What’s Worth Reading, January 2022.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise, Bloomsbury, 1994, 2004.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, has published 10
novels to date: Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988), Dottie (1990), Paradise
(1994), Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (2001), Desertion (2005), The Last Gift (2011),
Gravel Heart (2017), and Afterlives (2020). All are published by Bloomsbury, and all are
now in print (some of the earlier ones were not at the time of the award). The covers designed
by Greg Heinimann (seven of the ten in the copies I have) are beautiful. I read them in
reverse order, then from first to last, and found something to enjoy in all of them. I
recommend that you read Paradise first if you are not familiar with Gurnah’s work, so it's my
primary focus here. I'll follow up by reviewing Afterlives next.

Gurnah was born in Zanzibar in 1948, moved to the UK in the 1960s at the time of the
Zanzibar Revolution, and spent most of his working life as Professor of English and
Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, retiring in 2017. Memory of Departure, the
first novel, is set principally between a cockroach-infested slum in a coastal East African
town north of Dar es Salaam, and a fine merchant’s mansion in Nairobi. It relates the journey
of its protagonist and narrator, Hassan Omar, from the one to the other and beyond,
presenting them initially as contrasting visions of hell and heaven, but disclosing later that
cruelty and oppression are equally at the heart of both. The second, Pilgrims Way, is set in an
unnamed English cathedral city identifiable as Canterbury, in a unspecified year identifiable
as 1976: it refers repeatedly to the England-West Indies test series of that year, singling out
for special mention the ball with which Michael Holding yorked England captain Tony Greig
in the second innings of the Fifth Test at the Oval (a good choice, and you can find it on
Youtube). It recounts the relationship between Daud, who has left Zanzibar and eventually
found work as a hospital theatre orderly, and a student nurse, Catherine Mason, and ends with
his first visit to the cathedral and a new insight into the meaning the pilgrimage he has
undertaken. The third, Dottie, has a female protagonist, as the title indicates: Dottie
Badoura Fatma Balfour (described once as slender, once as slight, and four times as
scrawny): born in Leeds, living in London, and responsible after the death of her mother
Bilkisu (Sharon) for her brother Hudson and sister Sophie. Dottie, working in a food-packing
factory and sustained by a love of literature that starts with an abridged version of David
Copperfield given to her by her social worker, decides in due course that it is time ‘she
stopped behaving like a mother hen and put some order in her own life’ (102). It takes her a
while, but in the end she does so, haltingly and precariously, acquiring successively a house,
marketable skills and a better job - becoming, as it happens, a model neoliberal subject. This
is by far the longest of Gurnah’s novels, and completes what I regard as Gurnah's
apprenticeship in the art of writing fiction.

Paradise is important because it establishes a point of reference for Gurnah's fiction: the
highly Islamised and Arab-influenced Kiswahili-speaking area of East Africa broadly running
across contemporary Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, including Zanzibar, in the period before
European colonisation. Zanzibar is geographically as well as thematically central, because the
world of the novels reaches out from coastal East Africa and its offshore islands into the
Indian Ocean, to include the Arabian peninsula, Persia, India and China. Longstanding
Omani connections led to the establishment of Zanzibar as the capital of the Sultanate of
Oman in the 1830s, and as an independent sultanate from 1856. Zanzibar at this point was a
major trading entrepot for slaves (a trade only gradually eliminated) and ivory (the world's
largest exporter in the 1860s) from the interior of Africa, in exchange for cotton goods and
spices, some locally produced. The defining feature of this world was trade, and the key
figure was the merchant, personified in Paradise in the character of the 'rich and renowned'
Aziz. Long-distance overland trade took the form of 'caravans' featuring human porterage (as
animals were vulnerable to the tsetse fly), often away in the interior for months or years on
end. Paradise is precise in its symbolic framing, opening with the sighting of two Europeans
on a railway platform, and closing with the arrival outside Aziz's coastal mansion of a
military column made up of African troops (askaris) led by a German officer. This is the
'protection force', the Schutztruppe, that figures prominently in his latest novel, Afterlives.
The background here is the arrival in 1885 of the German East India Company, the creation
of German East Africa and the Schutztruppe in 1891, and the building of a railway line from
Tanga, on the coast, turning north and reaching Moshi, on the edge of Mount Kilimanjaro, by
1911. It is the young protagonist, Yusuf, who sees the European couple on the railway
platform, and at the end sees the Schutztruppe arrive. He lives at an intermediate stop on the
line an overnight journey away from the coast, where his father has been running a four-bed
hotel for four years, and Aziz (known to him as 'Uncle' Aziz), comes by regularly on his
various trading expeditions to the interior. The story begins when Yusuf's father pawns him,
aged eleven, to Aziz as a rehani, a pledge against his debts, and Aziz takes him away. The
action of the novel takes place over six years, and centres on a trading expedition or 'caravan'
in which Yusuf participates. It reflects the end of Arab/Omani hegemony and largely Indian-
funded long-distance trade in the wake of European (specifically German) settlement (a
history recounted by Aziz at some length at a mid-point in the story, 130-33). Networks of
trade loom large, and when the action is not focused on the caravans themselves it follows
Yusuf as he first works in the shop attached to Aziz's mansion on the coast, then spends time
in a smaller trading post further down the line. The novel is not about the political economy
of long-distance trade, of course, any more than Dickens’ novels are about poverty in
Victorian England, or Melville’s Moby Dick is about whaling in the nineteenth century, or
come to that Conrad's Heart of Darkness is about the ivory trade. But its moral economy is
one in which trade, associated here with 'Islamic' values, brings civilisation, and the portrayal
of the merchant, in the person of Aziz, is central to this.

