The Catalyst Press book cover states that Ndlovu’s novel The History of Man is ‘set in a southern African country that is never named’. This is true, neither Rhodesia nor Zimbabwe is ever mentioned. But every other place in this novel can easily be located in what is now Zimbabwe: the Matopos hills in the south, where protagonist Emil Coetzee spends his happy childhood, and, some fifty kilometres further north, the city that he initially hates: Bulawayo, here consistently denoted by its nickname The City of Kings. The ceasefire date mentioned on the first page, 21-12-1979, the date which marks the end of the ‘bush war’ in which Emil Coetzee has come to play such a gruesome role, is exactly the day that was the beginning of the end of white minority rule in Zimbabwe.

Still, it does not really matter where and when this story takes place. This is not a book about Zimbabwean history, not even about British colonial history. It is the story of a man who happens to live in and love a country which he deep down feels is not really his to love – and the tragic events that leads to. As most great novelist do, Ndlovu works with big abstract notions – the limitations of linear history, the complexity of identity formation, the relationship between the individual and the state – and turns them into a single man’s story, which, in turn, sheds its light on the bigger things. Emil is part of the dynamics of British (post-)colonialism, even though he is not British – Coetzee is an Afrikaans name – which makes him somehow more suspect, but also less colonial. Or, in other words, it makes him, more than anything else, an ambiguous character, and I think that is exactly what he is meant to be. Emil’s first and last love is the savannah. But in between, in the period where he has lost touch with the elephant grass, he does not seem to be able to choose who or what he is.

This is Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s second novel, and it turned out to be the second of a trilogy. The first one, the acclaimed The Theory of Flight, explores, like The History of Man, how circumstances can change the experience of the self, in relation to others and to the state. But where The Theory of Flight is set in a post-colonial state and is multifaceted – it consists of several interconnected stories of a broad range of people and harbours a touch of magic realism – The History of Man is a story of one man in a colonial setting, and it is told in a collected, rational, (almost) linear fashion. In her third novel, The Quality of Mercy, released in 2022, Ndlovu tries to bridge these two worlds. Here, a black policeman who also played a minor role in The History of Man, researches the disappearance and possible death of Emil Coetzee.

At first sight, the thing Ndlovu tries to capture in The History of Man seems to be how an innocent and happy and sensitive boy can grow into a cruel man, a man who turned his back on everything he loved and lost any sense of who he is. That is also more or less what is stated in the first chapter, titled ‘Prologue’: ‘His story, if it were ever told, would have to be told chronologically, in a linear fashion, with a definite beginning, middle and end – none of that starting-in-the-middle-or-end modern nonsense. It would have to be told in that fashion because that was the only way to make any sense of the dark, grey, concrete room with his naked light bulb (…) and the man with the blood on his hands.’

Notwithstanding the deceiving title of this first chapter, this is not Ndlovu talking, it is Emil, or to be more precise: the narrator, giving voice to Emil’s thoughts. This narrator seems to comply with Emil’s wishes: his story is chronologically told – except that the Prologue, like a stuck-out tongue, is almost literally repeated in the second last chapter. But the outcome of this narration is not what Emil hoped or expected: his story still does not make sense. In the end, it turns out to be a series of seemingly unrelated events. There are moments where he feels love, and there are moments when he feels loss. There is the series of choices he made. All the important events of his life are being narrated, but that does not help to create meaning or a meaningful identity.

Especially in South African literature, a white middle-aged male protagonist whose controlling of the narrative or gaze in a novel reveals his own blind spot, has been a recurrent feature. Mehring in Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974), may be one of the most famous, but another example is only a few years old: Francois Smith’s Gustav van Aardt in Die Kleinste Ramp Denkbaar (2020). What Mehring and Van Aardt have in common is that they don’t intend to look beyond their gaze, even though they vaguely recognise that something is amiss. It is only in their uncoordinated search for something else that they sort of stumble upon a deeper truth. Emil Coetzee, however, is very much aware of his own choices. He is also very much aware of his own shortcomings. He knows he is as much driven by fear as he is by love, and that his fear, especially his fear for being homeless, is the stronger force. He knows he teams up with the bullies at school because it will keep him from being bullied. He knows he is not really able to love his own son, because his softness reminds him too much of his own father, who Emil once caught wearing women’s clothes. He knows that betraying his best friend several times because of this friend’s ‘weakness’, made him, Emil, the weaker man. The only thing Emil has ever been proud of is that he created the Organization of Domestic Affairs, an institute set to recording the lives of African people. With it he tried, in his own words, to make African citizens less vulnerable by giving them a history.

Ndlovu, or the narrator, does not elaborate on why Emil is so proud of this accomplishment, or even why he feels the urge to do it. This seems to be the one flaw in this novel: for an intelligent man like Emil, his pride does not seem to make much sense. We, as readers, of course know that African citizens already had a history, a fact which is underlined throughout the book by using the name The City of Kings, a referral to the founding of Bulawayo by Ndebele King Lobengula in 1840. We know Emil Coetzee – and all the British colonial institutes that did the same thing – did not give Africans a history, only incorporated them in colonial history. His life’s work does not make them less, but more vulnerable. To Emil, however, his work is what gives his own life purpose, and it is the only thing he does not question. On a subconscious level he probably thinks it will make him less vulnerable. But one cannot help feeling that he should have known that he was wrong.

