Book Review | Secrets of colonialism and exile from the dark heart of Ostafrika

Abdulrazak Gurnah is a novelist and essayist and, judged by Afterlives, his newest novel, he is a writer of fluidity and is imbued with a hauntingly deep sense of the place in writing about eastern Africa, although he has lived in Britain for some five decades since he was a teenager. Given the quality of his prose, and the strength of his portraiture that cuts out the frills but dwells on the essence of life’s many turning points in periods of time made unstable by colonial wars and colonial suzerainty over impoverished peoples — in this case tribal nations of eastern Africa — it is surprising that Gurnah had to wait for commercial success until he found renown with the Literature Nobel in 2021. The novel is set in Ostafrika, or German East Africa, which was a colony of Germany in the Great Lakes Region of Africa for roughly four decades ending with the Germany’s defeat in the First World War. Dislocation and re-building within the colonial framework in German — and later British- East Africa is the fluent theme of the novel.