He saw two Europeans on the railway platform at that time, the first he had ever seen. He was not frightened, not at first. He went to the station often, to watch the trains come noisily and gracefully in, and then to wait for them to haul themselves out again, marshalled by the scowling Indian signalman with his pennants and whistle. Often Yusuf waited hours for a train to arrive. The two Europeans were also waiting, standing under a canvas awning with their luggage and important-looking goods neatly piled a few feet away. (Gurnah 1994, 1)

1Uninitiated readers might not be aware, when they discover the incipit of Paradise, that these few lines – drawn from the second paragraph of that opening passage – already hint at the extent to which this novel, like Abdulrazak Gurnah’s work more generally, opens a remarkable window onto the history of East African societies and their diverse cultures.

2The story is set in East Africa at the very beginning of the twentieth century, a period of profound political, economic, social and cultural upheaval for the region and its inhabitants, as European colonisation – primarily German and British in these areas – had already been underway for more than two decades. The setting is the North-Eastern part of the colonial territory of German East Africa (present-day Rwanda, Burundi and mainland Tanzania), founded some twenty years earlier, in 1885, not far from the port city of Tanga, and thus close to the border of British East Africa (now Kenya), as well as to the snow-capped peaks of Mount Kilimanjaro.

3Within the short span of the second paragraph of Paradise, then, an entire historical background unfolds. This is true both for Yusuf, a young East African adolescent encountering Europeans for the first time, and for the reader, who is offered an depiction of East Africa in the midst of colonisation, where socio-cultural elements inherited from a more distant past begin to rub shoulders with infrastructures associated with a supposedly Western modernity. The signalman, whose Indian origin is emphasised from the outset, provides a particularly emblematic example thereof. Has he lived in the region for decades, like many other Indians who arrived in East Africa through centuries of transoceanic trade and were later trained in railway management? Or was he a technician recruited by the British Raj and brought across the ocean as part of transimperial circulations? It hardly matters: both interpretations remain possible, and in all cases, they allow us to foreground the encounter that is unfolding, an encounter shaped by colonisation.

4Yet, this encounter remains incomplete: when the novel begins, trains are already present, and Yusuf has long been accustomed to waiting for them. However, he has not seen Europeans before the opening lines; and when he finally does, he does not fear these Europeans – at least, not yet, but the story that unfolds will soon give him ample reasons to do so. Indeed, Yusuf is about to discover the vast world of East Africa alongside his “Uncle Aziz,” a rich and powerful coastal merchant who enslaves him only a few pages into the novel, and with whom he travels along the immense caravan routes that criss-cross the hinterland – from the Swahili coast to the Great Lakes region and back again. This initiatory journey enables him to encounter many East African populations inhabiting the regions he traverses, who often remain isolated from German colonisation, despite its ongoing presence in the area. In the process, he is confronted with multiple forms of human violence: internal systems of servitude and social coercion, inter-communal conflict and bodily vulnerability, alongside the encroaching brutality of German colonial rule. For although the colonial yoke imposed by the Germans at the end of the nineteenth century in this part of East Africa was becoming increasingly structuring, it was not yet omnipresent: written from Yusuf’s point of view, the novel offers a stimulating reflection on how this colonisation looming on the horizon might be perceived and experienced at the local level. By shifting the perspective of the English-speaking reader, who is often overly Western-centric, the novel places colonialism itself into perspective: without underestimating its importance – still less its violence – the novel also engages with the idea that colonisation does not determine all aspects of life in East Africa; social, economic, and political interactions often unfold according to local dynamics shaped by a long and complex indigenous history, as has been recently emphasised in the historiography (Lefebvre 2017; 2021). This can be said to be one of the great strengths of Paradise – and one to which this article will return. Gurnah weaves a tale of East African history at the turn of the twentieth century with finesse, subtlety, and poetry, almost seeming to engage with a rich historiography – if not to anticipate it, given that Paradise was first published in 1994, well before many major works on colonial and imperial history (e.g., Cooper and Stoler 1997; Colley 2002; Cooper 2005; Stoler, McGranahan and Perdue 2007; Burbank and Cooper 2010; Singaravélou 2013) – to a degree that makes the story he tells echo the sources and documentation consulted by historians working on East Africa.