Problems arise when the bush war starts, and the colonial government becomes extremely interested in the data Emil has collected. Emil does not believe in the war, but he cannot escape being sucked into it, because he does believe in the state. When the war and the state as he knows it come to an end, he is completely lost. His story is a circular one after all: it ends where it started, at the savannah. But now there is no love, and also no fear, there is just the feeling that he has lost all humanity.

The only demerit I can find in this novel, is that the creative freedom with which Ndlovu gave room to her ideas in Theory of flight (2028), is a little lost here: she very clearly wants to make a point. Or rather: ten points. Which she does. And while doing so, Emil becomes a little less convincing as a character, at least in the last section of the novel. Nevertheless: Ndlovu convincingly pictures the absurdity and pettiness and uselessness of colonial power, its means and its moral foundations, and the psychological motivations for excessive violence within the state, while at the same time presenting us with an absorbing and intriguing, very human story. An impressive accomplishment.

Gitte Postel
Literary translator & journalist

Introduction

A humble corpus of seventy-nine limestone flakes – ostraca – and four papyri lies at the basis of this book, a study of what Jennifer Miyuki Babcock understands to be visual representations of Ancient Egyptian animal fables. The author is a professor of Art History and Archaeology in New York, and specializes in the visual arts and narratives of Ancient Egypt, an interesting combination of fields, as the book demonstrates.

As for the corpus, as a writing material, papyrus was expensive and ostraca were cheap; the latter were used for a variety of purposes. Some were ‘textual’ – letters, inventories, receipts, work journals, …- while others were ‘figurative’ and contained drawings and sketches. Many of the ostraca were ex-votos, offerings made to deities to fulfill a vow, some may have been created for educational purposes or perhaps even out of boredom, as the author suggests. A small but interesting group depicts animals acting like people – wearing clothes, playing board games, banqueting, playing music, … – and these are the focus of this investigation. The most popular animals, for this purpose, are cats, mice, canines and caprids, but there are also birds, hippopotami and lions. Jennifer Miyuki Babcock chose to exclude most pictures with primates (with the exception of the motif of the baboon and the cat), because, as she argues, their activities could be the result of animal training; they usually appear in the company of people, not in anthropomorphic animal settings like the others.

Animals play a big role in Egyptian culture, religion and daily life. In representations, they are symbols of danger, strength, power, etc. In the hieroglyphic script animal-shaped signs can carry both literal and metaphorical meanings. On paintings, they appear in real-life conditions, crying out in pain, galopping, … and even their odor can be expressed by using symbols. But the ostraca are a group apart, as the animals here engage in human behavior. This is what animals in fables do. However, linking them to specific stories is not self-evident. The original drawings are not accompanied by explanatory texts and most drawings are not backed up by a recorded story. Jennifer Miyuki Babcock leaves no stone unturned to overcome this problem.

Let the reader be warned (but not deterred): this book is a reworked dissertation, which is still palpable, and it is not an easy read. It is based on original source materials that are hard to interpret. Before one can enter the world of tree climbing hippos and ennobled mice, one is deeply immersed in academic debates. What a reader not too familiar with Ancient Egyptian history might miss, at times, is a concise historical framework before these debates start, something I would have added because this book is of interest, not only for Egyptologists, but also for other people interested in fables and story-telling in other parts of the world or other temporal settings. There are a few flaws in the register which could have been avoided – e.g., the entries hippopotami, hippopotamus and hippotamus (sic!), hippotamus and crow but no crow as an entry, … – but on the whole this is a good work. In terms of methodology, the author is a guide, who presents complex theories in an accessible way and uses them eclectically. In the course of the book we find reflections on terminology and definitions; when different interpretations of materials have been suggested pros and cons are duly weighed, conclusions are drawn after consideration, the author shares her doubts and provides tentative explanations, it is up to the reader to agree or disagree. The author argues that in order to analyze the pictures one has to contextualize them and this becomes the key to their interpretation.

The book has six chapters, each of which opens up a new perspective:

1. Introduction to the Materials
2. Artists and Audience: Deir el-Medina and Its Inhabitants
3. Understanding Ancient Egyptian Aesthetic Value
4. Constructing Visual Narratives in Ancient Egypt
5. Animal Fables and Their Purpose
6. Contextualising the Egyptian Imagination: Concluding Thoughts

There is an Appendix of 84 pages, with colour photos of the papyri and ostraca, a few drawings, detailed descriptions and references. Not only is this catalogue fun to browse through, it also allows the readers to see the evidence with their own eyes. This catalogue is a most valuable instrument as the materials are not easily available otherwise. Beside all the rest, this book tells us a story of archaeological evidence that was dispersed over so many museums and private collections that studying them, today, requires an odyssey. As a result of historical power relations, many small artefacts have left Egypt, and are now in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, … The whereabouts of some of the materials cannot be traced anymore, in which case a modern drawing is all that remains. Writing this book required a lot of patience and dedication, even on a material level.

