1The underrepresentation of African voices in colonial narratives constitutes “coloniality of knowledge,” where due to prevailing and persisting power dynamics, knowledges of the colonized are considered less valuable and remain sidelined, while those of the colonizers are pedestalized and universalized (Quijano 2007). This results in what Boaventura de Sousa Santos refers to as epistemicide, namely the deaths of the suppressed ways of knowing and worlding (2014). “Epistemicide” is an example of cognitive injustice, and refers to “failures in the domain of knowledge to recognize the different ways of knowing by which diverse people across the human globe make sense of the world and provide meaning to their existence” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2021, 887). To repair epistemicide, we are called upon to be deliberate about epistemological decolonization, which involves disentangling knowledge production from hierarchical and hegemonic dispensations. One way of working towards epistemological decolonization is a democratization of knowledge, which Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni describes as “opening up to mosaic epistemologies and ecologies of knowledges” (884). We posit that a “hidden transcripts” approach to material on and from the colonial period contributes to epistemological decolonization, as it unveils and amplifies voices suppressed by colonial power asymmetry.
2James Scott, in his book Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), presents the concept of “hidden transcripts” as the undercurrents that live beneath and challenge the public transcripts of the powerful. He argues that studying the hidden transcripts “uncovers contradictions, tensions, and immanent possibilities” of the power dynamics between the dominating and dominated groups, as captured in his question: “How do we study power relations when the powerless are often obliged to adopt a strategic pose in the presence of the powerful and when the powerful may have an interest in overdramatizing their reputation and mastery?” (Scott 1990, xii). Archival sources in situations of glaring power asymmetries, like colonialism, contain predominantly “public transcripts,” which, Scott posits, are performances that serve to maintain existing power relations and therefore primarily make the voices of the dominant actors visible, hence the caution that “even close readings of historical and archival evidence tend to favor a hegemonic account of power relations” (xii). These power dynamics make it difficult to document traces of the colonized subaltern in texts and other statements, as the Cameroonian Germanist David Simo posited in his 2014 essay “Wie der Subaltern spricht” (in English, How the Subaltern Speaks) posited. It is only by searching beneath the surface, actively looking for hints of what might be hidden, suppressed, and ignored, that the voices and stories of the dominated become unveiled.
3Since Scott published his work in 1990, a wealth of publications about the German colonial period have focused on recovering and moving center stage the voices and actions of formerly colonized peoples (Deutsch 2006; Morlang 2008; Moyd 2014; Pesek 2005; Pesek 2010; Pugach 2012; Rockel 2006). The Kiswahili-language Tanzanian archive has been made accessible through translations of texts composed during the colonial period (Mtui 1958; Mnyampala 1995) and Tanzanian historians have deepened our understanding of the history of the country (Kirey 2023; Kimambo, Maddox, and Nyanto 2017). But many gaps remain, especially in terms of perspectives from socioeconomically vulnerable members of East African society, including those dominated by the Swahili elite. Literary fiction provides a specific tool for recovering these kinds of voices, by drawing on historical sources but also by practicing what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” a writing practice that is grounded in a critical reading of the archive and uses the “capacities of the subjunctive” to imagine lost and latent possibilities (Hartman 2008, 11; Hartman 2019, xiii–xv). While Hartman focuses on real, not invented characters (Hartman 2008, 12; Hartman 2019, xiv), her proposed approach to imagining the histories of those not represented in the archive can also be applied to engaging with the trajectory of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s fiction. Critical fabulations, as Lauren Guilmette argues, “throw into crisis authoritative accounts” (Guilmette 2023, 441), thereby having the same potential as hidden transcripts, that of contradicting the public transcripts (Scott 1990, 5).
4Gurnah’s critical approach, as we will show in our discussion of Paradise (1994) and Afterlives (2020), bears the potentiality of capturing and restoring the humanity of those lost in the archive, through critical fabulations. Yet, Gurnah not only writes back at the colonial archive; he also writes back at the Swahili elite that voiced its lament about the loss of sovereignty and power as a result of German colonialism in a wide range of genres that were composed during the colonial period. Gurnah thus provides points of view that are missing from available historical material, including both the German colonial archive and texts that were written in Kiswahili and reflected, for the most part, the vantage point of the Swahili elite. This two-pronged approach toward making visible the hidden transcripts of colonized subalterns and their descendants brings to life a multivocal universe that speaks to the lived reality under colonial rule.
5Before we delve more deeply into the analysis of Gurnah’s novels, we provide a brief discussion of the writings of the Swahili elite, in order to acknowledge the Kiswahili archive Gurnah was able to draw on, and also to identify key topoi of the critique of German colonialism, as voiced in some of these texts. We then focus on central themes of Gurnah’s approach toward centering the voices of East African subalterns. We end our analysis with an assessment of the impact of Gurnah’s interventions on our understanding of the German colonial period in East Africa (1885-1918).
