Harare Review of Books

304 pp. March 18, 2025, Bloomsbury Publishing/Riverhead Books. Fiction.

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Karim is born out of a loveless marriage. His mother Raya consents to marrying a much older man to protect her family’s honour: A young freedom fighter has taken interest in her and will not suit. The marriage is unhappy, and Raya soon flees with Karim; but she is unable to be the mother to him that he needs, and a short time later is out of his life, married to another man and living in Dar Es Salam. Karim eventually reconciles with his mother, and divides his time between Zanzibar and Dar.

A bewildered Badar, fourteen years old and knowing he’s not loved by his adoptive family (although his adoptive mother does what she can) is dragged from the village to Dar es Salaam, into the employ of Raya and her new husband, Haji (which is how he later comes to meet Karim). The couple treats him kindly and he finds a measure of happiness there; but there’s a secret he is unknowingly part of, and everything soon comes to a head. Karim is the one who steps in and rescues him.

This novel is about Karim and Badar’s parallel and then intersecting and intertwined lives. The brilliant Karim is without a mother’s love during his formative years, but has many advantages and privileges over the orphaned and impoverished Badar. Badar’s story is, as he says to himself at some point in the novel, one of endurance; that of Karim is the evolution of one of Africa’s future Big Men, with all of the moral corruption that entails. None of this, though, Gurnah suggests, is inevitable; and readers will reflect on the forces that have shaped each of these men’s lives.

The women of the novel serve mainly as some of these forces: Raya, Karim’s absent mother and Badar’s benefactor and kind employer; Badar’s stepmother, helpless in the face of her husband’s silent rage to fully protect Badar; and then there’s Fauzia, the loved one who becomes a wife.

Theft is a fairly quiet novel of some beauty, focussed on character studies. It’s suffused with a sense of place, particularly the parts set in the countryside and in Zanzibar’s old town. Gurnah takes the time to make mild commentary on the destructive influence of both tourism and ‘white savourism’ on Tanzanian and Zanzibari life and culture: while we often hear about destructive tourism, it’s the aid workers who helicopter in and leave a trail of destruction behind in these lives with their contemptuousness and condescension. The theft of the title is an echoing and effective theme across the novel—not just one theft, and not just the literal stealing of possessions, but that of potential, of personal independence, and in relationships. But this is not a gloomy novel: even for the most undeserving of characters, Gurnah offers an understanding of human frailty.

Compulsively readable. Recommended.

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