with brutal and overwhelming force, and the resultant genocide by the Germans cost approximately 300,000 Africans their lives.
Khalifa is a half African, half Indian young man who is hired as a bookkeeper by a cunning and largely unscrupulous merchant in a port city in German East Africa. After he agrees to marry the niece of the merchant, a match which benefitted the merchant but did not bring happiness to Khalifa or his new wife, he meets and befriends a younger man, Ilyas, who enters town with a letter of recommendation by his German overseer. Ilyas was orphaned at a young age and rescued from bondage by his master, who taught him both the language and the customs of the mother country. Once he is settled Ilyas returns to his home village and rescues his beautiful younger sister, Afiya, from the family who has kept her as little more than a house servant. After the two settle in a peaceful existence in town Ilyas suddenly decides to enlist as a soldier in the schutztruppe, the colonial troops which were tasked to crush any rebellious activities or behaviors by the resentful and downtrodden subjects of the Germans. Afiya is left unprotected, but is rescued from a life of abuse and bondage by Khalifa and his wife Asha.
The schutztruppe in German East Africa is used to fight against the askari, Africans of other countries who were often forcibly recruited to engage in war against enemy colonies during the First World War, under inhuman conditions and with heavy loss of life. One survivor of the war is Hamza, who returns to the port city that he escaped from by joining the schutztruppe. He is hired by the son of the merchant who employed Khalifa, and he gradually gets to know, and ultimately fall in love with, Afiya, who remains unmarried and available.
The primary focus of Afterlives is the growing relationship between Afiya and Hamza, and their story is beautifully conveyed by the author, with rich portrayals of the young lovers and the other major characters in the novel. The brutality of colonial rule under the Germans between the end of the Maji Maji Rebellion and the end of World War I is also compelling and evocative, particularly Hamza’s often harsh treatment by his commanding officers. However, the end of the book is quite rushed, underdeveloped and somewhat unconvincing, as if Gurnah wanted to be done with the book. As a result I knocked down my rating of Afterlives by half a star to four stars, but it is still a superb novel and one well worth reading.