Missing: the archaeological context

Sadly, an utterly relevant context was lost in modern times. The ostraca and the papyri had once belonged to the vestiges of an ancient civilization, like the remnants of temples, houses, streets, tombs, skeletons, plant and animal remains. It seems that ostraca of different kinds were found in various contexts, such as the ‘Great Pit’, houses, tombs, streets, … but no one took care to note which one came from where so that we cannot know whether those with anthropomorphized animals came from a specific context, as a group or in groups, or were found in different settings. It is believed that all of them came from Deir el-Medina, the ‘Valley of the Artisans’, near Luxor, which can be ascertained for many of these, but not for all, and that is as far as one can get. The animal drawings can hence not be linked, by their archaeological context, to domestic, funerary or religious contexts, let alone to specific owners, their houses, graves, or other possessions, contexts that could potentially have contributed to their interpretability. Had they not been robbed of this context, because of 19^th century looting and substandard excavation reports, all of these vestiges could have told their story in unison. The damage done is irreversible.

Deir el-Medina and its artisans

As for the makers of the ostraca, Deir el-Medina was not a run-off-the-mill village, as the author explains. Its artisans were the ones who excavated and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings and that of the Queens. They were highly skilled and exceptional workers who also decorated tombs in their own village, with delightful scenes from every-day life. They were visually literate and educated people. Although the concept of art in contemporary European and American context has undergone a semantic shift – it now conjures up a world of individual expression, something almost transcendental, as the author explains – Jennifer Miyuki Babcock defends the position to call the products of Egyptian ‘craftmanship’ art. Artistic quality was something that was highly sought after and no one can doubt the artistic skills of the painters of Deir el-Medina.

Motifs

While in search of their meaning, the author notes that the anthropomorphized drawings on the ostraca reflect elite themes and that there are recurrent motifs. One of these, that of the cat and the vulture, can be successfully connected to the myth of the “Distant Goddess”: in this story the god Thoth appears in the shape of a baboon, while the goddess Tefnut has assumed the form of a cat. The former tries to convince the latter to return to Egypt by telling her a story of a cat and a vulture. Depictions of a baboon and a cat, or of a cat and a vulture (or other birds), are thus identified as depictions of fables. The author tentatively connects the story-telling and the ostraca to celebrations during festivals for the Distant Goddess. She points out that although materials from Deir el-Medina have been found in Amarna, no such ostraca were found in the city of Akhenaten (Akhnaton), an absence that she links to the pharao’s religious reforms. The fact that the connection with the Distant Goddess myth can be ascertained, means that other motifs which include anthropomorphized animals in story-like settings, are most probably also connected to animal fables. Some depictions are very specific, such as the hippopotamus sitting in a fruit tree with a crow climbing a ladder, or a hippopotamus and a crow sitting on opposite sides of a balance. These images raise so many questions that it would be easy to convert them into story lines (how did the hippo end up in the fruit tree? why does the crow not fly but use a ladder? is he crippled and if so, whose fault was that? …). Corroborating evidence that these are indeed animal fables, not just funny pictures, is that there seems to be ‘a stock of characters and motifs’ which, as the author states, include:

1. Elite Animals and Offering Scenes
2. Chariot Riding
3. Religious Scenes
4. Agricultural and Food Production Scenes
5. Animal Musicians
6. the Distant Goddess and the Cat/Vulture Fable
7. the Boy, the Cat and the Mouse
8. the Hippopotamus and the Crow
9. Unclear/Miscellaneous

Narration

The reconstruction of narratives based on sequences of images found on the papyri turns out to be a challenge, since the materials do not seem to have been organized in a linear way. In ‘Constructing visual narratives in Ancient Egypt’ the reader is introduced into the conceptual world and theories of narratology and their application to visual materials. The author argues that we should look beyond the modern bias, that narratives should be presented in a linear sequence. To investigate how stories are presented in the visual arts of Ancient Egypt, she looks into paintings in tombs which depict the road to afterlife. She incorporates the idea of Assmann, that myths are organized around ‘nuclei’ (larger themes) which could be combined into ‘narrative constellations’ in oral story-telling, and wonders whether the ostraca were ‘icons’ that could be arranged and rearranged, during performances. Tentatively, she points out that in the 18^th century, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, lukasa memory boards were used by story-tellers (boards with beads, shells and metal) as a mnemonic device. Could the ostraca have had a similar function? The world of the Ancient Egyptian story-tellers is another lost dimension, but the author, as said, leaves no stone unturned to find relevant contexts and ideas which help us imagine how the texts might have functioned.

