12 Afrasian Prisms of Postcolonial Memory 12
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12 12 Afrasian prisms of postcolonial memory German colonialism in East Africa and the Indian Ocean universe in contemporary anglophone and German literature Dirk Göttsche Despite the prominent role of scholars from India and the Arabic world in anglophone postcolonial theory, postcolonial research in modern lan- guages has often focused on transatlantic connectivities and the relationship of individual overseas countries with individual European states and North America. The synergies between postcolonial studies and slavery studies, as reflected prominently in the concept of the “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy 1993), have tended to reinforce this selective approach to the global history of colonialisms and their legacies. International historical research and some strands of literature in various languages, however, have recently acceler- ated the exploration of the equally dynamic historical connectivities across the Indian Ocean—before, throughout, and after the age of European impe- rialism—which underlines the significance of South-South relations. Since the days of Egyptian antiquity, and thanks to mastery of the Monsoon winds, East Africa, the Arabic world, India, Indonesia, Madagascar, and to some extent China have been linked through a history of trade— ranging from natural produce to gold, ivory, and slaves—as well as the move- ment of people, cultural practices, ideas, and religions. These connections led to some of the oldest diasporas in human history and to cosmopolitan cultural exchange, in particular between legendary harbor towns such as Zanzibar, Kilwa, Mombasa, Mascat, Bombay, Goa, Calicut, and Canton (Guangzhou) (see Karugia 2017; Schulze-Engler 2014). Recent research has rectified the colonial narrative of European superiority by showing that— well into the eighteenth century and, locally, such as in the case of Zanzibar and Madagascar, into the late nineteenth century—the Portuguese, French, British, Dutch, and German ventures of the early modern period merely added new competitors to a well-established Indian Ocean infrastructure. Only in the course of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did politi- cal crises in India and the imperial turn of European colonialism rewrite the political map of the Indian Ocean. But even at this stage, European colonial occupation and exploitation continued to build on the established infra- structure of the Indian Ocean universe (see Hawley 2008a; Alpers 2014; Afrasian prisms of postcolonial memory 218 Dirk Göttsche Pearson 2015; for Zanzibar and Madagascar see Campbell 2005; Nicolini 2012). The use of existing Arab-Swahili caravan routes, including relevant expertise and labor, by European colonial pioneers such as Richard Burton, Henry Morton Stanley, or Oscar Baumann, and later also by the German and British military and administration, are a prominent case in point. As is the fact that British East Africa and British relations with Zanzibar, in the nineteenth century the hub of a trading network stretching into the African interior and all the way to the Congo, were administrated from British India, building on the long-established role of Indians in the commerce, administration, and finance of the Arab-Swahili economy (see Mangat 2012, 1–63). At the same time, there is an older history of African immi- gration to Western India and Sri Lanka, which accelerated with the spread of Islam (see Oka and Kusimba 2008, 208–209) and is still reflected today in the distinct culture of the so-called “Sidi,” the descendants of African slaves in India, and other African diasporic communities that have recently attracted postcolonial attention.1 Both anglophone world literature and contemporary German literature engage with this multi-layered history of the Indian Ocean universe, often combining the postcolonial memory and critique of European imperialism with the validation of Indian Ocean history and its cosmopolitanisms. This case study focuses on four authors and novels which combine the literary representation of Indian Ocean connectivities with the critical memory of German colonialism in today’s Tanzania: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994), Ilija Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler (The Collector of Worlds, 2006), Hans Christoph Buch’s Sansibar Blues (2008), and M.G. Vassanji’s The Magic of Saida (2012). Gurnah (*1948) and Vassanji (*1950) both come from the Indian diaspora in East Africa but moved to the UK and Canada respectively; Bulgarian-born German author Trojanow (*1965) has lived in Kenya, India, and South Africa, amongst others, before more recently moving from Germany to Austria; Buch (*1944) is a well-traveled German pioneer of the “postcolonial gaze” (Lützeler 1997), with