5The aim of this article, however, is not to revisit the sources and historiography that Gurnah may have drawn upon in writing Paradise but rather to offer a geographical and historical contextualisation of East Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. Taken as a whole, Gurnah’s literary oeuvre provides a remarkable introduction to modern and contemporary East African history, as his novels – in which small stories intersect with larger ones – offer a social fresco that allows readers to immerse themselves in Swahili culture, and to gain a deeper understanding of its contours.

7In order to better contextualise East Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as the political, socio-economic, and cultural upheavals associated with the rise of Western imperialism and the establishment of a German colonial order, this article is divided into three parts. Firstly, it offers a brief overview of a thousand years of East African history, marked by multiple movements and hybridisations across the western Indian Ocean. It then focuses on the caravan system that shaped, structured and organised East African spaces during the nineteenth century, before finally returning to the rupture – or lack thereof – brought about by the arrival of Westerners, particularly the Germans, with the rise of European imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century and the formal beginnings of colonisation in the mid-1880s.

East Africa: a millennia-old meeting ground of civilisations and worlds

8Very early on in history, East Africa – particularly its coastal strip stretching from Mogadishu to the north of present-day Mozambique, together with the offshore islands, including the Zanzibar archipelago, from which Abdulrazak Gurnah originates – became part of the Indian Ocean trading networks. These started as early as the first century BC, or even the second millennium BC, according to some authors (Horton and Middleton 2000; Beaujard 2018, 143). Wind and monsoon patterns were among the main reasons for this contact between the East African coast, the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf, and Asia, as they offered merchants favourable sailing conditions: from November to March, the northeast monsoon (kaskazi, in Kiswahili) facilitated maritime travel from the Arabian Peninsula to the East African coast; from April to September, the Southwest monsoon (kusi, in Kiswahili) favoured navigation in the opposite direction (Sheriff 1987; Wilkinson 2015; Beaujard 2015). This wind pattern thus encouraged regular trade and contact between East African societies and those around the Indian Ocean, beginning with the Islamised populations of the Persian Gulf. As a result, the East African coast was gradually integrated into a world system, acting as an interface between several trading centres (Arabia, Persia, Egypt) and peripheral areas (the African hinterland, the Comoros, Madagascar). Philippe Beaujard uses the term “semi-periphery” to describe this intermediary position between dominant regions and terrestrial and maritime margins (Beaujard 2012, 102).

10Indeed, the rise of Swahili civilisation can be traced back to the expansion, in the early centuries AD, of Bantu groups who established the first settlements and trading centres along the coast, particularly in the Lamu and Zanzibar archipelagos, and Mozambique. Well integrated into transoceanic trade networks, these sites functioned as meeting places for Africans, Arabs, and Indians. In the early centuries of our era, they developed a relatively homogeneous culture shaped by these overseas influences and underwent processes of cultural and religious mixing, political reconfiguration, and urbanisation – and between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, some twenty Swahili city-states emerged (Kusimba 1999; Sinclair and Håkanson 2000; Vernet 2004). Relying on trade and benefiting from their privileged liminal position between the African continent and the Indian Ocean, these Swahili city-states became wealthy enough at times to dominate large stretches of the coastline, as in the case of Mogadishu (in the thirteenth century), Kilwa (in the fourteenth century), and Mombasa and Pate (from the sixteenth century onwards). Tanga, where Yusuf’s story begins with his “Uncle Aziz,” was yet another of these cities.

12This Arab influence, initially predominantly cultural, soon acquired a political dimension with the arrival of a new actor: the Sultanate of Oman. Faced with competition stemming from the arrival and growing influence of the Portuguese in the region in the mid-sixteenth century, the Swahili city-states, a century later, sought support from the Arabian Peninsula – particularly from the Omanis, who were themselves enemies of the Portuguese. After recapturing the city of Muscat from the Portuguese in 1650, Sultan bin Saif, the leader of the Omani Ya‘ariba dynasty, launched a series of raids against European forces along the East African coast and secured the allegiance of several local chiefs, notably in Zanzibar. In 1729, the Portuguese were definitively expelled from the region by the Omanis and forced to retreat South of Cape Delgado (Bennett 1978, 7–13; Pouwels 2000; Vernet-Habasque 2019).