Interpreting the social implications of the fables is another topic that is covered, and here too we see how the author gains information from contextualizing the materials. Several ostraca reverse the roles of preys and predators, e.g., they depict mice who are being served by cats. Interpreting such scenes is not unambiguous and the author shows us a range of possibilities. Is role reversal a sign of rebellion against the existing social hierarchy? Not necessarily so, according to Jennifer Miyuki Babcock. She argues that the population of Deir el-Medina had more direct ways to express their dissatisfaction if needed; as evidence she adduces the fact that the first recorded strike ever was a sit-in near the mortuary temple of Ramasses II. She also denies that the pictures with the human-like animals are satirical or blasphemous representations of religious ceremonies. She points out that in the Book of the Dead, mice are presented as divine; the priest is a jackal. Blurred boundaries between humans and animals are omnipresent in Egyptian religion. It is by comparison with other materials from Egypt (Prophecies of Neferty, Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage) and near-by regions such as Mesopotamia and Greece that she finds reason to believe that stories about social upheaval and chaos could well end in a restoration and celebration of existing power relations.

Imagination

The ostraca and papyri are silent witnesses of the history of human imagination. To unmute them the author contextualized what she saw. The patience and dedication that was put into this scholarly work has paid off; she has definitely shed light on the interpretability of these images and there is a lot to discover in this book. Although the study is focused on a better understanding of Ancient Egyptian materials, it is relevant for a variety of readers. It shows us a road that lies ahead, one that runs in two directions. For one thing, it reminds us that research in fields like Assyriology and Egyptology that helps us interpret drawings on limestone flakes also urges us to deconstruct the myth of the Greek miracle, of Aesops who appear out of the blue. ‘Unmuted histories’ that are the results of archaeological, anthropological and textual explorations, are starting to shed light on the relations between cultures and on captivating literary networks. Historical power relations have created disbalanced views of the past. Contemporary research tells us to revise such views. Meanwhile, creativity and imagination keep doing their work, because subconsciously, when reflecting on this need to bring more balance in the reconstruction of the fragmented history of humanity, the image of the heavy hippo and the light-weighted crow, who struggled to find a balance, comes to my mind. An ancient fable whose original context is clouded is trying to rewrite itself in a contemporary setting, which is what fables do.

For all these reasons I recommend this book.

Caroline Janssen (Ghent University)

During the 1991-1992 academic year, the Division of the Humanities of the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University, with grant-funding from the National Endowment of the Humanities, restructured its two-semester core course entitled “Introduction to Humanities I and II”. The overall goal was to revise and expand the course content to include in the Humanities curriculum non-western literary historiography and cultural trajectories. Howard, like some other North American universities, quickly decided to include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as the exemplary novel to represent the wide expanse of African literatures written in English. Project administrators purchased a copy of Lindfors’ Approaches to Teaching Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (Modern Language Association, 1991) for the faculty who would teach a section of the Humanities course. I was one of them. While there is no explicit reference to that work in the volume reviewed here, this reviewer believes that, in many ways, it is a comprehensive sequel to that publication and to the proliferation of other published scholarship heretofore on Achebe’s work.     

After a quite engaging introduction by editors Korieh and Nwajiaku, the volume is divided into three parts. Part I “Chinua Achebe and Igbo-African Realities” includes 6 chapters (essays); Part II “Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Representation” includes 4 chapters; and Part III “Achebe, History, and the National Question” comprises 5. The editors offer the following rationale for the division: “The rationale behind this division is that, although some aspects of the Igbo experience can be addressed in their relationship to African and Nigerian culture, unique contextual circumstances warrant such division” (p. 4). The 15 essays are authored by scholars representing a variety of fields in the humanities, social sciences, theology, and communications. This gives way to different hermeneutical approaches and to a variety of sometimes conflicting interpretations of Achebe’s perception, presentation, and representation of historical facts, hence the subtitle of the volume: Between Fiction, Fact and Historical Representation.  

By all accounts, this volume is indeed a welcome and timely addition to studies on Achebe’s literary works and persona because it takes us from chapter to chapter to a deeper understanding and fresh and new-fangled analyses of his work. Achebe’s efforts to unveil artistically the social, political, religious, male-female relations and the general psychological environment of the Igbo people are lauded, but they are examined critically and comprehensively to offer varying ways of reading and appreciating his artistry. In general, this volume makes a gargantuan contribution to African Studies, Igbo Studies, and cross-cultural literacy. The novice student as well as the seasoned scholar of African Literatures and Cultures will gain invaluable insights from reading the thought-provoking introduction and the 15 elucidating chapters followed by an excellent index of names, topics and themes.

James J. Davis (Howard University)

Long-listed for both the 2021 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Walter Scott Prize, Afterlives is the tenth novel by Zanzibar-born Abdulrazak Gurnah, who was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. This award has been regarded as “a family win” for East African writers or, more broadly, for Gurnah’s many devoted readers worldwide. As Kenyan writer Yvonne Owuor puts it in an interview with Meg Arenberg, “Gurnah is like the favorite uncle who is rather shy; thus there is extra pride that he is finally being discovered.”[1]

Arenberg has also aptly pointed out, however, that the right award has been given for the wrong reason: “The Nobel Prize committee in Stockholm pigeonholed the complex and cosmopolitan work of the Zanzibar novelist in conventional East/West terms—terms he’s always rejected.”[2]  In fact, in all the novels the author has written since the late 1980s, the conventional notions of “East vs. West” or “world literature writer” are ceded in favor of multiple and relational cartographies. A prime example of this is Paradise (1994), a novel detailing the caravan trade of Tanganyika before World War I, which “has been most acclaimed and discussed for its subtle but elegantly intertwined narrative of shifting maps”[3] (Vierke, forthcoming).

