Nobel winner Gurnah criticises governments for mistreating migrants

Nobel literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah criticised the “lack of compassion” of governments, including Britain’s, that treat migrants as a problem or a threat.

Gurnah grew up on the island of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania, and arrived in England as an 18-year-old refugee in the 1960s.

He has drawn on his experiences for 10 novels, including “Memory of Departure,” “Pilgrims Way,” “Afterlives” and the Booker Prize finalist “Paradise.”

'Same old ugliness'

Gurnah said migration is “not just my story … It’s a phenomenon of our times.”

The 72-year-old novelist said the tribulations faced by migrants hadn't lessened in the decades since he left his homeland.

“It might seem as if things have moved on, but once again you get new arrivals, same old medicine,” Gurnah told reporters a day after winning the prize. 

“Same old ugliness in the newspapers, the mistreatment, the lack of compassion from the government.”

Gurnah said Britain has become more aware of racism over the decades and had “accelerated” discussion of its imperial past.

But “institutions, it seems to me, are just as mean, just as authoritarian as they were.”

Gurnah said Britain’s detention of asylum-seekers and the Windrush scandal, in which thousands of long-term residents of the UK from the Caribbean were caught up in crackdown on illegal immigration, “seem to me to be just continuations of the same ugliness.”

Gurnah, who holds British citizenship and recently retired as a professor of literature at the University of Kent, urged governments to stop seeing migrants as a problem to be solved.

“These people are not coming with nothing,” he said. “They are coming with youth, with energy, with potential.”

READ MORE: Refugee plight chronicler Abdulrazak Gurnah wins Nobel Prize in literature