13Even though the coast regained relative economic and political independence, the Omanis remained highly present: merchants from the Persian Gulf settled along the coast and established their own trading networks, exchanging Indian textiles for African ivory. Increasing numbers of Arab immigrants also settled on the coast and, through intermarriage, contributed to growing racial and cultural mixing. Above all, the Sultanate of Oman, which was ruled by the Busaidi dynasty after 1741, became increasingly influential at the turn of the nineteenth century. Under the leadership of Said bin Sultan, the Omanis began to settle permanently on the island of Unguja, in the Zanzibar archipelago, located 35 kilometres off the Swahili coast.

14Unguja possessed an excellent harbour and extremely fertile soil, and faced the Mrima Coast, the main outlet for the slave and ivory trades. Said visited the island for the first time during a trip in 1828, after which he settled his son Khalid in a palace in Mtoni, a few kilometres from the main town of Unguja, and appointed him as his representative there, assisted by a vizier. The archipelago gradually established itself as the centre of decision-making and economic development on the East African coast. The Omanis progressively colonised more territories; they compelled all merchants to conduct business exclusively through Zanzibar. Above all, the introduction of cloves in the first half of the nineteenth century completed the island’s transformation into a major source of revenue at a time when globalisation was driving up the price of this spice. Consequently, Zanzibar became the principal warehouse in the Western part of the Indian Ocean for ivory, slaves, cloves, and agricultural products, as well as the main importer of manufactured goods from India and the West, eclipsing all other coastal cities. Arabs and Indians flocked there, forming a new commercial elite closely connected to the seat of power. Around 1840, Said settled on the island, definitively establishing Unguja as a political and economic centre at the heart of his possessions, thereby turning Oman into a dual-headed state centred on the two most important sites in its trading system – Muscat and Zanzibar (Bennett 1978).

15However, when Said died in 1856, major succession disputes led the Busaidi state to become autonomous from Muscat. While Thuwaïni, the eldest son, ascended the throne in Muscat, another son, Majid, seized the African possessions and proclaimed himself sovereign (1856-1870) – a status recognised by the British in 1861 (Bhacker 1992). Thus, within just a few decades, Zanzibar established itself as a stronghold of Omani thalassocracy – a system of political and economic control primarily exercised through maritime power –, eventually becoming an independent Arab state in the mid-nineteenth century, with considerable influence on the East African coast and in the hinterland, reaching as far as the Great Lakes region.

16The Busaidi state exerted a strong influence along the coast, with representatives of its authority sometimes settled in certain cities, such as Mombasa, coexisting alongside local governments that remained partially autonomous. Its influence even extended to major trade corridors, reaching deep into the hinterland – for example, as far as Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika. Historiography has nevertheless emphasized the difficulty of precisely delineating the extent of Zanzibarite authority on the continent, as its functions and substance varied considerably from one area to another – ranging from the recognition of political and commercial importance in some locations to the exercise of fiscal, judicial, military, or administrative prerogatives in others (Deutsch 1995; Coret 2019). Relations between the Busaidi state, the coast, and the hinterland were therefore highly complex. To speak of an “Omani empire” in East Africa – or to apply notions such as “vassalage” or “suzerainty” – would be a simplification, reproducing too schematically categories and representations derived from the Western world (Unangst 2022; Froment 2026a). On the contrary, East Africa constituted a veritable political and cultural mosaic.

17The hinterland remained largely disconnected from the coast, and the spread of Islam provides a clear example of this. For a long time, the adoption of Islam was largely confined to coastal areas. Some scholars, such as Mark Horton and John Middleton (2000), explain this by noting that merchants on the Swahili coast feared losing their position as essential intermediaries between the Indian Ocean and the African interior if their continental partners also converted. Based on archaeological excavations, they concluded that the coastal inhabitants may have gone even further, by significantly limiting the supply of imported goods, such as ceramics and glass, from the Indian Ocean to the interior.