Clustered in four parts and comprising fifteen chapters, Afterlives leads the reader through “extended passages on the cruelties of the Kaiserreich inflicted in Deutsch-Ostafrika —which encompassed Tanganyika (now mainland Tanzania).”[4] The book cover depicts an Askari soldier of the German East African Schutztruppe in uniform, including a tarboosh with the Imperial Eagle badge.[5]

How Gurnah de-centers geopolitical maps and treaties and European historical accounts in Afterlives reveals one of the writer’s most exquisite talents: that of narrating the ordinary lives of people grappling with the haunting presence of colonialism and interconnected human woundedness, or, as Maaza Mengiste puts it, struggling with “what remains in the aftermath of so much devastation.”  Therefore, one might ask, what does remain in such afterlives? In order to find out, the reader is led on a journey with Gurnah’s characters, their social struggles and passages of self-discoveries. As poignantly put by Mohineet Kaur Boparai, Gurnah “does what history does not, which is to reach into the recesses of lived experience.”[6]

Krieg. Vita. War. “Who are we fighting?”[7]

We collect fragments of what remained in the aftermath of the German occupation by following the stories of two veterans of the Schhutztruppe, Hamza and Ilyas, and their different yet entangled final destinations in life: the former in the town where he had lived as a child, the other in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin.

“At the very end of the war, when we were all exhausted and half-mad from the bloodletting and cruelty we had been steeped in for years,” Hamza is healed by Frau Pastor – as she is referred to in the book – and realizes how much they all risked their lives “for these vainglorious warmongers.” (Afterlives, 265). He strolls around different cities (Mwanza, Kampala, Nairobi, Mombasa) with no particular destination in mind, carrying with him nothing but two German books (Friedrich Schiller’s Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1798 and Heinrich Heine’s Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland). He eventually falls in love with and marries Afiya; they name their child Ilyas after Afiya’s brother, who was lost in the war.

From the beginning, the reader is immersed in typical Swahili biographical cartographies through the story of Khalifa and his father Qassim, who hailed from Gujurat but came to the Swahili coast of Africa on receiving an offer to join a bookkeeping team. Though Khalifa does not look Indian, his father married an African woman and always remained loyal to her: “Yes, yes, my father was an Indian. I don’t look it, hey?” (Afterlives, 3). Khalifa is the oldest character in the novel. His biography, retold via flashbacks, is entangled with historical events, bigger and smaller battles,  as reflected in the following episodes.

When Khalifa begins studying mathematics, bookkeeping, and some basic English vocabulary with a private tutor, he is around eleven years old, exactly when “the Germans arrived in the town” and the al Bushiri revolt began (Afterlives, 5).

“The Germans and the British and the French and the Belgians and the Portuguese and the Italians and whoever else had already had their congress and drawn their maps and signed their treaties, so this resistance was neither here nor there. The revolt was suppressed by Colonel Wissmann and his newly formed schutztruppe” (Afterlives, 5).

By the time Khalifa is completing his period with the tutor, “the Germans were engaged in another war, this time with the Wahehe a long way in the south. They too were reluctant to accept German rule and proved more stubborn than al Bushiri, inflicting unexpectedly heavy casualties on the schutztruppe who responded with great determination and ruthlessness.” (Afterlives, 5).

During their baraza evening on Khalifa’s porch, we are introduced to the concerns of that time,  “with rumors of the coming conflict with the British, which people were saying was going to be a big war, not like the small ones before against the Arabs and the Waswahili and the Wahehe and the Wanyamezi and the Wameru and all the others. Those were terrible enough but this is going to be a big war!” (Afterlives, 41).

“Uncle Ilyas is wounded at the Battle of Mahiwa in October 1917. (“I was there,” Hamza says. “It was a terrible battle.”)” (Afterlives, 274).

The character of Ilyas is introduced to the reader first as a “a friend of the manager, the great German lord himself. He speaks German as if it’s his native language” (Afterlives, 21). Through his conversations with Hamza, however, we hear more about his childhood: that he had to run away from home as a child, was kidnapped by a Shangaan Askari at the train station, and was eventually released and cared for by a German, after which he was sent to a German mission school, where—“don’t tell anyone”—he was made to pray like a Christian (Afterlives, 22). Mnafiki is thus what Hamza calls Ilyas, or “hypocrite,” an intertextual reference to sura 63 of the Quran, called Al-Munāfiqūn (“The Hypocrites”).

