Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

A sprawling story following different characters and their experience if the German attempt of colonizing East Afrika. I enjoyed reading this, and found each of the characters lives and their stories interesting to follow.

I knew little about this book and the subject matter but I am trying to be open to more diverse reads and Afterlives seemed to fit this description. Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian author, offers a complex and revelatory insight into lives of citizens living in war-torn Deutsch-Ostafrika - East Africa that was colonized by Germany between late 1800's and early 1900's. The book recounts the tale of a number of characters that stem from the introduction of Khalifa who meets the merchant Amur Biashara. From there Gurnah weaves the hardship of day-to-day citizens to try to earn a living, survive and live a stable life, all in the backdrop of uprisings, colonial resistance and violence and eventually the upcoming WWI that the Germans have to prepare for. Hamza, a survivor Schutztruppe Askari (local soldier supporting the German military), returns to his hometown where fate brings him into Khalifa's world and Hamza befriends a girl named Afiya. Through Hamza, we witness the brutalities of oppressed local soldiers fighting for the German oppressors during the War, but we also witness heartfelt healing and trust being restored through Hamza and Afiya's relationship, as well as Khalifa and other characters in this interesting read.

It is definitely eye opening to learn more about the impact of colonialism in East Africa and the significant impact of the World War even in countries that were not directly involved in the conflict. This book was at times challenging to read as there is an assumption of knowledge of the history of colonial East Africa during the German regime, and Gurnah uses a number of local terms - German, East African language and Arabic - which were distracting to read. The book covers a lot of historical detail and change which made it difficult to keep up and also concentrate on the fictional stories of the characters in the story.

While I enjoyed reading the book overall, I did have to endure a number of pages to get to the end as I felt the story did not flow that well, and seemed to stutter at times, in haste to cover all the historical factual details, as well as move the fictional story of the characters along. A compelling read overall but it can probably be fine-tuned.

Afterlives was a tricky book for me to get into, and in the end I decided to stop reading at the 25% mark.

It's difficult to rate, as I'm sure there will be readers out there who thoroughly enjoy this style of storytelling. For me, the historical details surrounding the plot were fascinating, but the tale itself sadly fell flat. The narrator's voice is unemotional and felt distant to the events taking place, meaning that it was difficult to engage and to care for the characters. As I read, I got the sense of being told what was happening as though it was a synopsis rather than being brought into the story.

On the whole, not a bad book, but not one for me.

My interest in this book was initially due to the point of view - written by an African examining the part that African solders played fighting for the Germans in the First World War.
I learnt a bit about this and it was interesting to be shown how the major powers really just used the native inhabitants to their own ends as pawns, treating them with little respect or caring about their future afterwards.
I found the characters pretty bland, however, and as a result didn't become invested in their outcomes.

This is a hard book for me to rate since I found the material with which it's concerned fascinating - but the mode of storytelling is very distanced and 'told'. Rather than living through the experiences with the characters, we're often absorbing narrative information as if we were reading a history text rather than a novel: 'They burned villages and trampled fields and plundered food stores. African bodies were left hanging on roadside gibbets in a landscape that was scorched and terrorised.' This exposition-heavy style includes lots of indirect speech (instead of dialogue): 'Ilyas told Khalifa how he had run away from home as a child and wandered around for several days before he was kidnapped by a schutzgruppe askari at the train station and taken' - scenes that might have been powerful if we'd witnessed them or even heard them in the voice of the subject become almost incidental. I did wonder if this was deliberate technique to normalise the experiences of the characters or whether this is a reference to a different, non-western, storytelling tradition - I don't know the answers but it did make this a very slow read as I was intellectually engaged but not emotionally involved.

The story itself takes a look over a period of about 60 years of colonial involvement in East Africa, primarily the role of Germany. This is such a little-known history to me that I was fascinated to find out more, especially the role of African mercenaries in German 'protection troops'. Beginning in around the 1890s, there's a large section that explores how English-German hostilities during WW1 and after played out in Africa; and the book also flips forward to WW2 when the Nazis' policy of lebensraum extended back to Africa and their former colonies there.

All of this is fabulous material, but I struggled with the telling. The characters on whom the story is hung move in and out of focus: sometimes we're engaged in their lives, at others they seem just hooks upon which to hang the history. And then the book ends abruptly with a bald statement that feels inconclusive.

So I think this is one of those books where we need to manage our expectations going in - the content is unusual in terms of material and is absolutely fascinating, but the mode of telling might be less novelistic that I, at least, wanted.