18However, one should not draw too sharp a distinction between the coast and the East African hinterland, which is often perceived as a single entity. Far from being unified, the hinterland consisted of multiple political groups. For example, on the Southern slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, the populations commonly referred to as “Chagga” since the nineteenth century were themselves divided into numerous local chiefdoms, which often rivaled one another and were also politically distinct – and sometimes hostile – from neighbouring Maasai, Meru, Kamba, and Taita groups (Stahl 1964; Moore and Puritt 1977; Wimmelbücker 2002; Clack 2009; Bender 2013). In addition, the East African interior was divided into different linguistic groups, including Nilo-Hamitic, Sudanic, and Bantu.

19However, the East African interior should not be seen as a fixed mosaic, in which societies were compartmentalised according to a simplistic tribal or ethnic pattern. Multiple exchanges and transfers took place between these different East African societies, and they intensified considerably as long-distance trade expanded, particularly so during the nineteenth century.

Structuring space, transcending power: a long nineteenth-century trade system

20Interregional contacts and exchanges in the East African hinterland predated the nineteenth century. Researchers, particularly archaeologists, have shown that many goods – mainly weapons, slaves, copal gum, coconut oil, and ivory – circulated from the coast to the interior of East Africa through multiple, rotating regional markets. For example, some scholars have highlighted very ancient trade routes along the Pangani basin through archaeological excavations that reveal the presence of non-native plants, objects (such as ceramics, beads, and shells), and certain skills (notably coral-stone architecture), all of which were imported from the Swahili coast over the last two millennia (Walz 2010).

22Believing that these routes could pave the way to the continent’s interior they sought to explore, Europeans took an early interest in them. Hoping to benefit from the infrastructure associated with caravan trade in order to venture into territories known to be dangerous, they sought, on each of their expeditions, either to join caravans or to enlist the help of a coastal merchant with extensive knowledge of the interior. From the very beginning of European exploration of the East African hinterland – traditionally considered to have begun in the 1840s with the arrival in Mombasa in 1843 of Ludwig Krapf, a missionary of the Church Missionary Society who began traveling inland for evangelical purposes and was soon joined by Johannes Rebmann and Jakob Erhardt (Bridges 1973) – numerous sketches, maps, and written accounts attempted to describe the region. One of the most successful of these efforts was undoubtedly what later came to be known as the “Slug Map”, produced by Rebmann and Erhardt and presented to the Royal Geographical Society in November 1855 (Voigt 2012). On it, several routes connecting the coast to the interior appear, traced in black and red. The text read during Jakob Erhardt’s presentation to the Royal Geographical Society complemented this cartographic representation: the missionary described the various routes in great detail, offering a geography of East Africa as understood through caravan routes (Erhardt 1855).

23Although such sources tended to freeze these routes in time – presenting them as perfectly well-established and structured infrastructures, anchored since time immemorial in the territories they traversed, and therefore intangible and definitive – these routes were in fact highly fluid, a reality of which contemporaries were well aware. In their Slug Map, Erhardt and Rebmann attempted a cartographic classification of routes, distinguishing the most important and most frequently used ones (marked in black and highlighted in red) from those considered abandoned (marked only in black and accompanied by the words “old route”). Similarly, in his account of his first journey to Mount Kilimanjaro, Rebmann recounts having taken a path that was difficult to follow because it was “so much buried in a thick and thorny jungle” and therefore, in his view, did not deserve the name “way”; local inhabitants themselves described this path as “dead” (Rebmann 1849, 12). In a letter sent to Friedrich Bialloblotzky – a German missionary who, in 1849, was planning to explore East Africa and look for the sources of the Nile (Railton 2002) – an administrator at the British consulate in Zanzibar attempted to warn him that there were no caravan routes, or at least that they were nothing like what Europeans imagined them to be (ZNA 1849). Far from well-paved roads that would never change, these routes were more like tracks, shifting with the weather and the risk of attacks along the way – risks that European observers often attributed to raids by Maasai groups. Until the last decades of the nineteenth century, letters sent or received by the British Consulate in Zanzibar often reported that certain roads were temporarily blocked due to weather conditions or banditry (ZNA 1883; ZNA 1885).