6Let us first consider the literary culture to which the texts that were authored by the Swahili elite belong. In addition to a rich oral culture, East Africa maintained written traditions long before European colonization. The Arabic script served not only commercial and religious purposes but also cultural production, linking communities around the Indian Ocean. Kiswahili literary texts were initially written in Arabic script. One of the oldest preserved manuscripts in Swahili is Utendi wa Tambuka, also known as Chuo cha Herkal, by Mwengo wa Athumani, and is dated 1728 (Knappert 1958). The legendary figure Liyongo is central to oral traditions developed between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries and later transmitted in various poetic genres (Liyongo Working Group 2004).
7Kiswahili-language texts that address the German colonial period in East Africa thus draw on established oral and written forms. These texts encompass different genres, including fiction (poetry, narrative texts) and non-fiction (autobiographies, travelogues, documents). Many texts from before and during the colonial period – initially mostly written in Arabic script – tend to be attributed to European ethnographers, linguists, and missionaries, who recorded or transcribed them. Among these are Johann Ludwig Krapf, Karl and Lorenz Tuschek, John W. T. Allen, George W. Bateman, Carl Gotthilf Büttner, Carl Meinhof, Ernst Dammann, Jan Knappert, Edward Steere, B. D. Copland, Carl Velten, and Hans Zache. The Swahili authors and informants of the texts, while they played a key role in the creation and transmission of the cultural material, are often left invisible.
- 1 These and other travel accounts were published in the original Kiswahili and in German translation (...)
8However, we do know the Swahili authors of a good number of texts, many of whom interacted with the German colonizers and their scientific cultural entourage, and some of their texts play an important role in Gurnah’s novels. Most of these intertexts that are identifiable, primarily in Paradise, are travelogues. The most important example is the autobiography of Hamed bin Muhammad el-Murjebi’s Maisha ya Hamed bin Muhammed el Murjebi yaani Tippu Tip: kwa maneno yake mwenyewe [Life of Hamed bin Muhammed el Murjebi also known as Tippu Tip: in his own words], which provides much inspiration for the setting, characters, and themes of the novel (Muhamed el-Murjebi 1902-1903). As James Hodapp has shown, other key intertexts are Salim bin Abakari’s “Safari Yangu ya Urusi na ya Siberia” [My Journey to Russia and Siberia], a late nineteenth-century travelogue that recounts the author’s travels as a servant with a German officer, and Selemani bin Mwenye Chande’s “Safari Yangu ya Bara Afrika” [My Journey Up-Country in Africa] (Hodapp 2015). Gurnah is surely also familiar with Salim bin Abakari’s “Safari yangu ya Nyassa waqati bwana Major von Wissmann alipopeleka stima katika juto la Nyassa” [My journey to Nyasa when Major Von Wissman took the train to Lake Nyasa] and “Safari yangu ya Ulaya toka Daressalama hatta Berlin” [My journey to Europe from Dar es Salaam to Berlin].1
9Other intertexts are less clearly identifiable, and here we want to focus specifically on the genre of historiographic poetry, which includes elements of fiction and non-fiction (Miehe et al. 2002, 31–43). An anthology edited by Gudrun Miehe, Katrin Bromber, Said Khamis, and Ralf Grosserhode has made available a rich corpus of these poems from the German colonial period through translations of the Kiswahili and German materials into English (Miehe et al. 2002). Information about the authors of the poems differs in its depth; in some cases, plenty of details are known about their lives, in others we only have their names, and in some cases, the poems remain anonymous. But for the most part it can be safely stated that the authors of the poems belonged to the educated Swahili elite (Miehe et al. 2002, 89–94).
- 2 Bromber refers to a polarized 1970s debate at Dar es Salaam University over the relevance of the Sw (...)
10The value of the poetry – particularly the relevance of its commentary on German colonization – has been questioned by earlier critics who argue that its mediation by Europeans significantly shaped, and inflected, its content, and that their authors were effectively subservient to the colonizers (Miehe et al. 2002, 87).2 And indeed, specifically the praise poetry dedicated to German colonial administrators and officers seems to be entirely in the service of those celebrated in the poems; an alternative reading, however, might attribute the counterfactual glorification of German colonizers to irony and sarcasm, especially when performed or read to East African audiences (Miehe et al. 2002, 379–480; Abdilatif Abdalla in Biersteker 1996, 148). Other scholars have placed central topoi covered in the corpus of poetry into relevant Kiswahili literary traditions (Bromber 2003). Another reading of these poetic texts finds the poetry valuable in terms of the insights it provides into the elite’s self-understanding as waungwana, a term used to describe “free and culturally refined urban Muslims” (Burton 2022, 246). The idea of waungwana is especially poignant in contrast to the washenzi of the interior, which refers to both non-Muslim and non-urban Africans who were considered to be “uncivilized” according to this binary. (As we will see, Gurnah’s novels comment on this binary, and allow the reader to engage with its complexity.) As Burton argues in his assessment of the poetry under discussion, “German colonial conquest shook the very foundations of some, yet not all, of these self-images” (2022, 246), and the historiographic poetry, among other texts, pays tribute to the elite’s lament of the loss of sovereignty.
- 3 For a critical discussion and close reading of this text, along with another historiographic poem f (...)
