Paradise

Gurnah's East Africa on the eve of the First World War: a boy pawned to settle his father's debt grows up in a merchant's household on the Swahili coast, then travels inland with a trading caravan across the dry plateau to the great lakes and the mountains, moving through Arab, African and Indian worlds as German colonial power tightens. The map runs from the coral-stone coast at Kilwa and Bagamoyo up the old caravan road to Tabora, on to Lake Tanganyika, and north to the snow of Kilimanjaro.

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The Swahili coast at Kilwa

The coast

The story begins in the ordinary coastal life of a small boy: a shopkeeper father, a railway halt, and the arrival of the wealthy trader to whom the boy is handed over as security for an unpaid debt. That world of dhows, verandahs and Indian and Arab merchants belongs to the old Swahili coast, of which Kilwa was one of the great historic ports.

Opening chapters, the coastal world

inspired by Gurnah does not name the coastal district, but the old coral-stone trading towns of the southern Swahili coast are its clear model; this marks Kilwa Kivinje, a historic caravan terminus, as a representative point.

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The merchant's coastal town, Bagamoyo

The coast

The boy grows up in the household of the merchant, working in the shop and tending the walled garden with its pool and fruit trees that gives the book its title. The trader's town is a coastal caravan port of exactly the kind Bagamoyo was, the place where goods and people gathered before the long march inland.

The merchant's household and garden

inspired by The merchant Aziz's town is never named in the novel; Bagamoyo, the mainland port where caravans formed up for the interior, is used here as the representative coastal type.

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