Literature Nobel: Zanzibari Abdulrazak Gurnah declared winner for works on colonialism, refugee experience

Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Zanzibari Arab writer settled in the United Kingdom, has been declared the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature for his works on colonialism and the lives of refugees.

Gurnah was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean. He was forced to flee to the UK, the former colonial power, at the end of the 1960s after a revolution occurred in Zanzibar.

The members of the Arab community on Zanzibar were targeted in the revolution, which is why Gurnah had to flee.

Gurnah arrived in England at 18. He was professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent in Canterbury, focusing principally on writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Salman Rushdie.

Gurnah has published ten novels and a number of short stories. The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work.

Zanzibar is part of East Africa, a region known as the Swahili coast, stretching from present-day Somalia to Mozambique on the western shores of the Indian Ocean.

For centuries, traders from Arabia, Persia and the Indian subcontinent mixed with local Bantu populations to give rise to a new culture and language: Swahili.

‘Swahili’ comes from the Arabic word ‘Sahel’ or coast. Cities and islands such as Zanzibar, Lamu, Malindi, Mombasa, Kilwa and Sofala were prosperous due to maritime trade and intermingling of races and cultures.

The Ming Chinese Admiral, Zheng He or Cheng Ho, also visited the Swahili coast in the 1400s with an armada of junks.

The area was later visited and colonised by European colonial powers. A Kutchi trader and sailor named Kanji Malam guided Vasco da Gama’s ships from Malindi to Calicut in 1498.

Tanzania (Tanganyika and Zanzibar), where Gurnah comes from, was part of German East Africa in the 19th century. After World War I, it was taken over by the British.

The cosmopolitan and melting pot heritage of the Swahili coast forms the backdrop of most of Gurnah’s novels.

The Nobel Committee said in a press statement:

In all his work, Gurnah has striven to avoid the ubiquitous nostalgia for a more pristine pre-colonial Africa. His own background is a culturally diversified island in the Indian Ocean, with a history of slave trade and various forms of oppression under a number of colonial powers – Portuguese, Indian, Arab, German and British – and with trade connections with the entire world. Zanzibar was a cosmopolitan society before globalisation.

But the primary strand in his writing is the refugee experience, drawing on his own personal life.

“Gurnah’s itinerant characters find themselves in a hiatus between cultures and continents, between a life that was and a life emerging; it is an insecure state that can never be resolved,” Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee, wrote in his biographical sketch of Gurnah.

His debut novel, Memory of Departure, from 1987, is about a failed uprising and is based in Africa.

His second work, Pilgrims Way from 1988, explores the multifaceted reality of life in exile. The protagonist, Daud, is confronted with the racist climate of his new homeland, England.

His third novel, Dottie (1990), is about a black woman of immigrant background growing up in harsh conditions in racially charged 1950s England.

She feels rootless in England and attempts to create her own space and identity through books and stories; reading gives her a chance to reconstruct herself.

His most important work so far has been his fourth novel, Paradise (1994). The hero Yusuf, is based on the Biblical and Quranic prophet Joseph.

Yusuf’s story is set against the backdrop of colonial German East Africa in the late 19^th century. Yusuf is forced to abandon Amina, the woman he loves, to join the German army he had previously despised.

Admiring Silence (1996) and By the Sea (2001) are again based on the refugee experience.

Desertion (2005) tells the story of a doomed romance between an Englishman and the daughter of a Muslim merchant at the start of the 20th century in Zanzibar.

Gurnah’s latest novel, Afterlives from 2020, is again set at the beginning of the 20th century, a time before the end of German colonisation of East Africa in 1919.

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