The story is largely told through the eyes of Yusuf, and Khalil (another rehani in the shop,
six years older, who introduces Yusuf to his duties), Mohammed Abdalla (the mnyapara wa
safari, or 'foreman of the journey', who organizes and runs the expeditions, and 'Simba'
Mwene, initially his deputy, are prominent among the minor characters. We first meet Aziz
when he visits Yusuf's father:

Uncle Aziz gave off a strange and unusual odour, a mixture of hide and perfume, and gums
and spices, and another less definable smell which made Yusuf think of danger. His habitual
dress was a thin, flowing kanzu of fine cotton and a small crotcheted cap pushed back on his
head. With his refined airs and his polite, impassive manner, he looked more like a man on a
late afternoon stroll or a worshipper on the way to evening prayers than a merchant who had
picked his way past bushes of thorn and nests of vipers spitting poison. Even in the heat of
arrival, amid the chaos and disorder of tumbled packs, surrounded by tired and noisy porters,
and watchful, sharp-clawed traders, Uncle Aziz managed to look calm and at ease' (3).

Aziz is devout, insistent on social hierarchy, respectful of others, and always in command of
his emotions, and the moral order he upholds and that leads Yusuf into servitude is socially
accepted. 'Yusuf did not understand all the details,' we learn, 'but he could not see that it was
wrong to work for Uncle Aziz in order to pay off his father's debts' (24); and Khalil tells him:
'He's a good man, the seyyid [master]. He doesn't beat you or anything like that. If you show
him respect he'll look after you and make sure you don't go wrong. All your life' (25). Aziz
himself lives in accordance with a single purpose. So, when Yusuf later asks where the
caravan is going, Khalil replies: 'To trade with the savages. This is the seyyid's life. This is
what he's here to do. He goes to the wild people and sells them all this merchandise and then
he buys from them. He buys anything ... except slaves, even before the government said it
must stop. Trading in slaves is dangerous work, and not honourable' (34). And when
Mohammed Abdalla tells Yusuf that he will be going on the next trip, he tells him: 'You'll
come and trade with us, and learn the difference between the ways of civilisation and the
ways of the savage' (52). Incidentally, European claims that the caravans depended on slave
labour were mistaken - whether managed by African or Arab traders, the caravan system
depended primarily on free wage labourers (Rockel, 2000, 2006).