11To illustrate how these poems provide valuable insight into the elite’s view of colonial East Africa, we want to draw attention to three poems which comment on, among other topics, the changing nature of sovereignty, governance, and power. “Utenzi wa Vita vya Wadachi Kutamalaki Mrima, 1307 A.H.” by Hemedi bin Abdallah el-Buhriy is an extensive historical poem that vividly portrays the process of colonization in 632 stanzas (Miehe et al. 2002, 118–88; see also 90 on the author).3 This epic poem was known orally among poets, preserved by the el-Buhriy family, and only published in the 1950s (Miehe et al. 2002, 96). It describes, in chronological order, the role of German traders, treaty negotiations, warfare, and the eventual defeat. Strong criticism of the Germans is expressed through a moving lament for the loss of power and cultural identity:
Kilwa na Dari-’sSalama / kuna Wazungu nakama / mtu hapati kusema / nti wamezizuia.
In Kilwa and Dar es Salaam, / Europeans were too many. / Nobody dares to speak out. / They held the country. (Miehe et al. 2002, 144)
12The poet laments painful aspects of life under occupation, where German forces overwhelm, silence, and thus, control, the local population. Another example is “Utungo wa Habari ya Mrima” (in English, Poem about News from the Coast), by an unknown author, which initially seems to be written in the tradition of a praise poem but clearly criticizes German colonial rule. After stating outright in the first stanza that the poem will praise the emperor (“Nimsifu sulutani”), the second stanza provides more details in this regard:
Kaisari Wilhelmu / ni sultani azimu, / ana na nyingi kaumu /kuhesabu sikadiri.
[Indeed] Kaiser Wilhelm / is a great wonderful king. / He has also his people behind him, / so many and innumerable. (Miehe et al. 2002, 113)
13As in the first example, the large number of Germans is an aspect relevant to understanding German power. Stanza 3 of the poem focuses on the wealth of Berlin’s inhabitants, which is followed by a description of the darkness of the city in stanza 4:
nyumba zilivosungana / huona giza mchana, / mtu hapati kunena / kwa wingi wa askari.
Houses there stand close together / that one sees darkness in daytime, / there’s no moment to utter a word / before so many of these soldiers. (Miehe et al. 2002, 113)
14Here, the effect of the colonizers’ wealth, suffocating darkness, and military domination engenders the population’s speechlessness and silence. As the poem describes the dark energies of the city of Berlin, the theme of speechlessness is extended to the German population, a move that allows for a possible comparison of German and East African people, both living under an oppressive imperial rule.
15Another example is “Vita na Hassan bin Omari” (The War Against Hassan bin Omari), by Mwalim Mbaraka bin Shomari – originally published in Velten (1918) – a poet about whom little is known (Miehe et al. 2002, 91):
nawahubiri wenzangu / hii ezi ya Wazungu
[…]
mwenyi lake ana lake / hataki la mwenzi wake
[. . .]
zimeondoka heshima / kwa watu wa kimrima; / hatunalo la kusema / kwa kuchelea hatari.
I’m telling you, my friends, / this is the era of the Europeans.
[. . .]
This is a world of personal interest / don’t rely on your neighbour.
[. . .]
No more respect / for the coastal people. / We have nothing to say / for fear of repercussions. (Miehe et al. 2002, 302–303)
16These lines are particularly powerful in how the poet specifies distinct dimensions of the impact of colonization. Not only does the poetic voice acknowledge the loss of sovereignty (“this is the era of the Europeans,” “we have nothing to say”), but it also recognizes that the new economic and social order is based on the centrality of the individual. “Mwenyi lake ana lake” literally means “everybody for themselves,” which signifies ethical, social, and economic principles that stand in sharp contrast to notions of personhood, social organization, and ownership that are rooted in communal thinking (Rettová 2020). The loss of “heshima,” the Kiswahili word for respect, captures the devastating consequences of colonial subjugation in terms of the loss of control over resources and cultural identity (Iliffe 1969).
17As illustrated here (however briefly), the Swahili elite voiced their complaints about their loss of sovereignty, power, and agency through historiographic poems and other genres. Missing in the archive – and the scholarly discussion of these poems to date – are the voices of those who were without representation, even before the German colonizer arrived. Gurnah draws on the extant corpus of Kiswahili writing, directly and indirectly, and in addition his novels introduce the viewpoints of the socioeconomically weaker members of East African society. He invites his readers to engage with the lives of those East Africans whose transcripts are hidden in the archive, by using the tool of critical fabulation.
18Paradise and Afterlives are set in occupied Deutsch-Ostafrika, present-day Tanzania, and narrate the stories of socioeconomically marginalized children, men, and women, whose lives were disrupted by colonialism, from their perspective. Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents” (The Nobel Prize 2021, n/p). He also received praise for his decentering of European history as “a structural decision that is also potent” (Mengiste 2020). This “decentering” is an aspect of epistemological decolonization termed by Dipesh Chakrabarty as “provincialising Europe” (1993), explained in the words of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o as “moving the centre” (1993), which involves discontinuing the pedestalization of European approaches in science and knowledge, thereby creating room for other ways of knowing and interrogation (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018, 17). Epistemological decolonization, as we see it, involves a sensitivity to exclusionary tendencies of narratives in situations of power asymmetry. In Paradise and Afterlives, Gurnah brings to the fore characters who, due to their socioeconomic position in society, were disregarded by both the European colonizers and the Swahili elite. By so doing, he unveils the nuances and facets of power and oppression.
