On October 7th the Swedish Academy awarded Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian writer based in Britain, the Nobel prize in Literature for 2021 for “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. He became the first black African writer to win the accolade since Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian novelist and playwright, in 1986.
Ahead of the announcement bookmakers had preferred the chances of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan writer who was arrested and imprisoned in 1977 for his unsparing depictions of his country. Mr Ngugi forsook writing in English for his native Gikuyu, a Bantu language, and his decision, taken nearly 60 years ago, made him a hero of the decolonisation movement across the world and a longtime Nobel favourite. But Mr Gurnah’s writing is every bit as political, if in a different—and quieter—way.
His novels and short stories are populated with characters who are buffeted by history, conflict, family strife and communal upheaval. Anders Olsson, the chair of the committee that awards the prize, said the figures in Mr Gurnah’s tales are caught “between the life left behind and the life to come, confronting racism and prejudice, but also compelling themselves to silence the truth or reinventing biography to avoid conflict with reality”.
Mr Gurnah was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, which over the centuries has been a centre of the Indian Ocean’s slave trade, a warehouse for the global export of cloves and a jumping-off point for colonial expansion across east Africa, both British and German. In 1964 the Sultan of Zanzibar was overthrown and the island was politically joined to its neighbour, Tanganyika, to become Tanzania. A few years later Mr Gurnah, fearing persecution on account of his Arab heritage, was forced to flee. (He was not permitted to return to the island until 1984, shortly before his father died.) He travelled to Britain to study and became a professor of English at the University of Kent, where he supervised projects on the writings of Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Joseph Conrad and Jamaica Kincaid.
His exile made him acutely aware of the challenges faced by people who are forced to leave home and create new lives for themselves. He has been a mentor to generations of young writers, such as Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, a Kenyan author now based in Berlin, and Nadifa Mohamed, a British-Somali writer whose novel, “The Fortune Men”, is on the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize.
His two best-known works are “Paradise” (1994), the determining novel in the Nobel committee’s decision, and “Afterlives”, published last year, which picks up where “Paradise” ends. “Paradise” tells the story of Yusuf, a young Tanzanian boy at the turn of the 20th century who is pawned by his father to an Arab merchant to whom he owes money. In a nod to Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, Yusuf joins the merchant’s caravan and travels to Congo, before returning to east Africa where the German army is forcing young African men to fight on its side in the first world war. “Afterlives” is the story of what happens to these battle-weary young soldiers as they try to pick up their old lives when the war is over.
In Mr Gurnah’s literary universe, Mr Olsson explained, “everything is shifting—memories, names, identities”. He avoids simplification, caricature and cliché. His books are full of the turmoil of conflict and suffering; yet, for all that, they are imbued with a deep humanity which is what stays with the reader long after the final page. ■