Trade is presented as a calling, in a religious sense. Abdalla expands later, 'This is what we're
on this earth to do. ... To trade. We go to the driest deserts and the darkest forests, and care
nothing whether we trade with a king or a savage, or whether we live or die. It's all the same
to us. You'll see some of the places we pass, where people have not yet been brought to life
by trade, and they live like paralysed insects. There are no people more clever than traders,
no calling more noble. It is what gives us life' (119). Once the expedition descends from the
slopes of Kilimanjaro to the plateau, Yusuf suffers from the dust, grit, insect bites and thorns,
while despite everything, Aziz 'managed to look untroubled, said his prayers five times a day
at the appointed hours, and almost never wavered from his appearance of amused
detachment' (117). When difficulties ensue or problems are raised, his habitual response is
'Trust in God' (120, 123, 125, 159); when a porter dies after being savaged in the night by a
hyena, he says prayers for him and reads the Ya Sin for the dead before moving on (125), as
he does when others die along the way. When they come across a village that has been
attacked by raiders, leaving numerous dead, he agrees over the protests of Abdalla, who
wishes to move on swiftly for fear of disease, that they should give them a proper burial
before proceeding (127-8). And when a 'sultan' (a local leader recognised by the Sultan of
Zanzibar) briefly impounds their goods but offers, moved by mercy, to spare their lives, Aziz
gives him short shrift: 'Mercy belongs to God,' the merchant said. 'Tell him that. Tell him
carefully. Mercy belongs to God. It is not for him to give or withdraw. Mercy belongs to
God. ... Tell him that if it is our lives he wants he can have them. They are worthless. But if
we are to have our lives we also demand our goods. How far would we get if we were unable
to trade? Tell him we will not go without our goods' (162).

There is plenty of humour in the book, largely of a 'Shakespearian' kind in which the lower
orders indulge in bawdy remarks and insult each other's cultural practices, religious beliefs,
proclivities, and so on, and Gurnah, who is widely read and familiar with literary
conventions and theories of all kinds, has plenty of fun of his own, but the dominant tone all
the same is one of foreboding, and regret for a way of life that is coming to an end. This final
caravan is attended by ill omens and dogged by bad luck, and as it makes its slow way home
a weariness comes over Aziz, while the myanpara, suffering from a previous shoulder injury
and a beating received on this trip, has lost his vigour and ability to command. 'Now that the
European has arrived [in the interior] he will take the whole land', Aziz declares (172);
'Everywhere they went they heard stories of the Germans, who had forbidden the people to
ask for tribute, and had even hanged some people for reasons no one understood' (176):

'Your caravan trade is finished,' the Sultan of Mkalikali said. These Mdachi [Germans]!
They have no mercy. They have told us they don't want you here because you will make us
slaves. I tell them no one will make us slaves. No one! We used to sell slaves to these people
from the coast. We know them, and we're not afraid of them'.
'The Europeans and the Indians will take everything now,' the merchant said, making the
Sultan smile' (176).

The bedraggled troop arrives home gaunt, hungry and in rags, and the merchant leads them in
prayers, 'asking God to forgive them for any wrong they may have done' (177).

The novel does not end here, and I do not want to suggest that Gurnah presents an entirely
elegiac and uncritical picture of 'pre-European colonial' East Africa under Arab and Islamic
hegemony. As the story unfolds from this point Yusuf comes to question his dependency, and
the oppressive underside of 'paradise' for women in particular is made clear. But the
European colonisers are presented throughout as amoral, ruthless and barely human, and as
cynically making the prevalence of slavery a pretext for their assumption of control, so there
is a persistent contrast throughout between the two successive patterns of colonisation - a
pattern that is accentuated by the hovering dialogue with and implicit critique of
Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

But to make too much of that obvious point of reference would be to miss the core values at
play here. The connection between Islam and trade and the high standing of merchants as
both traders and carriers of Islamic teaching are basic points of reference in the relevant
literature. Just as important is the significance of trade - doux commerce - commerce as a
civilising force - in Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and many others. My hypothesis, to be
explored in relation to the later novels in my next review, is that the central value that
Gurnah's fiction reflects, and the source of its moral power, is liberalism across the board, in
relation to trade, politics, and the rights of the individual.

References

Rockel, Stephen. 2000. 'A Nation of porters' : the Nyamwezi and the Labour market in
nineteenth-century Tanzania', Journal of African History, 41, 173-195.
Rockel, Stephen. 2006. Carriers of Culture: Labor on the Road in Nineteenth-Century East
Africa, Heinemann, 2006.