ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to Afterlives, published in 2020 by Zanzibar-born British writer and Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah. It analyses how Gurnah reimagines the colonization of Deutsch-Ostafrika and the First World War on the East Africa front. Next, it focuses on Gurnah’s representation of the Askari, the colonial soldiers in the German army prior to and during the First World War. By examining the affects of the African combatants, Branach-Kallas argues that Afterlives recreates and at the same time shatters the myths that have emerged around the Askari as ruthless mercenaries absolutely loyal to their German officers. Furthermore, the chapter discusses Gurnah’s aesthetics/ethics of incompletion and the complex representation of war trauma in the novel. By exploring the complicated itineraries of the Askari in the aftermath of war, both in Nazi Germany and British-administered Tanganyika/independent Tanzania, it exposes the continuities of colonial violence, and its genocidal, epistemic and archival facets.