19East African society at the time of German colonialism was multiethnic and multireligious, and its stratification included various forms of dependency. Gurnah sketches this complex society in ways that correct the reductive trajectory of racializing colonial discourse (Griffiths 2012, 309) by illuminating economic and social relations between African, Arab, Indian, and European peoples; between Muslims, Christians, and Hindus; between coastal Swahili and peoples of the hinterland and the interior; between men and women; between free and unfree individuals; and between colonizers and colonized individuals. He engages the broad cultural horizons of Islamic, Indian Ocean, and indigenous African civilizations, and most importantly, he guides the lens to focus on practices of socioeconomic interaction and material conditions. Deploying an approach that resonates with Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation” (2019; 2008), he allows his readers to experience the German colonial period through the eyes of socioeconomically vulnerable members of society – the subaltern –, and makes them aware of the oppression that people from the interior, in particular, but also lower-class Muslims suffered at the hands of the Swahili elite as well as German colonizers. A closer look at subaltern characters that play a key role in Paradise and Afterlives elucidates how the author centers the experience of socioeconomically marginalized East Africans. We then turn to central themes of the novels, including the humanization of East Africans; the description of the complex social stratification of society; and the various linguistic and behavioral strategies that East Africans deployed to navigate existing challenges that were exacerbated by colonial occupation. Overall, our discussion shows how Gurnah’s novels send messages that contradict public transcripts.
20In Paradise and Afterlives, the characters of Yusuf and Hamza, along with their relatives and close companions, provide insight into the lives of East Africans whose perspectives are missing from the colonial German as well as the local Kiswahili archive. Gurnah’s novels give voice to the subaltern, the marginalized, for some of whom the German colonizer in fact represented an opportunity to break away from established patterns of oppression. That is the story in Paradise, which focuses on Yusuf, who was pawned by his father to the caravan and slave trader “Uncle Aziz” as a rehani, a “pawn,” when the father could not pay his debt to the merchant. Over the course of the novel, Yusuf becomes aware of his social situation as an indentured servant; this awareness culminates in his running off to join the German army, which entered his town searching for recruits. Yusuf chooses opportunity, as so many powerless individuals have been and are forced to do, for lack of better options.
21In 1969, the Tanzanian historian G. C. K. Gwassa called this kind of strategy available to East Africans within the colonial context the “mercenary technique,” one of the four “African reactions and resistance to German intervention” (Gwassa 1969, 86). Berman suggested, however, that we can interpret Yusuf’s choice to join the German army as a deliberate decision that reflects his (limited) agency and one that he hoped would result in an improvement of his situation. Drawing on historical research about the significant number of East Africans who, voluntarily and involuntarily, joined German services in East Africa (Morlang 2008; Moyd 2014; Pesek 2005; Pesek 2010; Pugach 2012), Berman showed that Gurnah’s novel challenges us to consider the reasons motivating the young man to join the German army as well as the possible consequences of his choice (Berman 2013). In this regard, Gurnah provides a nuanced answer to the question of East African collaboration with colonial powers in his compelling novel, which chronicles first the coming-of-age of Yusuf and then his eventual defection from the cultural context and social relations of his childhood and youth.
22In addition, and that is our focus here, Gurnah provides us with the story of Yusuf to understand more deeply the power dynamics between different players in coastal Tanzania. Yusuf’s parentage clearly associated him with the hinterland peoples, whom the Islamized and educated Swahili elite looks down upon. The hotel Yusuf’s father runs in the small town of Kawa, which is ambiguously positioned between coast and interior, serves as a stop for caravans on their way to the interior, and under the Germans “had become a boom town” (Gurnah 1994, 5). Yusuf recounts that, in an angry moment, his father described his mother as “the daughter of a hill tribesman from the back of Taita who lived in a smoky hut and wore stinking goatskin” (13). But even his father, who looks down upon the “uncivilized” peoples of the interior, the washenzi (6), and prefers Yusuf to “play with the children of the Indian storekeeper” (6) is associated with the washenzi: “Anyone with eyes could see that his mother must have been a savage and that he himself was not blessed with prosperity” (14). Given this parentage, Yusuf is thus associated with the peoples of the interior, which points to the stratifications that existed in East African society, some of which were amplified by colonialism. Like the Omanis and Portuguese before them, the Germans further uprooted the balance of power between coastal and hinterland peoples and their economic networks, particularly as parts of the existing slavery and porterage systems were transformed into wage labor over the course of the nineteenth century (Sunseri 2002, 26–50).
23Throughout, Paradise allows the reader to engage with instances of the power dynamics between members of the coastal Swahili elite (waungwana), on the one hand, and the people from the interior (washenzi, in the derogatory Kiswahili parlance) and lower-class Muslims (some of whom had ties to the interior, while others were urban), on the other. By focalizing on the experience of Yusuf and his closest interlocutors, Gurnah privileges subaltern perspectives.
