Book cover: Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Penguin, 2025)
- Mphuthumi Ntabeni writes a regular book column for LitNet.
Title: Theft
Author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
Publisher: Penguin Random House (2025)
ISBN: 9781324094562
Theft is the first novel Abdulrazak Gurnah has released since winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2021. Epic in a true sense of the word, it follows the intertwining lives of three Tanzanians, Badar, Karim and Fauzia, and their coming of age in the fast-changing world of Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania.
Gurnah, who now lives in Canterbury, England, is a professor of English at the University of Kent. Born in Zanzibar, he has lived in the UK for a long time, but most of his books are set in Tanzania.
Gurnah’s favourite theme – that of a young man sold by family members into what we may term domestic slavery – returns in Theft. His previously successful novel with this theme is Paradise, in which we follow the story of Yusuf, born in the fictional town of Kawa in Tanzania at the turn of the 20th century. Yusuf’s father is a hotelier and is indebted to a rich and powerful Arab merchant named Aziz. Yusuf is pawned in exchange for the cancellation of his father’s debt. He must work as an unpaid servant for the merchant to pay it off. He joins Aziz’s caravan, travelling into the interior to the lands west of Lake Tanganyika, and meeting hostility from local tribes, wild animals and treacherous terrain. As the caravan returns to East Africa, World War I begins and Yusuf encounters the German army as they sweep across Tanzania, forcibly conscripting African men as soldiers. The intertwining of African and Western history is one of my favourite things in Gurnah’s writings. It compels us to look at history in a holistic manner that doesn’t privilege one point of view over others. By so doing, not only does it expose our commonalities, but it also renders the effects of history universal.
In Theft, Gurnah moves slightly away from the genre of historical novel into social realism. The book is set between the ’60s and the ’90s, the period fast becoming Gurnah’s favourite years for ruminating about Tanzanian history. You feel his sense of nostalgia and wonder about what could have been in a personal and national sense. In Theft, Badar, who grew up with a surrogate family, is returned to work for his relatives when he starts causing trouble, due to his hormonal pubescent changes. His surrogate sister accuses him of eyeing her when she is washing. She is a mean character who condescendingly calls Badar “Mkojozi” (Bedwetter), because he used to wet his sleeping mat when he was younger.
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In Theft, Gurnah moves slightly away from the genre of historical novel into social realism. The book is set between the ’60s and the ’90s, the period fast becoming Gurnah’s favourite years for ruminating about Tanzanian history.
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Badar has the luck of an orphan. He has never known his real parents. His mother died of the pandemic (cholera) when Badar was younger. No one in the family knows what happened to his father. One day, he took to the harbour as a stowaway to God knows where. He was never heard of again. The household Badar is sent to work for, in Dar es Salaam, treats him like a hired help, concealing their biological relationship to him. He learns to cook, bake and clean the house. He most enjoys the company of Juma, their gardener, who teaches traditional wisdom, all along hinting to his real identity.
Though treated well, he is soon enough accused of theft. It turns out that his real father is related to the house owner, Haji, and stole money from his father, Uncle Othman, who resents Badar because of this. As his luck would have it, Badar strikes up a protective friendship with the son of the house, Karim, who has come to stay in the house while attending varsity. Karim takes Badar under his wing when he is about to be thrown onto the streets as punishment for his theft. We shall come back to the story after we have learned more about Karim.
The book is written very well, competently tackling issues of the feminine struggle with patriarchal African culture. It begins with Raya, a young woman from the little rural village of Unguja, being married off to an older man, Bakari Abbas. In a relentless struggle against the cruelty of her husband, Raya eventually pretends to visit her home, never to return to her matrimonial house. She chooses the humiliation and social stigma of returning to her parents’ home with her three-year-old boy, Karim. Gurnah writes female characters very well, and vividly delineates the extant impact of patriarchy. He makes feminist theories tangible in the simple and real experiences of African women.
Karim is the main protagonist of the book, but the early struggles of his mother, Raya, lay life-changing foundations for the path of his life. In the second section of the book, we follow Karim’s life, first living with his grandparents when his mother abandons him to marry the pharmacist Haji in Dar es Salaam. Karim moves in with his half-brother when his grandparents die, and stays there until he goes to varsity in Dar. This is where and how he meets Badar.
In Bongo City (Dar), Karim rekindles his relationship with his mother and gets on very well with her husband, Haji, the pharmacist. After he graduates, he marries Fauzia, whose life we also have been following from her village. Theft is a beautifully expansive novel. Overriding her fears of transmitting her mild epilepsy condition, Fauzia eventually falls pregnant and gives birth to a baby girl. Their marriage is challenged by the rigours of married life, postpartum depression and taking care of a very demanding newborn. This situation, too, is used by the author to interrogate the state of modern marriage, another one of his favourite topics that is more developed in the novel Admiring silence. This is still my favourite book from Gurnah’s oeuvre; an unnamed Zanzibari man flees his island in the ’60s, settles in England, becomes a teacher, enters into an interracial relationship and jointly raises a recalcitrant teenage daughter. Autofictional? After 20 years, without having ever visited his Tanzanian homeland, the narrator travels back to Zanzibar to reflect on his past and finds a place that is no longer home. Everywhere, he feels overwhelmed and out of his depth. There is a hint of him starting an affair with a talkative lady he sits next to on the plane back to the UK.
Gurnah’s nostalgia for Tanzanian cuisine and culture is displayed very efficiently in the household of Raya, Karim’s mother. She is a kind and doting mother. The novel, in general, is culturally informative – traditional and neoteric at the same time, when it comes to the delicious cuisine of Zanzibar, the spice island. With his unresolved hatred transference issues toward Badar due to the disappointments left behind by Badar’s father, Uncle Othman is the one who successfully campaigns with his son to fire Badar. Karim saves Badar by inviting him to move to his own house.
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Theft is a well-calibrated book of mannerisms, character development and finding your place in the world – an ordinary family saga that is refreshingly free of African horror/tragedy pornography.
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Badar eventually gets a job working at a hotel. Is it too modest even to admit that the soft spot he has for Karim’s wife is a crush? Karim, who has been discontent, suffering from “unappeased longings” since his wife gave birth to their daughter, incurs a fatal complication by entangling himself with a young, white European guest, Jerry, staying at the hotel where Badar works. And with that we are cleverly introduced to another theft scenario. This metaphorically places us in the mess of colonial and racial theft. Those who have ears shall hear and learn that marriage is choosing to stay, as you learn to cope with things you did not know about the person you are living with.
Theft is a well-calibrated book of mannerisms, character development and finding your place in the world – an ordinary family saga that is refreshingly free of African horror/tragedy pornography. It is written in simple, easy to read language that is not simplistic. It often astounds with original and fresh descriptions and definitions of things. Consider this small passage of a woman (Fauzia) waking up to the sudden realisation of her broken marriage:
Some things seem predictable after they have happened, when before they might have seemed unlikely. He was gone, and it was as if she had known he would be. He was gone, and when he came back, if he came back, she would not be there. She did not want to speak to anyone, not yet. She sat on the sofa, the sun streaming in through the window behind her, considering how to proceed, contemplating what she could retrieve from the wreckage of her life. In her own heart, she had started to suspect that love was ailing some time ago, but she had not known that it would come to this so swiftly. (117)
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