On Abdulrasak Gurnah's Nobel Prize in Literature

By Farooq Kperogi Twitter: @farooqkperogi The announcement of Professor Abdulrasak Gurnah as the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literatur...

By Farooq Kperogi

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

The announcement of Professor Abdulrasak Gurnah as the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature by the Nobel Committee “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugees in the gulf between cultures and continents” gladdened many hearts in Africa--and elsewhere. 

My joy amplified when I realized that Gurnah taught literature at Bayero University Kano’s Department of English and European Languages between 1980 and 1983! When I was admitted to Bayero University, Kano in the early 1990s, I was a student in the Department of English and European Languages for two years before I transferred to the Department of Mass Communication in my third year.

 In many way, this is another (vicarious) Nobel for Nigeria. Professor Wole Soyinka, the first Black African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature captured this sentiment when he said Gurnah's win is equivalent to the prize returning "home."

Interestingly, Gurnah and Soyinka share more in common than being Africans; they are also the only winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature for their body of work written in a second language.

Ali Mazrui once said Wole Soyinka was the only person on earth who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for work he wrote in a language that isn’t native to him. He said this as a putdown during an unfortunate spat with Soyinka. 

I wish Mazrui were alive to witness another non-native-English-speaking African like Soyinka who has won the Nobel Prize in Literature for literature written in English, which he speaks with a uniquely charming Tanzanian accent.

Incidentally, Nobel Laurette Abdulrasak Gurnah’s native language is Swahili—like Mazrui’s! He also represents an identity that Mazrui once called an Afrabian: an embodiment of African and Arab bloodlines, like Mazrui himself was.

Gurnah is a Tanzanian of Arab origins who fled the Tanzanian province of Zanzibar in the 1960s when "Zanzibar went through a revolution which, under President Abeid Karume’s regime, led to oppression and persecution of citizens of Arab origin," according to the Nobel Committee. Mazrui was a Kenyan of Omani origins. 

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