In one passage, we learn about Ilyas’s perspective on German kindness, which is met with hoots of laughter from the others, thinking there is no one as stern as a German: “Listen, just because one German has been kind to you does not change what has happened here over the years. […] In the thirty years or so they have occupied this land, the Germans have killed so many people that the country is littered with skulls and bones and the earth is soggy with blood. I am not exaggerating.” (Afterlives, 41). But Ilyas—of whom we lose track after he announces his plans to volunteer for the Schutztruppe—believes that his friend is in fact exaggerating.

Baba Khalifa, as a sensitive man who bears the burden of other people’s troubles and dies quietly at the age of 64, plays an intriguing role in the story; as the omniscient narrator witnesses him aptly say of Ilyas, “Maybe he had started to think of himself as a German or maybe he always wanted to be an askari.  The reality was that he was always on the point of stumbling. You could not imagine someone more generous nor anyone more self-deluded than Ilyas.” (Afterlives, 199).

It is striking to see how only after the war does Hamza realize how the soldiers in the service of the German officer risked their lives “for these vainglorious warmongers.” (Afterlives, 265). During the war itself, the enthusiasm of being a soldier and fighting for the so-called governor of the Mdachi (“Germans”) resonates in this interpolated song:

It was not really a song, more like a sung conversation, delivered to a jaunty marching tempo with an explosive response at the end of every phrase (Afterlives, 52) :

Tumefanya fungo na Mjarumani, tayari.           We have joined the Germans. We’re ready?
Tayari!                                                                       We’re ready!
Askari wa balozi wa Mdachi, tayari.                    We are soldiers of the governors of the Mdachi
Tayari!                                                                       We’re ready!
Tutampigania bila hofu.                                        We will fight for him without fear.
Bila hofu!                                                                  Without fear!
Tutawatisha adui wajue hofu.                              We will terrify our enemies and fill them with   fear,
Wajue hofu!                                                              We’ll fill them with fear!

(Afterlives, 52)

The culture of brutality that the above excerpt illustrates is also reflected in several highly mimetic conversations, in which Swahili mingles with German,  Arabic, and Bantu languages such as Kinyamwezi[8] and Kiswahili:

Unfahamu? [Do you understand?] Every order was shouted and accompanied by abuse. Ndio bwana. [Yes, sir.] (Afterlives, 60).

This is our Zivilisierungsmission. […] We have come here to civilise you. Unafahamu? [Do you understand?] (Afterlives, 65).

Among various other demeaning comments, we find “you are a bunch of washenzi,” (Afterlives, 51). where washenzi means “barbaric, indigenous from the mainland”;[9] “don’t swing your hips like a shoga,” (Afterlives, 51), where shoga refers to “very close female friends”;[10] and hataki mavi yenu ndani ya boma lake, “He doesn’t want your shit inside his camp.” (Afterlives, 54).

Swahili is mixed with German in the phrase haya schnell, when Hamza is ordered to lower his suruali (“trousers”) in front of the medical officer. (Afterlives, 57). The Arabic bil-askari  (which means “like a proper soldier”) is highlighted as the exact mold in which the ombasha wants to train them. Specific threats also stand out vividly, such as “If it is not clean you will suffer kiboko na matusi in front of everyone, hamsa ishirin […] Twenty-five strokes of the cane on your fat buttocks.” (Afterlives, 58).

In fact, what remains in the aftermath of these entangled narratives are the many scars of “ignorance and narrowmindedness” (Afterlives, 105) and the overall culture of brutality that the writer recounts, happening in the so-called boma la mzungu (“the white man’s camp”) (Afterlives, 54) as well as in domestic contexts: a broken hand inflicted by an uncle in his own home as he believes that learning to write is wrong, or being slapped, ambiguously touched, injured, or accused of terrible misdeeds by the Feldwebel.

We see how “the brave little things” (Afterlives, 199) —like being able to write a note on a scrap of paper saying Kaniumiza. Nisaidie. (“He hurt me. Help me.”) or running off to war (Afterlives, 46, 199, 205–6) —enable one to drift somewhere else or rescue one’s own life. The novel indeed illustrates how the past is always at hand, and only time and love will be able to heal the scars and unite the wounded.

The scars after love

“So I don’t have any people to tell you about.  I lost them when I was very young and I don’t know what I can tell you about  … you want me to tell you about myself as if I have a complete story but all I have are fragments which are snagged by troubling gaps, things I would have asked about if I could, moments that ended too soon or were inconclusive.”

(Afterlives, 206)

In the last section of the book, the reader is immersed in the season of Ramadan, a period of fasting during which, in the novel, the scars will be recounted via the tender lovemaking and relationship between Afiya and Hamza. When Afiya slips into Hamza’s room, “whose door he had left ajar,” (Afterlives, 196) we hear more from both characters: “how brutal the culture was,” (Afterlives, 200) where the scar on Hamza’s hip comes from, and how he was healed by that “Frau Doktor” over more than two years in Kilemba.

Interestingly, the love story between the two characters starts with a piece of poetry that Hamza translates from German into Swahili, relying on the Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1798 that the German officer had given him.