Lately a friend reviewed Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea, which reminded me of his novel Paradise(1994) that I did read some decades ago. So when the news reached me a new novel of him was about to be published, I was keen to read it as my present reading habits seem to have turned rather Eurocentric over the years.

Glimpsing through summaries of that Man Booker shortlisted novel Paradise, quite some parallels and recurring components in Gurnah’s storystelling struck me , from the social patterns defining the tough childhood of some of the characters (a childhood spent in debt bondage or suffering from domestic abuse), the dreamy nature of one of the protagonists, the merchant milieu, the setting of the narratives at the confluence of cultures and religions in East Africa, to the detached storytelling, the dash of homo-erotic suggestiveness and the astonishing kindness and generosity some of his characters bestow upon each other in a light-hearted way.

Like Gurnah’s novel Paradise, Afterlives is a historical novel which goes back to the times of the German and later British colonisation of East-Africa, in particularly what is today known Tanzania, mostly spanning the years shortly before and during the first world war, with a more concise rendition of the fate and experiences of the characters during the second world war and the aftermath of it.

Slowly paced, the novel introduces the reader gradually to the few principal characters in the story, through which storylines and history will meet: the merchant clerk Khalifa who is of Ghujarati descent, Ilyas, Hamza and Afiya.

A large chunk of the novel conveys the every day life and military campaigns of the Askari, the local soldiers serving in the German Colonial Army (Schutztruppe) recruited for enforcing the colonial regime and who fought in Africa during the first World War. Askari were employed by the Italian, British, Portuguese, German and Belgian colonial armies.

"As the askari told their swaggering stories and marched across the rain-shadow plains of the great mountain, they did not know that they were to spend years fighting across swamps and mountains and forests and grasslands, in heavy rain and drought, slaughtering and being slaughtered by armies of people they knew nothing about: Punjabis and Sikhs, Fantis and Akans and Hausas and Yorubas, Kongo and Luba, all mercenaries who fought the Europeans’ wars for them, the Germans with their schutztruppe, the British with their King’s African Rifles and the Royal West African Frontier Force and their Indian troops, the Belgians with their Force Publique".

Both Ilyas and Hamza will join the askari forces voluntarily, unaware they will be merely pliable pawns of the brutal times sweeping their region. Their life paths will get connected when both men, in different stages of the novel, wash ashore on the premise of Khalifa in a unnamed East-African port town. Khalifa will also take Ilyas’s once lost little sister Aliya under his wing.

The novel paints a devastating picture of terror, war and exploitation in the name of bringing civilisation – personified in the ambiguous conduct of the despondent German officer sent to the region to occupy the country, treating his African batman, Hamza half seriously, half mockingly, with a weird mixture of contempt and affection. The officer attempts to learn the local language while at the same time he insists on teaching Hamza German, to introduce Hamza to German literature, with the ultimate ambition to acquaint him with Schiller’s writing.

Even though the colonisation and war are ravaging the region, by painting scenes of every day local life in the small merchant community, where Islamic faith goes together with traditional belief in necromancers and men and women find each other in birth and death, courtship and marriage Gurnah beautifully evokes how life goes on, working, loving, learning and worshipping. One of the themes is the sense of uprooting Hamza and Aliya experience, how they are cut off from the past, bereft of or abandoned by their parents and siblings, or having been abandoning them themselves, for different reasons. Their sensitivity in dealing with their past gives a melancholic tone to the prose.

While the distant, sober style made it hard to engage fully with the story, the matter-of-factness attributed significantly to the believability of Gurnah’s storytelling. When reading historical fiction I normally have to silence the voice in my head wondering if what I am reading is fact or imagination, which more often than not prevents me from truly enjoying the book and making me wish I had chosen to read a non-fiction account of the subject and period instead. Gurnah’s deft storytelling however managed to soothe that pesky voice. While not the whole cast of characters was entirely convincing – for instance the proto-feminism of the merchant and of Alifah won my sympathy but seemed improbable - the background narrative was immersive.

Reading historical fiction not that often, for what it is worth, Afterlives to me came across as a fine specimen in the genre, weaving the big history throughout the tale and touching on the impact of the life of individuals in a way the balance between historical details and fictional elements seems fine, covering and bringing to life an episode in Western and African history which might be less known.

"Later these events would be turned into stories of absurd and nonchalant heroics, a side-show to the great tragedies in Europe, but for those who lived through it, this was a time when their land was soaked in blood and littered with corpses".

Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for granting me an ARC of this finely composed novel of love, resilience, freedom and survival.
(***1/2)