25Gaining momentum during the nineteenth century, this long-distance trade brought different populations and cultures into contact, at least indirectly. It gradually contributed to the globalisation of the East African hinterland. Ivory and enslaved people were traded for manufactured goods from around the Indian Ocean and the rest of the world: pearls, fabrics, clothing, and weapons, for instance. Caravan trade and the porters who drove it thus tended to unify East African spaces and territories by connecting the entire hinterland to the Indian Ocean, thereby helping to spread goods, practices, and knowledge across diverse social groups. It is in this sense that Stephen Rockel referred to the wapagazi as “carriers of culture” (Rockel 2006). A particularly emblematic example is the spread of Kinyamwezi – the language spoken by the Nyamwezi –, and even more so Kiswahili, which throughout the nineteenth century established themselves as true lingua francas throughout the hinterland, along the trade routes. Beyond these lingua francas, foreign crops, agricultural techniques, religions, and forms of artistic expression also spread and were exchanged from one region to another, to such an extent that Rockel considers the porters to have been “at the leading edge of innovation in nineteenth-century Africa” (Rockel 1997, 6). Even the monetary system, in which several currencies coexisted – such as the Maria Theresa Thaler (a silver coin minted by the Austrian Empire, widely used around the Red Sea and thus in East Africa due to its integration with Red Sea trade), the rupee, and the doti merikani (four yards of American unbleached cotton) – remained consistent on a regional scale, driven by trade; the doti merikani was recognised almost everywhere along the routes and had a set value against the Maria Theresa Thaler, widely used in Zanzibar and on the coast, on the basis of which porters’ wages were calculated (Rockel 1997, 196–97). There was a complex but functional monetary system – one that would be completely redesigned and reorganised under European colonisation, like so many other aspects of East African life.

Enter the Westerners: a colonised East Africa between upheaval and continuity at the turn of the twentieth century

26Concrete European colonisation in East Africa began in the mid-1880s. It was, however, preceded by a growing imperial presence of Western powers in the region (Coupland 1938; Nicholls 1971; Bennett 1986). Although the French had already settled at the end of the eighteenth century on the Southern Swahili coast near Kilwa for the purpose of slave trading (Gray 1956), and the British had carried out two coastal reconnaissance expeditions in the 1810s and 1820s and had very briefly settled in Mombasa – from 1824 to 1826, as explained by John M. Gray (1957) –, Western powers initially concentrated their presence offshore, in Zanzibar, near the Busaidi state, which was regarded as the main local power in the region. In 1833, the United States obtained the signature of a commercial treaty and subsequently established the first Western consulate in 1837 (Wesley 2011). They were soon followed by the British and the French in the early 1840s, and later by the German-speaking Hanseatic League in the 1850s (Bhacker 1992; Goswami 2009; Repussard 2009). Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Zanzibar became the main East African hub for Westerners – businessmen and traders, diplomats, missionaries, and explorers – who were all drawn to East Africa and its newly opened opportunities. This community was small and predominantly male – wives and other female Western residents may of course have lived there, but they were rarely mentioned in contemporary sources. Nevertheless, it grew from 22 residents in 1844 to 91 in 1879 (Bennett 1986). During the second half of the nineteenth century, East Africa thus became a new frontier for commerce, evangelisation, and exploration. The pursuit of resources was, in one form or another, a constant driving force behind this Western expansion, sometimes justified by objectives presented as humanitarian: the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, a theme that is clearly referenced in Paradise (e.g., pp. 171 and 176) (Cooper 1977; Sheriff 1987; Glassman 1995; Médard 2013; Cheriau 2023). In 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal also greatly accelerated this process, as it suddenly made East Africa much more accessible. Whereas it had taken Otto Kersten, a German explorer, between two and three months to reach Zanzibar from Northern Europe via the Cape of Good Hope in 1862, by 1884 it took Harry Hamilton Johnston, a British explorer, only about three weeks to travel from London to Zanzibar (Froment 2026b).