Hamza takes the first four lines of Schiller’s “Das Geheimnis” and translates them for Afiya:

Sie konnte mir kein Wörtchen sagen,                               Alijaribu kulisema neno moja, lakini hakuweza
Zu viele Lauscher waren wach,                                           Kuna wasikilizi wengi karibu,
Den Blick nur durft ich schüchtern fragen,                      Lakini jicho langu la hofu limeona bila tafuti
Und wohl verstand ich, was er sprach.                              Lugha ghani jicho lake linasema.

Recurring cycles

The final chapters map out the war between the UK and Germany that has started in September. It is a period in which the administration has started publishing the Kiswahili monthly newspaper Mambo Leo, in which the people read all sorts of news, sport and health issues included, because “the government wants all of us to be healthy so that we can work harder”; (Afterlives, 225) the content provides a counterpoint to local healing rituals, such as the hakim visiting Afiya’s son Ilyas and helping him to “drink” the Quran through verses washed from a glided plate, (Afterlives, 252) or the shekiya ceremony with its scented candles, incense burners, and “perfume, drumming and stupid wailing,” as Hamza would describe such “nonsense.”  (Afterlives, 255-57).

Despite Afiya’s superficial lack of interest in knowing what might have happened to the brother she lost, as if history can be conclusive—“What can we find out? […] What happened has happened” ((Afterlives, 202) —it is her son who, through German archival records, eventually traces Ilyas’s long journey to his death, which takes place in a concentration camp in 1942.  His request to view the archives of the magazine and photo journal Kolonie und Heimat, stored in Koblenz, allow us to discover that Ilyas was marching with the Reichskolonialbund, a Nazi Party organization that wanted the colonies back, restored to Germany.  To conclude, through Ilyas remarks “I knew nothing about a recolonizing movement,” (Afterlives, 271), we are duly invited to recall Giambattista Vico’s recurring cycles and reread how the Nazi Lebensraum did not only entail the Ukraine and Poland.

[1] BookRising. Yvonne Owuor on Abdulrazak Gurnah

[2] Latest from Meg Arenberg: https://newlinesmag.com/writers/meg-arenberg/

[3] Clarissa Vierke (forthcoming). “Zanzibari Worlds: A Relational Reading of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea and Adam Shafi Adam’s Vuta n’kuvute.”

[4] Sean James Bosman (2021): Afterlives, Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, DOI: 10.1080/23277408.2021.1970872, p. 1.

[5] A picture of an Askari uniform, kept at the German Historical Museum, Berlin, can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/30/afterlives-by-abdulrazak-gurnah-review-living-through-colonialism. Photograph: John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images.

[6] Mohineet Kaur Boparai (2021). The Fiction of Abdulrazak Gurnah. Journeys through Subalternity and Agency. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, p. 2–3.

[7] Afterlives, 80

[8] Kinyamwezi is a Bantu language of western Tanzania. Being mother tongue of at least one million people, its main speaking-area is the town of Tabora. (Mganga, C. & Schadeberg, T. C. 1992. Kinyamwezi: Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.)

[9] Sacleux 1939: 602.

[10] Sacleux 1939: 843.

This review was published in Africa Book Link, Spring 2022

“I remember the year I turned seventeen as the year of stubborn seasons.” (7) So begins Sifiso Mzobe’s novel, Young Blood, which follows the turbulent coming-of-age of a young man, Sipho, over the course of one pivotal year in his life – the year that he is 17.

Describing the seasons as ‘stubborn’ because they did not quite follow the usual pattern, he attempts to explain how that year was different from all others. “Summer lasted well into autumn, and autumn annexed half of winter. It was hot in May and cold in November” (7). Weather is the least of his concerns, though; he is confronted, more pressingly, with the changes and choices that the inevitable cycles of life demand. Reaching a personal crossroads, as he unwittingly (perhaps naïvely) slides into the parallel reality of criminality and violence, Sipho considers the seasons of life that his father and his ancestors before him have weathered in order for them to reach a satisfying stage of maturity and contentment. To reach the next stage of his own maturity, Sipho must embark on a “troubled quest for identity” (Baldick 2008:35), which begins in this bildungsroman when he meets up with a childhood friend.

Musa has just returned to Durban from Johannesburg, ‘the City of Gold’, displaying signs of tantalizing new affluence: “His return from Johannesburg – dressed fresh in Versace, in a car considered the holy grail of BMWs in the township – was drenched in a glorious ‘I have made it’ glow” (15). The renewal of this friendship between Sipho and Musa, sets in motion a chain of events both exhilarating and terrifying and, in the telling of their tale, the novel explores the precarious lives of young men in urban contemporary South Africa. The juxtapositioning of these two characters allows for an examination of the various forces that can shape or sway young people as they develop: for example, the family unit and the community, positive and negative role models, education and sport, as well as spirituality or religion.