24In Afterlives, which picks up where Paradise ended and brings the events of World War I and its aftermath in East Africa to the readership, Gurnah similarly draws attention to the tensions between players of distinct social standing. He includes portrayals of a range of German characters, capturing brutal as well as more empathetic personalities, thus forestalling any simplistic binaries of good and evil. Again, he focalizes the narrative through various subaltern characters, most prominently Hamza, whose family and origins are left unknown. The reader meets Hamza at a point when the adolescent who “had lied about his age, claiming to be older than he was” (Gurnah 2022, 62) auditions to join the German colonial army, the Schutztruppe. His time with the German Schutztruppe during World War I and his reintegration into civilian life after the war take up a significant part of the novel.
- 4 For a discussion that provides insight into ongoing discussions of the status of the hamza, see Par (...)
25Most importantly, Hamza’s name itself contains the full weight of Gurnah’s project. In the Arabic alphabet, the letter hamza (Arabic ء) is a consonant that denotes the glottal stop /ʔ/. However, the hamza (spelled out in Arabic هَمْزَة) is not one of the original twenty-two letters of the early Arabic alphabet but was later introduced to represent this sound in writing. Naming one of the key characters of Afterlives “Hamza” most vividly expresses his project, namely to turn what used to be an undocumented sound into a letter of the alphabet. In other words, through the character of Hamza, Gurnah transforms the undocumented and unrepresented sounds, or voices, of the past into the written testimony of literature.4
26Other central characters of Afterlives who are in various subservient positions are also associated with the hinterland, the “uncivilized” areas, as opposed to the coastal space. Khalifa’s father is Indian from Gujarat, but his mother “was a countrywoman.” In order to ingratiate himself with his Indian relatives, “he loved to announce his lineage […] Yes, yes, my father was an Indian.” But “his complexion, his hair, his nose, all favored his African mother” (Gurnah 2022, 3). Ilyas and his sister Afiya were born in a small village, a few hours inland from the coast (26–29), and both experienced extreme poverty, servitude, and deprivation. As an eleven-year-old boy, Ilyas had been “kidnapped by a schutztruppe askari” but later been freed and raised in a German mission school, while also working on a coffee farm (24–25). Like Yusuf in Paradise, he later decides to join the Schutztruppe, this time voluntarily (47–48).
27In addition, Afterlives memorializes the scores of East Africans who worked for the Germans as soldiers (askari), irregular troops (ruga-ruga), and porters (wapagazi), and who wreaked havoc upon their own people but also inflicted tremendous suffering upon themselves:
The askari left the land devastated, its people starving and dying in the hundreds of thousands […]. The carriers died in huge numbers from malaria and dysentery and exhaustion, and no one bothered to count them. They deserted in sheer terror, to perish in the ravaged countryside. Later these events would be turned into stories of absurd and nonchalant heroics. (Gurnah 2022,100–101)
28Gurnah’s two novels draw attention to the lives of named and unnamed East Africans whose precarious situations before the German colonizers arrived made them vulnerable to new opportunities, but also new forms of abuse and exploitation under colonialism. Their stories were either distorted by or left out entirely from the German colonial archive, but also marginalized and perverted in the writings of the Swahili elite. By focalizing his narratives on the subaltern, Gurnah adds their hidden transcripts to the archive.
29Gurnah centers the Africans in his stories by thoroughly humanizing them as people who are living regular lives with basic human concerns and aspirations. They have a deep sense of kinship and fiercely love each other, as evidenced by the way Yusuf’s mother plays with him: “[S]he was always [...] picking him up, pinching his cheeks, giving him hugs and slobbery kisses” (Gurnah 1994, 12). They look out for each other, as Khalil does for his sister by choosing to stay on with the Seyyid even when he could have left (207). Ilyas, in Afterlives, cares for and protects his sister, Afiya, and does not give up the search until he finds her and removes her from the household of her aunt and uncle, who had been mistreating her (Gurnah 2022, 26–39). Although he leaves again to join the war, his friendship with Khalifa ensures that Afiya is cared for, even in his absence. Khalifa keeps his word to Afiya and rescues her from the abusive relatives upon receiving her cry for help (51–52), thus illustrating that kinship bonds extend beyond blood relations. Khalil, in Paradise, although brusque towards Yusuf, still teaches him how to adapt to his new life in the shop by giving him tips on handling customers (Gurnah 1994, 23) as well as showing him “how to lift the sacks without hurting himself” (29). This suggests that Khalil’s seeming abrasiveness with Yusuf is some kind of tough love to help him (Yusuf) come to terms with his circumstances. This nuanced portrayal of African individuals as compassionate and caring individuals, family members, and friends humanizes them in ways that are absent from the historical record and contradicts the othering of African people as uncivilized, which was used to justify colonization (Traore 2012; Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1998).