27Curiosity can also be cited as a motivating factor: curiosity about the “eternal snows of Kilimanjaro,” first described in 1848 by Johannes Rebmann, whose existence was initially contested by some influential European scholars (Froment 2023; 2026b); curiosity about the true location of the sources of the Nile, which remained unknown in Western geography from Antiquity until the 1850s-1870s and the expeditions of Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, James Augustus Grant, Samuel and Florence Baker, and Henry Morton Stanley (Jeal 2010); and, more generally, curiosity about East African geography and the idea of “unveiling” (Surun 2018) this part of the continent. However, these explorers were all undoubtedly genuinely curious, but they were also eager to build their own reputations and to make money – and, in that sense, they did not hesitate to place themselves at the service of imperial or colonial enterprises when the opportunity arose (Driver 2001). Of course, they did not always participate directly in colonisation (Surun 2006). Nevertheless, they all contributed in various ways to fuelling Western imperialism. Because they believed that European knowledge would offer all of humanity the “unveiling” of the world (and of Africa in particular) – something that non-Western peoples were supposedly incapable of achieving on their own – they reinforced beliefs in Western superiority, an argument that would soon be used to justify colonial enterprises. Through their explorations, they also helped impose a Western interpretation of the world: first by taking cognitive possession of it, then by arousing colonial interest and imperial greed, and finally by providing, through knowledge, the means to take concrete possession of it (Pratt 1992; Godlewska and Smith 1994).

28In this game, the British believed they were the strongest – or at least the best placed: they had been particularly close to the Busaidi state since the 1840s – largely thanks to the considerable efforts of their consul in Zanzibar, Sir John Kirk – to the extent that East Africa could be regarded in the early 1880s as part of their informal empire (Gjersø 2015). Nevertheless, in 1884, some German actors and institutions – notably the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft (DOAG), a chartered colonial organisation led by Carl Peters – also set their sights on East Africa. Their aim was to establish a colony there and thus provide the young nation-state, founded in 1871, with a colonial empire. Although Chancellor Bismarck was initially uninterested in such a colonial adventure in Africa – fearing that competition with other Western powers on the continent might bring war back to European soil – a solid colonial lobby was nonetheless pressing for Germany to expand overseas (Wehler 1969; Conrad 2008). Against Bismarck’s wishes, Peters and three other members of the DOAG travelled to East Africa in November 1884 and began to seize territories inland by inducing East African communities to sign treaties written in German – treaties whose content Peters and his colleagues could not explain, as they did not speak Kiswahili or any other local language (Perras 2004; Kpao Sare 2007; Pesek 2010). They returned to Berlin with these treaties, and on 27 February 1885, in the context of the conclusion of the Berlin Conference which had established rules regarding colonisation, Bismarck finally agreed to recognise this new territory as German East Africa by granting a Schutzbrief to the DOAG. This “letter of protection” made the DOAG the effective owner and administrator of the land, while guaranteeing it military protection by German troops if necessary. Over the following years and until 1890, this new territory expanded, giving rise to lengthy negotiations – particularly with the British and the Busaidi state (Gjersø 2015; Wilkinson 2015; Coret 2026; Froment 2026b). Towards the end of the European “scramble for Africa,” the British managed to secure parts of the East African interior, which later became British East Africa (present-day Kenya) and Uganda. From 1890 onwards, they also took control of Zanzibar. As for the DOAG, it did not survive the major Abushiri rebellion in the Pangani Valley (1888–1890), a revolt that is mentioned in the opening pages of Gurnah’s Afterlives (2020), and went bankrupt. As a result, the Reich took over the territory from 1891 onwards, turning German East Africa into a colony directly administered by the Foreign (and later Colonial) Office in Berlin, under the authority of a governor based locally in Dar es Salaam, on the Swahili coast (Deutsch 1995; Glassman 1995; Pesek 2010; Unangst 2022). It was only with Germany’s defeat at the end of World War I that the German colonial period in East Africa came to an end – even though, in practice, the territory was not lost by General Lettow-Vorbeck, who waged a war of attrition against the British and Belgian troops and did not surrender until he learned of the armistice on 13 November 1918 (Iliffe 1979). In the meantime, this East African campaign had led to the recruitment of many East African soldiers (askaris) and civilians on both sides – German and British-Belgian – to contribute to the war effort. The ending of the novel alludes precisely to this situation: Yusuf encounters a troop of askaris and ultimately runs “after the column with smarting eyes” (Gurnah 1994, 247), leaving the reader uncertain about his intentions – whether he is merely following them, as he has just identified himself with stray dogs, or about to become one of these askaris.

