Afterlives
Afterlives Abdulrazak Gurnah Afterlives was written in the background of brutal colonization of East Africa by European countries. "The Germans and the British and the Portuguese and the Italians and whoever else had their congress and signed their treaties", divided East Africa, made their maps and considered natives like natural resources that they came to exploit. I had to Google a lot to gain some information about East Africa. My knowledge about the continent was limited. "That was how that part of the world at that time, every bit of it belonged to Europeans, at least on the map: British East Africa, Deutsch- Ostafrka, Africa Oriental Portuguesa, Congo Belge." But the beauty of Afterlives is that amongst all the bloodshed and devastation, ("the soil was soaked in blood and corpses littered everywhere") a few people in a coastal town of Deutsch-Ostafrika, held on and led lives as normal as possible. Central to the narrative was Khalifa,...