30Part of Gurnah’s humanization project comes through in his portrayal of Africans as people trying to live full and rich lives in the face of complications and disruptions that colonialism brought along. This fits into Hartman’s described goal of a “critical fabulation” narrative “to paint as full a picture of the [colonized] as possible” (2008, 11). By so doing, this narration brings forth stories about these characters as individuals, complete with emotions, desires, and weaknesses, rather than just as victims of colonial or other violence, given that the stories that exist in the colonial archive are “about the violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives, transformed [the dominated] into commodities and corpses, and identified them with names tossed-off as insults and crass jokes” (2). As such, we encounter Hamza, not only as a member of the Schutztruppe, but also as a passionate man, who uses his knowledge of German to translate Friedrich Schiller’s poems into Kiswahili, in order to woo Afiya (Gurnah 2022, 212–14). While it is easy to criticize Ilyas for leaving Afiya behind when he was a young child, his explanation of the circumstances leading to his departure leads us to sympathize with him as a human being who seeks a way out of pain and suffering (40–41). In Paradise, Khalil and Yusuf, despite their subaltern status as rehani, seem to take pride in their work in their master’s shop. Khalil appears to genuinely enjoy entertaining customers at the shop he serves; instead of taking offence when they make fun of his accent (which the reader may expect), he obliges them, “his eyes blazing with joy” (Gurnah 1994, 30), and as Yusuf observes, he (Khalil) “was happiest behind his shop counter, bantering with the customers in his heavy accent” (50). Khalil and Yusuf also create moments of pleasure in their lives. They take advantage of Uncle Aziz’s absence to tour the town during the Friday two-hour break, and “spent the afternoon strolling, laughing at everything they dared” (40). They bought candy, joined a game of Kipande and scored several times (39–41), and even joined the celebration of an Indian wedding. Such stories humanize the characters who are living under conditions of oppression and try to make the best of their circumstances.
31One aspect of being human involves the creation of ingroups and outgroups, which results in complex social relations. Gurnah gives insights into some of the complex social dynamics that defined pre-colonial Africa, from the perspective of the least powerful members of society. In Afterlives, we get glimpses of a splintered society, in which Africans use phenotypical and linguistic features to identify each other, an indication of existing ethnic groupings and divisions, echoing Thomas Spear’s argument that “ethnicity was not simply an ‘invention’ of the colonial period, but drew on older we-group processes of inclusion and exclusion” (Spear 2003, 23). Hamza, during his time as an African volunteer in the colonial troops, identifies his fellow soldiers as “Wanyamwezi” because of their physical appearance: “Hamza thought [their language] was Kinyamwezi because that was what the men looked like to him. Their escort […] also looked to be Wanyamwezi” (Gurnah 2022, 56). Physical features were used in the construction of otherness, hence Hamza’s aversion to the “frightening deadpan face of the Nubi-Askari” (60), an example of a personal “hidden transcript,” to which the narrator gives us access. Personal “hidden transcripts,” according to James Scott could be thoughts of rebellion, personal fantasies of revenge, and or imaginary speeches in which one puts one’s oppressor in their place, but they remain confined in the minds of the subordinates: “Such speeches may often remain a personal hidden transcript that may never find expression, even among close friends and peers” (Scott 1990, 8). Gurnah’s “critical fabulations” provide insight into the silently thought and felt hidden transcripts of individuals.
32In addition to the phenotypical features, religious and sociocultural differences greatly influence how Africans view each other, hence the persistent use of washenzi/savages by the coastal people in both books, to refer to those from the inland due to their faith and customs (Gurnah 1994, 6, 59, 18; 2022, 59, 120). In fact, one of the key markers of difference between the novels’ African characters is the distinction between “civilized” and “uncivilized” peoples. As Hamid explains to Yusuf, the waungwanas’ self-designation as “people of honor” is a God-given right, because of their faith: “We are honourable because we submit ourselves to the Creator, and understand and adhere to our obligations to Him” (Gurnah 1994, 100). In Afterlives, the binary is used by the African soldiers who have served longer in the German army to degrade their washenzi African recruits, who – like Hamza, Yusuf, and Ilyas – are tied to the coastal hinterland and interior, even though they may or may not be Muslim. It would seem that the proximity to the Europeans makes the experienced soldiers perceive themselves as (more) civilized, regardless of their ethnic belonging, hence their use of washenzi to refer to the new recruits (Gurnah 2022, 59).
33Language is also used as an indicator for belonging to the waungwana or washenzi among the African characters; their sentiments on languages, their use and users give insights into perceptions of linguistic capital and hierarchization typical of linguistic competition and conflict arising from the power asymmetry in the contact zones (Pratt 2012). Belonging to the waungwana and leaving the washenzi past behind may be evidenced by a speaker’s command of Arabic and Kiswahili. Yusuf, for example, receives advice from his friend Khalil to learn Arabic in order to gain favour with the powerful merchant Uncle Aziz (Gurnah 1994, 25). Yusuf observes how Hamid “accented his speech with Arabic words” so as to signal his affiliation with the waungwana (91). In addition to using language to indicate belonging to the powerful class, the African traders – just like the European missionaries and colonialists – recognized the social capital of language and exploited it to achieve their goals. As Uncle Aziz’s caravan approaches the unnamed lakeside town, Nyundo is sent ahead to break the ice with the sultan, because he (Nyundo) could speak the language of the people there and “it would be more courteous to address him [the sultan] in his own language first” (Gurnah 1994, 137). Despite the caravan’s view of the interior people as washenzi, the traders strategically use the less prestigious language of the lake town for emotive functions, similar to the colonial missionaries who saw the convincing power of local languages in evangelization, therefore encouraging translations that could lead to “conversions of mind, imagination, and soul” (Errington 2007, 96). Even among the communities with seeming linguistic homogeneity, aspects of language essentialism and superiority are also hinted at, as evidenced by Maimuna’s claim that the Kiswahili variant spoken on the island of Lamu is the purest version of Kiswahili on the coast (Gurnah 1994, 63). This linguistic discrimination contributes to the establishment of social hierarchies, which can still be observed today among societies on the East African coast, pitching speakers of “pure” (sanifu) Kiswahili against those who speak different varieties of Kiswahili.