29In any case, it is against this historical backdrop that the settings described in the novel must be understood. The story takes place entirely in German East Africa, yet the presence of the British (or rather, the “English”) is also regularly acknowledged (e.g., pp. 91, 104, 190, and 242). Local communities are aware of this dual Western presence: in terms of their colonial horizon of expectation, the Germans serve as the concrete authority on the ground, while the British represent an additional, nearby point of reference. For the protagonists of the novel, however, there seems to be little difference between Germans and British – both are simply part of the broader European presence. This impression appears to find a parallel in historiography, which, beyond questions of rivalry, has also highlighted instances of collaboration between empires and shown how each territory could draw inspiration from its neighbour in establishing colonial order (Lindner 2011).

30Colonial control was largely enforced through coercion – either by colonial troops or with the support of local intermediaries, notably through the recruitment (even before World War I) of askaris to fight under German orders. The Germans frequently exploited existing rivalries among local groups, favouring one over the others to maintain their dominance: the case of the Chagga of Mount Kilimanjaro could thus provide several examples (Stahl 1964; Wimmelbücker 2002; Froment 2026b), as could that of the Tutsi and Hutu of Rwanda and Burundi (Piton 2018). German colonisation focused primarily on extracting the region’s resources – both natural and human. Coercive and often violent methods accompanied the establishment of a plantation-based economy, the introduction of taxes that forced the colonised into wage labour for European employers, and the construction of vast new infrastructure, such as roads, railways and telegraph lines. The colonised were assigned particularly difficult, demanding and exhausting tasks, to such an extent that the colonisers had to rely on forced labour or the use of prisoners to find workers. Although this description focuses on German practices, the same basic mechanisms – coercion, resource extraction, and the use of infrastructure to control mobility – were also applied in British East Africa or Zanzibar (Cooper 1980), and in fact resembled patterns found in many other colonial empires across the world (Singaravélou 2013).

31New infrastructure – such as trains and roads – completely transformed forms of mobility in East Africa, with a particular impact on the caravan trade. Travel was accelerated, but routes and practices were redirected, altering long-established patterns. Some towns that had been key commercial centres were marginalised, while others gained prominence simply by being situated on colonial roads or railway lines (Greiner 2022a; 2022b). Two major railway lines were constructed by the Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft für Deutsch-Ostafrika: the Tanganjikabahn – the central line – and the Usambarabahn – the one featured in Paradise, linking Tanga on the coast to Moshi on Mount Kilimanjaro (Koponen 1994). Construction of the Usambarabahn began in 1893, reaching Muhesa (40 kilometres from Tanga, before Korogwe) in 1896. Due to the project’s scale, work was temporarily interrupted, and resumed in 1899, reaching Mombo – 129 kilometres from Tanga – in 1905, then Buiko in 1909, and finally Moshi in 1911 (Froment 2026b). That said, with regard to the Usambarabahn, it should be noted that there may be an anachronism in Paradise: Yusuf reaches Moshi by train relatively early in the novel, yet more than three years seem to elapse before the outbreak of World War I at the end of the narrative.

32The upheaval was cultural as well. For instance, the Germans introduced significant changes to Kiswahili. Whereas it had previously been written using Arabic script, they promoted the adoption of the Latin-script alphabet. Missionaries, who were often responsible for education, and the press distributed by the colonial power, were the two main means of spreading this Latinised Kiswahili. Such educational and linguistic policies profoundly changed cultural practices and served to reinforce and strengthen the colonial state’s control over the local populations (Chanson 2017; Krautwald 2021).