Sipho and Musa had become friends when they were boys. But despite being bright – “blessed with an absorbent brain” (34) – Musa has had little luck in life. His life contrasts in several important ways with Sipho’s. Sipho’s family is poor but both father and mother are present in his (and his younger sister’s) life, and they live together in a humble but orderly and loving home in the township. Musa, contrastingly, had come to live on the other side of the stream that separates the township from the ‘shantytown’ (an informal settlement called ‘Power’) with an ‘aunt’ (not, in fact, a blood-relative, but a friend of his late mother) and a number of other children, when he “lost both his parents to tuberculosis the year he turned ten” (33). In the kindly ‘aunt’s’ overcrowded household, Musa had grown up too quickly, then dropped out of school to leave Durban on a sudden whim: “I am going to Joburg. I hear things are better there” (35). He returns to Durban “a year and six months” (35) later, just as Sipho himself gives up on school.

Although Sipho, like Musa, also abandons his schooling, he is not cast adrift because he is ‘apprenticed’ to his father, a backyard (self-employed) mechanic. Sipho’s skills as a mechanic and as a driver would assure him a steady income. But those same skills become useful to Musa because, as becomes apparent when he returns to Durban, he is now a criminal involved with a sophisticated car-theft syndicate. Musa draws Sipho into the world of crime by using him – while paying him handsomely – to modify stolen cars, dismantle anti-theft devices, and to sometimes drive the getaway car on hijacking sprees. The lure of quick money and “the rapid upward social mobility that high-level criminal activity allows” (Wessels 2016:87) is too strong for Sipho to resist. Furthermore, the attractions of high-octane criminal life are understood in the novel as not only financially lucrative but, even more addictively, as a way of coming ‘fully alive’, albeit briefly. Infused with adrenalin, Mzobe’s detailed and exhilarating depictions of high-speed driving make plain the attractions of this car-focused, outlaw life:  whether it be at street ‘parties’ where drivers show off their skills – “drift, spin, do whatever. Bang your system to the maximum” (18) – or during terrifying rapid get-aways from hijackings and point-blank assassinations, or when simply cruising the highways and beachfront roads of the city.

Within months of Musa’s return to Durban, Sipho has succumbed to the dubious glamour of criminality and excess; and his life is on a downward spiral alongside his friend’s (who has already served jail time). But after facing several crisis points – such as the death of their fellow-thief, Vusi – and with the underlying foundation of love and support that his parents provide, Sipho is given the chance to turn his life around.

Because Sipho has the support of his immediate and extended family, he is able to benefit from their collective wisdom and experience. The importance of storytelling is foregrounded in Mzobe’s novel: Sipho is the recipient of experience and wisdom through the stories his father and uncles tell about themselves, about each other, and about their ancestors before them. But Musa does not have that benefit because he is fatherless, as are many of the young men in Sipho’s sphere: “Of the twelve houses in my street [he says], only two had father figures. Most of my friends in 2524 Close grew up without fathers” (64). However, for young men cast adrift in a country (and by extension, in a world,) where fathers are too often absent, Mzobe’s novel serves that same function: the function of ‘mentor’ to its readers; the novel serves the function of “time-binding”, which is the human process of transmitting the knowledge gained from experience, through the generations (Korzybski 1921).

Ultimately, and somewhat serendipitously, Sipho has the opportunity to turn away from crime – as his father had also done earlier in his life – and to, instead, turn to education and hard work as a more satisfying and meaningful way of life. This is what I most appreciated about this book, Mzobe’s ability to build the tension related to the fragility of the gangster’s hold on life, while simultaneously witnessing (through Sipho’s eyes) the beauty and sadness of ageing. In a scene near the end of the novel there is a tender moment when Sipho watches his father wash up after a day of hard work: “Maybe it was the shadows of the outside light on my father’s face. He was as meticulous as ever while he washed his hands, but that night I saw a frailty to his outline, a slowness to the whole process” (194). Whether Sipho chooses to ‘crash and burn’ or to, instead, slow down and live, is the question that draws the reader through the novel. At the end of “the year of stubborn seasons” (7), Sipho makes his choice.

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Sifiso Mzobe is a South African author and journalist based in Durban, South Africa. Young Blood was his debut novel. First published in South Africa in 2010, the novel has garnered much love and accolade. It was the winner of the Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Literature in 2011 and, in the same year, also won the Sunday Times Prize for Fiction, as well as the South African Literary Award (SALA) for First Time Published Author. Mzobe has since published a collection of short stories, Searching for Simphiwe (2020).

Young Blood is published by Catalyst Press: Vinton Texas in April 2021.

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Beverley Jane Cornelius:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/beverley-jane-cornelius-aa667b89/ https://www.instagram.com/daftcornelius/

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References:

Baldick, C. 2008. Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford University Press: New York
Korzybski, Alfred. 1921. Manhood of Humanity. E P Dutton & Co: New York.
Mzobe, Sifiso. 2021. Young Blood. Catalyst Press: Vinton, Texas.
Mzobe, Sifiso. 2010. Young Blood. Kwela Books: Cape Town.
Wessels, Michael. 2016. “Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood: Spaces of getting and becoming in post-apartheid Durban”, Scutiny2, 21(1):87-101.