- 5 “Translanguaging” departs from the traditional view of separate language systems in multilinguals t (...)
34In Paradise, the linguistic fluidity and flexibility of multilingual speakers become apparent through several of the subaltern characters, who use these competencies to advance their social standing. Khalil, for example, draws from his multilingual repertoire to develop syntactic structures that are described as “inspired as well as eccentric” (Gurnah 1994, 23) so as to strengthen his position in the Swahili-speaking society. “Translanguaging,”5 as this fluid movement through the linguistic repertoire of multilinguals is called, is the use of all resources, linguistic and otherwise, available to a multilingual person to communicate effectively. Instances of translanguaging in Gurnah’s novels makes it clear that this type of “language mixing” is an integral part of a multilingual society, as Sinfree Makoni and Pedzisai Mashiri postulate: “language mixing is therefore socially embedded in African historical and contemporary social experiences and uses of language” (2006, 82).
35“Hidden transcripts,” as argued, tell stories that have the potential to contradict public transcripts, because they uncover what lies beneath the public performances. An example of this can be found in Gurnah’s “critical fabulations” in Paradise, where Africans publicly display obedience and submission to the German colonial representatives. The reality, however, as unveiled by a glimpse into the personal “hidden transcripts” of the subordinate group (Scott 1990, 8–9), is that the Africans see the contradictions between what the colonial officers purport to stand for and what they actually do: although the Europeans present themselves as representatives of salvation and civilization, in the eyes of the locals they are corrupt, greedy, and ruthless, with an “appetite [that] has no limit or decency, like a plague of locusts. […] The first thing they build is a lock-up, then a church, then a market-shed so they can keep the trade under their eyes and then tax it” (Gurnah 1994, 72). The European is inhuman and unforgiving, despite the teachings of his religion, hence Simba Mwene’s remarks: “With us [Africans], if a culprit shows repentance we find it hard to punish him. […] But with the German it’s the opposite. The more severe the punishment, the more firm and unforgiving he is […] I think they like giving punishment” (115). Moreover, the Africans find colonialists physically repulsive, describing them as “skinless reptiles [who] have golden hair, like women or a very bad joke” (120). In Paradise, Yusuf is shocked by the ugliness and cruelty of the face of a German soldier:
The skin on his face was stretched tight and smooth, as if he had suffered burning or a disease. His smile was a fixed grimace of deformity. His teeth were exposed, as if the tightly stretched flesh on his face had already begun to rot and slough off round his mouth. It was the face of a cadaver, and Yusuf was shocked by its ugliness and its look of cruelty. (245)
36The narrator focalizes this observation through Yusuf and lets the reader partake in the young man’s perception of the German officer as an embodiment of violence, death, and decay. This could be read as a personal “hidden transcript” that unveils an act of resistance, as Yusuf dares look through the facade of power that the European officers carry, to see the weak and vulnerable human beneath, who is also suffering from the violence of colonialism, just like African soldiers, as Frantz Fanon argued in the chapter “On Violence,” that both the colonized and colonizer bear the brutality that sustains the colonial system (1963, 35–105). This vulnerability of the colonial troops is also unveiled by a hidden transcript of a conversation between two African soldiers, Julius and Hamza in Afterlives, which reveals that the German troops fear being ridiculed by the African soldiers. Julius says to Hamza, “yes, yes, they [the German troops] try to hush all this up because they are afraid we will laugh at them” (Gurnah 2022, 91). In moments like these, the insecurity of colonial authority is revealed; the colonizer is afraid of losing his godlike power over his subjects, which is why he intensifies violence as a cover – as exemplified by the behavior of the German colonial troops in the texts.
- 6 Similar to “shithead” or “arsehole.”
- 7 “Fulani” in Kiswahili refers to a random entity, so mtu fulani (some random person, someone), kitu (...)