33Still, historians today are careful not to exaggerate the reach or power of colonial empires. This is not to deny the violence or impact of colonial rule, but rather to emphasise that, even with coercive force, colonial authority was neither omnipotent nor omnipresent (Bayart 1989; Herbst 2000; Singaravélou 2013). In fact, not all East African societies were profoundly transformed by colonisation, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century. An illustrative case is the Great Lakes region, toward which Yusuf’s caravan travels in the novel. The kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi were only gradually incorporated into German East Africa in the late 1890s, and even then, German control remained quite limited: it was not until 1907, with the establishment of the Kigali Residence, that a more permanent administrative presence was created. Broadly speaking, the colonial state lacked both infrastructure and settlers, to such an extent that some historians have described its authority as “peripatetic,” exercised by officials constantly on the move (Pesek 2006). In practice, continuous colonial presence was confined to a few isolated administrative posts scattered across a territory exceeding two million square kilometres. This structural weakness often led to episodes of violence, frequently staged to conceal the fragility and vulnerability of colonial authority. Such fragility was reinforced not only by external resistance from the colonised, but also by the settlers themselves: the first bureaucrats administering the empire often envisioned themselves as local princes, acting according to their own discretion rather than as officials implementing coherent state directives (von Trotha 1994; Wirz et al. 2003; Pesek 2006). In a similar vein, recent studies have shown that, despite German efforts to transform roads and caravan routes in East Africa, many pre-colonial mobility practices persisted, demonstrating the resilience of vernacular transport systems (Greiner 2022a; 2022b; Unangst 2022). Thus, colonial occupation was marked by profound violence to impose a new rule on East African societies, but these societies found ways to adapt to it, or in some cases remained on its margins – continuing to exercise a form of agency that colonial power did not always perceive (Lefebvre 2017; 2021).

34A particularly telling sign of this position on the margins of colonial power is that information about the colonisers did not always circulate as smoothly as might be assumed. A striking historical example comes from the testimony of Martin Kayamba, born in Zanzibar in 1891, and who grew up and lived along the Swahili coast, between the various colonial territories – British and German. He recalls the rumours that spread across East Africa when World War I broke out in August 1914, while he was in German East Africa:

I made two trips in the interior, trading. On my second trip, whilst returning to Muheza, in the train at Korogwe I heard a rumour that there was war between the British and the Germans. Natives were talking about it. It was 2^nd of August, 1914. On my arrival I hurried to the U.M.C.A. Station at Magila and reported the matter to my friend Mr. Russell. He did not believe me and said it was impossible for the British and the Germans to fight because they were friends and relations. I replied that I thought there was something in the rumour, and returned home. Then I heard the German troops were already on the move and Rev. Spanton, the Principal of Kiungani College, Zanzibar, who had come with his college boys from Zanzibar on vacation leave, had been arrested by Captain Hering and sent to Tanga under escort. This was the beginning of troubles. (Qtd. in Kayamba 1935, 185)

35The notion of “rumour” – which Kayamba himself emphasises, with the idea of disbelief that two European nations, England and Germany, perceived from an East African perspective as allies, could suddenly go to war – as well as the ways in which information circulated in colonial contexts among and within colonised populations, has now been extensively explored in historiography (White 2000; Leonardi 2007; Asseraf 2019; Lacroix 2022; Létang 2024). It is therefore a particularly fruitful field of research, one that Gurnah’s novel had already powerfully anticipated in 1994. Throughout Paradise, rumours play a central role, especially so towards the end, which closes on the disruption that World War I is about to bring to the characters’ lives. This serves as a final reminder of Gurnah’s remarkable ability, in Paradise, to engage with and resonate alongside a rich body of historical scholarship.

36By way of conclusion, let us pause on the novel’s incredibly subtle and nuanced vision of the colonial history of the region. In addition to setting the scene of a complex and diverse East Africa – culturally, socially, and economically shaped by centuries- or even millennia-long exchanges – what is particularly striking in Paradise is how the novel shows that European colonisation brought about major upheavals, and yet largely remained a gradual process. It thus provides a profound meditation on how this insidious yet palpable process of colonisation – already unfolding – might be perceived and experienced.

37It is certainly due to the fact that the story is not told from the perspective of the colonisers – the ones who have long dominated the historical narrative – but through the eyes of a young adolescent, and then man: a colonised, marginalised, and subaltern individual. This is one of the greatest strengths of Gurnah’s work. Indeed, East Africa and its landscapes had already been portrayed by Ernest Hemingway in The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936), by Karen Blixen in Out of Africa (1937), and by Joseph Kessel in The Lion (1938) – that is, from a Western perspective, through the story of Western protagonists. With Abdulrazak Gurnah, we have access to a Swahili perspective – original, sensitive, and deeply-rooted in – that brings us into the heart of East African societies and their place in the twentieth century.