Askari, colonial encounters, and postcolonial war commemoration in Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

ABSTRACT

This article offers an analysis of the representation of the Askari in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 2020 novel Afterlives. I approach the war and colonialism as interconnected factors and argue that Gurnah contests the myth of the Askari as savage mercenaries devoted to their German officers. By retracing Gurnah’s portraits of African protagonists, the article shows the different motivations and choices of the Askari before, during and after the First World War. The figure of Ilyas throws into relief the pitfalls of colonial modernity, as well as the disturbing continuities of violence between the colony and the concentration camp. By contrast, Hamza’s intimate relationship with a German in the Schutztruppe serves to explore an alternative history of emotions between colonial soldiers and their officers. The article goes on to examine Gurnah’s representation of war trauma, the phantomatic presence/absence of the Askari in collective memory, and the conflicted ethics of postcolonial war commemoration.

KEYWORDS:

• Askari
• Schutztruppe
• sly civility
• colonial war trauma
• colonial modernity
• commemoration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. These themes are developed in By the Sea (Gurnah 2001) and Desertion (Gurnah 2005). See Newns (2015) and Steiner (2010). Although the names of the protagonists have been changed, Afterlives seems to be a sequel to Paradise (Gurnah 1994), set at the turn of the 20th century, which “portrays a fractured and fragile socio-cultural universe in which emerging European colonial rule reorganizes existing identities and conflicts” (Göttsche 2020, 223).

2. Ilyas’s fate mirrors that of Bayume Mohamed Husen, who “had migrated to Germany in the late 1920s, married and had children with a German woman, before he became involved with the ‘re-colonisation’ movement. He worked as an actor into the early 1940s and was later sent to a concentration camp for having an extramarital affair with a white woman” (Jeraj 2021, n.p.).

3. For a discussion of the tensions in the Schutztruppe at the end of the war, see Moyd (2011).

4. See Andermahr (2016), Craps (2012), and Visser (2011, 2018) for a discussion of “decolonized” approaches to trauma.

5. Due to lack of space, I cannot discuss Hamza’s relationship with the pastor, which is also traumatizing.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Narodowe Centrum Nauki [DEC- 2019/33/B/HS2/00019].

Notes on contributors

Anna Branach-Kallas

Anna Branach-Kallas is full professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, and head of its Institute of Literary Studies. Her research interests include the representation of trauma and war, postcolonialism, corporeality, health humanities, and memory studies. She is the author of over 90 articles and book chapters, and most recently has published Comparing Grief in French, British and Canadian Great War Fiction (1977–2014) (2018), co-authored with Piotr Sadkowski. She is currently working on “Critical Mourning, Entangled Legacies of Violence, and Postcolonial Discontent in Selected Twenty-First Century First World War Novels in English and French”.