Beware white women: a Dickensian masterpiece of modern Africa

The Herald Scotland

09-06-2025

Or I could simply say that when I got within 50 pages of the end of Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah I panicked that it would all soon be over and I'd have to say goodbye to its world and its characters, some of whom I'd come to love, some of whom I despised.
All the learning would come to end, the lessons I'd been taught about the food and fashions of east Africa, the history of Zanzibar, the culture of people far removed from me through distance but exactly the same as me, my friends and my family in their shames and ambitions, failings and braveries.
This is the first book Gurnah has written since he won the Nobel Prize. Be in no doubt, his talents remain undimmed. If anything this is his most affecting book, in terms of its emotional heft, and his most important given its ruthless dissection of colonialism and the hangover which remains for both Africans and Europeans.
Theft is intensely political, but its politics are almost invisible. It isn't hectoring. You aren't being lectured. You aren't even aware that history is being laid on the anatomy table.
Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Image: Bloomsbury)
This is a book about family and friendships. Yet its message reaches right to the poisoned root of the relationship between Africa today and the Europe which exploited the continent for two centuries.
This is a book you want to stand up and applaud when you finish.
The comparison with Dickens is apt. Like Dickens, Gurnah's lead character is the classic 'orphaned boy'. Badar has no mother and father. He's raised by distant relatives who care little for him, then farmed out to another family as a servant.
I must tread carefully, for fear of ruining the plot, but we're in David Copperfield territory here, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby.
It feels somehow wrong to equate Gurnah with Dickens. To do so is almost the kind of inward-gazing colonial act he takes his scalpel to, but the comparisons are too strong to avoid.
Theft, like any Dickens novel, is driven relentlessly forward by character. You cannot resist the company of his creations. The story is addictive and page-turning. Again like Dickens. This blend of character and story is so heady it hides the very powerful, very political points the writer makes. Again like Dickens. Though Gurnah has a subtlety Dickens lacks.
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Midway through, Badar is falsely accused of theft. Initially, it seems this gives us the book's title. However, as the novel closes, we learn that the theft Gurnah is exploring isn't one of property or money. To understand the theft Gurnah is really investigating, we must turn to the white characters - specifically, and uncomfortably, white women. It's the action of white women who explain the metaphor of theft.
Again, I'll say no more, lest I ruin a moment in the book, which for white readers is deeply troubling but horribly and shamefully recognisable. After all, who are history's great thieves if not our colonial ancestors who stole the very land from under the feet of the peoples they invaded and ruled? Are we more like them even today than we care to acknowledge? Do we still have the thief's mind?
Like Dickens, Gurnah expertly dissects broken families. There's no family here not carrying some secret, some shame, some guilt. Children are abandoned, raised by relatives, shipped off. Parents disappear, sleep around, hurt their kids.
There's one scene of physical violence when a character we began by loving but come to loath harms their own baby in the most ghastly way. It's a moment of shocking horror in a novel that's otherwise tender, even when dealing with the pain of poverty and humiliation.
In essence, Theft tells the story of young and impoverished Badar, taken under the wing of the slightly older and much wealthier Karim. The pair set out to make their way in 1990s Tanzania as it juggles modernity and tradition: a nation trying to maintain its dignity amid the interference of western charity workers who use Africa to burnish their own fake sense of virtue.
They're nothing but modern missionaries, dressing the colonial mindset in the clothes of progressive liberalism. Much more harm is done than good, and those harms crowbar their way into the lives of Badar and Karim.
While Badar and Karim are the twin poles the book revolves around, the supporting cast is dominated by strong women characters, from Karim's feckless and selfish mother, to the modern but diffident Fauzia.
This isn't a book which simply turns white characters into monsters, though. Indeed, white characters cause harm through thoughtlessness, self-absorption and carelessness. Black characters can be just as unpleasant: vengeful, cruel, petty, intolerant.
Damage is inherited. Damaged parents create broken children, and it takes great courage to overcome this inheritance. The same is true of countries. How do they recover from the damage of colonialism? Do they inherit the sins of the coloniser?
What matters to Gurnah is the simple contents of a human soul. It's irrelevant if you're rich or poor, had good parents or bad, come from a country of colonisers or the colonised. It's the heart inside you which shapes your humanity.
Badar wonders to himself if white people come to Africa as they 'feel entitled to please themselves because in the end it was they who mattered'. The same is true of men in their behaviour towards women in this book, and parents towards their children.
Damaged people hurt others as they believe they are all that matters. In their pain, they cannot see the lives of others.
What Gurnah does is paint a picture of how empathy is the escape mechanism. If we can find that key within us we can save ourselves from the horror of history and the pain of family. In the end, if we're to be human, empathy is all we've got.