37A “hidden transcripts” reading of Afterlives and Paradise gives insights into strategies the subordinates apply to navigate the prevailing power asymmetry, many of which include some forms of self-preservation. As Hamza’s German improves and he understands the contempt the German officer has for the locals, he pretends to be deaf and hopes to be invisible to the officer. When the officer insults him and his “childish language” (Kiswahili), Hamza loudly responds “Jawohl, herr Oberleutnant,” but says “Scheißer”6 to himself, thereby unveiling his subversive resistance (Gurnah 2022, 95). Soldiers embrace other forms of covert resistance, which include training themselves to ignore the humiliating abuse and insults of the colonial officers and the dehumanization of colonialism. Hamza “learned not to look” so as to curb anger and fear, and not to acknowledge the insolent and intrusive inspection of the German officer (86). Another form of self-preservation is seen in the fluid identities the African soldiers adopt. A Mnyamwezi soldier in Afterlives embraces the name “Fulani” that his merchant boss gave him because he [the merchant] could not be bothered to remember the Mnyamwezi’s actual name, even though, as the narrator reveals, it reduces him to a vague entity, a “so and so” (66).7 Many African soldiers took up German names for themselves (120). By embracing these new identities, the soldiers may have sought to protect their true selves from what they have morphed into by serving in the Schutztruppe. For the European officers, the obscurity of the African soldiers reflects the insignificance of African peoples at the lower end of the power pyramid, with the most socioeconomically vulnerable at the bottom.
38The African bodies, therefore, bear the brunt of colonial repression, suffering its direct as well as indirect violence, similar to, for example, Audre Lorde’s thesis of the body as a site of (political) struggle (2017). Sustaining, healing, replenishing and even indulging life – and the body, therefore, becomes an act of resistance. Such resistance can be read in Afiya, who despite the multiple losses she endures, grows into a kijana (young woman) under the guardianship of Bi Asha and Baba Khalifa. Notwithstanding the shortages caused by the war, Afiya, her family, and friends live on, worry about delayed marriages, and even celebrate the Muslim festival Idd with gifts (Gurnah 2022, 111–17) – acts of care, which Lorde argues embody resistance. Following Lorde’s thoughts, we argue that by surviving and living their lives in the face of the hardship exacerbated by colonialism, the subalterns in Paradise and Afterlives exercise a silent form of resistance which is made visible through “critical fabulation.”
39Mzee Hamdani, the gardener in Paradise, highlights another form of resistance, in his answer to Khalil’s question as to why he did not take up the mistress’s offer of freedom:
“They offered me freedom as a gift. She did. Who told her she had it to offer? […] They can lock you up, put you in chains, abuse all your small longings, but freedom is not something they can take away. When they have finished with you, they are still as far away from owning you as the day you were born.” (Gurnah 1994, 223–24)
40Mzee Hamdani’s response refers to a notion of innate autonomy that cannot be taken away, not even under the conditions of slavery. Hamza’s statement in Afterlives that “nobody owns anyone body and spirit” (Gurnah 2022, 230) reinforces the African conceptualization of freedom, which asserts itself precisely where overt resistance is impossible. These scenes can also be read as a commentary on colonial subjugation, whose violence captures the body but not necessarily the spirit.
41Gurnah, via forms of “critical fabulation” that imagine “hidden transcripts,” thus allows his readers to appreciate various forms of self-preservation and resistance, as practiced by the subaltern.
42Reading Paradise and Afterlives through the lenses of “hidden transcripts” and “critical fabulation” allows us to acknowledge Gurnah’s novels as acts of epistemic repair. These narratives shift the readers’ understanding of colonial East Africa, as represented in the German colonial archive but also the writings of the Swahili elite, by centering the voices and lives of socioeconomically marginalized characters. Gurnah makes visible the “hidden transcripts” of the subaltern: their calculations, strategies of resistance, compromises, resentments, and hopes that unfolded alongside the reality of domination.
43Across both novels, Yusuf, Hamza, Afiya, Ilyas, and others inhabit multifaceted positions shaped by class, religion, language, geography, and gender. Gurnah’s careful attention to these layered stratifications challenges reductive binaries of colonizer and colonized, collaboration and resistance. Choices that appear baffling, even objectionable, such as joining the Schutztruppe, adopting new names, performing obedience, or cultivating emotional and familial bonds under duress, emerge instead as historically situated strategies of survival and defiance. In rendering these strategies intelligible, the novels shed light on the limited yet potentially liberating agency available under conditions of extreme power asymmetry. Gurnah humanizes subaltern East Africans as thinking and feeling subjects, whose love and care for each other become modes of resistance in their own right. Such portrayals challenge colonial public transcripts that dehumanized Africans and expose the fragility of imperial authority.
44Paradise and Afterlives function as literary archives that inscribe subaltern experience into the historical record, via “critical fabulations.” By transforming silenced lives into narrative presence, Gurnah renders East African social worlds in their moral, social, and political complexity, offering literature as a vital site of the decolonialization of knowledge.
45In an article in which Gurnah critically discusses the construction of African identity in the writings of prominent writers from the continent and the diaspora, he warns against essentialism and racial self-righteousness as treacherous ways of homogenizing African histories, which differ so greatly across time and space. He alerts the reader to the vexed process of history writing: “When I started to write […] I understood that the idea of the past which had become the legitimate African narrative of our times, would require the silencing of other narratives that were necessary to my understanding of history and reality.” He elaborates by stating that he “understood also that history, far from being a rational discourse, is successively rewritten and fought over to support a particular argument, and that, in order to write, you had to find a way through this competing babble” (Gurnah 2002, 16). In this regard, Gurnah’s novels indeed offer the reader ways “through this competing babble,” through an archive that is polyvocal and includes the perspectives of large segments of East African society during the period of German, and later, British colonialism.
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