Coming of Age in Colonial Tanganyika

 

A review of Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah, The New Press, NY, 2021.

 

Pulitzer Prize winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah of Zanzibari extraction sets this novel in Tanganyika in the years just before WWI. Arab merchants and slavers had wandered freely throughout the region for decades, but their predominance was giving way to harsh German and Belgian authority.  The story tracks Yusef, son of a small time Swahili storekeeper who is conveyed to “Uncle Aziz” a successful trader in repayment of a debt. Aziz takes the sensitive boy to his coastal enclave and apprentices him to a storekeeper. Later Aziz, who supervises months-long trading caravans that cross into the Congo seeking gold, ivory and rhino horn takes Yusef along. For hundreds of miles about a hundred porters carry trade goods such and cloth and beads through deserts, bush, and jungle.  Throughout the brutal journey Yusef is coming of age, growing from a boy to a man. 

The tale is well fleshed out with lots of dialogue and ruminations through which the author paints eastern Africa of the epoch.  For the most part it was bleak. Although the coastal area was civilized and comfortable, in the interior Arab/Swahili people are few and far between and always nervous about their status. They live precariously amongst the native tribes, ever denigrating black Africans as heathen savages. Women, especially well-off Arab/Swahili women, are isolated from everyday life and controlled by men. Because of his indentured status, the same can be said of Yusef.

The safari Yusef goes on is troubled by weather, pests, disease, betrayals, deaths, and hostilities. It was, in retrospect, one of the last such undertakings as the coming war and stronger German suzerainty would prohibit further journeys. Yet for his part Yusef is an apt observer and gradually a participant in the life around him. A true innocent at the outset, he manages to escape rape, (which the author leads the reader to believe will happen at any moment). He gradually discovers his own sexual and emotional feelings.  In the end he liberates himself from the legal, traditional, and other strictures of his youth and takes responsibility for his own fate.

The title Paradise is ironic in that bush Africa, to which it refers, was anything but. That being said, Gurnah paints a vivid portrait of a vanished period peopled with believable characters.  The book is an entertaining read and exposition of what once was.