A cast of loosely connected individuals in a small, coastal town of German-occupied Tanzania is the centre of the historical novel Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah.
At the 1885 Berlin Conference European powers had divided up Africa amongst themselves, heralding the ‘Scramble for Africa’. Tanzania, at the time Tanganyika, became a German protectorate. The book begins in 1907 when 26-year-old Khalifa, of mixed African and Indian heritage, is a clerk to Indian merchant Amur Biashara in an unnamed coastal town.