particular experience of the Caribbean and Africa. All four authors thus share cosmo- politan experiences reflected in their novels, and their narratives all work with advanced postcolonial poetics. Their Afrasian prisms of postcolonial memory are both similar and different in the way they portray the experi- ence of German colonialism in East Africa and they all encourage re-con- ceptualizations of postcolonial critique from an Indian Ocean perspective. My case study therefore combines two objectives: On the one hand, it aims to promote comparative postcolonial literary studies, placing the rediscovery of colonialism in contemporary German literature (see Göttsche 2013) in context, reading prominent sources in conjunction with anglo- phone novels on the same theme. On the other hand, it asks how the novels’ critical rereading of German and European colonialism from the perspec- tive of Indian Ocean narratives relates to recent criticism of established postcolonial theory by scholars working on the Indian Ocean as a space Afrasian prisms of postcolonial memory 219 of Afrasian interactions. John C. Hawley, for example, has suggested “that the Indian Ocean world offers a philosophical challenge to the hegemony of Western modernity” (Hawley 2008b, 5); he sees the history of interaction between Africa and India, in particular, as an example of “mutual exchange on economic and cultural levels that continues to run parallel to the cur- rent dominance of the West” (Hawley 2008b, 10), opening up “alterna- tive universalisms” and “the notion of a globalization from below (from the global south, in one imaginary, from subalterns, in another)” (ibid., 8). Comparing conditions across the Black Atlantic with those across the Indian Ocean, Isabel Hofmeyr, South African scholar of African literature, has taken this line of inquiry one step further, reading the Indian Ocean as a “complicating sea” and “a method” that questions “our ideas of colonial and postcolonial histories, which tend to be turned into binary stories of colonizer versus colonized, white versus black” (Hofmeyr 2012, 584, 587; also see Hofmeyr 2007), an approach unsuited for the multi-layered condi- tions of Afrasian interaction. In addition, she argues, “[t]he Indian Ocean [also] requires us to take a much longer perspective” than one focused on the period of European colonialism and subsequent decolonization; it necessitates “a revision of older ways of thinking about diaspora” and warns against “the pitfalls of both anticolonial and colonial approaches” (Hofmeyr 2012, 589, 587). Critical self-reflection has noted the dangers of “Indocentrism” and “romanticising Indian-African interactions” (Schulze- Engler 2014, 160) in cosmopolitan conceptualizations of the Indian Ocean universe. Gaurav Desai has suggested more cautiously that “Indian Ocean exchanges and African-Asian interactions […] alert us both to the possi- bilities of interracial and interethnic collaborations as well as the potential derailment of such alliances” (Desai 2013, 25). Beginning, like others in the field, with Amitav Ghosh’s travel narrative, In an Antique Land (1992), and concluding with Vassanji’s first novel, The Gunny Sack (1989), Desai sees such postcolonial literature negotiate “the pressing competing claims of indigeneity and diaspora, of secularism and religious belief, of hybridities and discourses of purity, of ethnic identities and political goals, and of (neo) liberal democracies and socialist aspirations” (Desai 2013, 25). It is along the lines of tensions such as these that the novels analyzed here remember East African experiences of (German) colonialism in the context of deeper Indian Ocean history. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise: Reconstructing the Swahili universe in the heyday of European imperialism Abdulrazak Gurnah’s acclaimed novel Paradise (1994) is at one level a post- colonial Bildungsroman of its young protagonist, the Swahili boy Yusuf from the East African interior, who is “pawned” at the age of 12 to a rich Arab merchant from one of the coastal trading centers “to secure his father’s debt to the merchant” (Gurnah 2004, 47). Employed in the merchant Aziz’s 220 Dirk Göttsche town shop as assistant to the shop manager, an older Arabic youth who also works off his father’s debt and acts as his mentor, Yusuf is then taken to one of Aziz’s business partners in the African interior for a year before being asked to join a second, much larger trading mission to the Western shore of Lake Tanganyika, which ends in life-threatening failure. Back with his mentor Khalil in the town shop, he undergoes a dangerous ‘éducation sentimentale’ with Aziz’s wife and her slave-like servant, Khalil’s adopted sister, before refusing the merchant’s offer to become his personal assistant and supposedly joining the German askari soldiers instead, the emblems of colonial