Maroc - NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 17/Aug 03:06

History as stories

GURNAH is the 2021 Nobel Prize winner for literature. He is from Zanzibar – now part of Tanzania – off the east coast of Africa, and is the author of 11 novels with themes relating to the colonial and post-colonial periods. His Caribbean connection is through his academic interest in Caribbean writing and his personal relationship via his Guyanese wife, fellow academic Denise DeCaires. Jane Bryce is a retired professor of African literature and cinema at UWI, Cave Hill. She was born in Tanzania and has published widely in the areas of contemporary Caribbean and African fiction. She has been living in Barbados since 1992, the birthplace of her daughter. Her other personal Caribbean connection is through her husband, Vincentian poet, Philip Nanton. Zamani – a Haunted Memoir of Tanzania (2023) is her latest book. Quarrels about how poorly literature is taught in schools are legendary. The joy of reading for pure pleasure, inculcated by parents, can be drilled out of us unless one is lucky enough to encounter a gifted teacher who loves stories and can communicate their essence, transformative nature and their unique apercus. History also gets a bad rap. It was at university that I began to enjoy history (extra-curricular). I suddenly understood that history is what we live, that records of the past are highly disputable, that geography shapes history, that culture influences events and that the heroes are not always the story. I learned of the interconnectivity of events, of the responsibility we each bear for the future; and I also came to realise that literature is always about human existence in different lived historical moments. The relevance of geography teaching to history is also criticised. How many of us would know where exactly Tanzania is, let alone Zanzibar, which is an archipelago? People of a certain age might have a passing acquaintance with Tanzania’s experiment with ujamaa and know of its inspirational former president Julius Nyerere. The other exceptions might be people who studied modern history and the post-colonial world or are business people or diplomats. Others, like me, would only have encountered Tanzania through travel or its literature, the way we discover the rest of the world. A most rewarding experience is when everything connects – when history is told as a life story, and when literature and past events meet, especially when it is unexpected, as it is by reading Bryce’s sensitive, deft memoir Zamani and both of Gurnah’s vivid and compelling novels set in Tanganyika, as it was then called: Paradise, set before WWI, and After Lives, which spans WWI to the 1960s. In 2013 Bryce returned to Africa with an ache in her heart. She was invited as a judge to Zanzibar’s international film festival. For her, Zanzibar is “the bridge between memory and whatever this country has become in all the years it’s carried on without me.” Gurnah has been part of the carrying on, growing up in Zanzibar’s post-colonial period and being part of the community that remembers the harsh experiences of German rule in Tanzania and the transition to more benign British rule. That history is told through his fictitious characters, but some of the historical events that are a backdrop to or determine their lives are the very events that shaped the real lives of Bryce’s parents, British colonial civil servants, and resulted in her family being ejected from her birthplace in the 1960s, something we sense Bryce never really overcame. She retraces her family life in Tanzania and finds that the past is alive, her own existence is part of its fabric, and that her family is part of the collective memory from which she has not been excluded. In these works of fiction and nonfiction one is struck by the kindness of the people whom Gurnah’s characters and Bryce encounter and how the most unlikely circumstances can beget it. Gurnah does not focus on the world wars or massacres but rather on the communities of people who exist, even thrive, within them and survive the various political transitions, yet the ruthlessness of German attempts to quell local uprisings appears in both the memoir and the fiction. Both authors recall the decapitated head of the Hehe rebel leader being sent to Germany as a trophy and its eventual return to the Hehe people. Germany’s role as a genocidal colonial power resulting from the 19th-century “scramble for Africa” that carved up the continent between European countries is hardly recalled now, since German colonial rule ended with its WWI defeat. Germany’s more recent WWII genocidal past has overwritten its Africa history, but Gurnah’s fictions help explain why Germany denies Israeli genocide in Gaza and why Germany is Israel’s staunchest European ally. Germany is haunted by the Holocaust; but it may not have come to terms with its dirty past in Tanzania either, even though it apologised in 2023. The post History as stories appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.