SOURCE: “Resisting Ignorance,” in Times Literary Supplement, July 15, 1994, p. 22.

In the following review, Gurnah offers a positive assessment of The Longest Memory.

In the mythology of defiance to racial slavery in the United States, no act has quite the resonance as that of learning to read and write. There were practical reasons for the prohibition of literacy by the slave-holders, but among them was also a desire to have their assumption of the African's degraded humanity fulfilled. For the slave, overcoming the prohibition was a form of resistance to this assumption and a step towards liberation. In The Longest Memory, it is insurgent acts like these which indicate to the overseer that Chapel is bound to run one day.

The events in the novel take place on a Virginia plantation owned by Mr Whitechapel about the turn of the nineteenth century. An old slave, called Whitechapel after his...