Kololo Hill by Neema Shah

Neema Shan, British Asian, parents East African Asians, and with ancestors from India’; found not many stories were told, about their lives, their stories were not on the book shelves. Her grandparents, were the so-called ‘twice migrants’ who had roots in one country, built a life in another and moved to a third! 

There is also a wider unfamiliar truth, one that very few people seemed to even know about, unless they recalled the news reports from the early 1970s. 80,000 Uganda Asians were expelled by brutal ruler Idi Amin with only 90 days to leave. 

What it would be like to leave everything you know and love behind, to start again. When 'twice migrant' people are told to go to their own country, they often wonder, which is their country? Neema Shah explores these questions through this book which was 34th of 2021.

Refugees always have to start their life from scratch, wherever they go. Women are more accustomed to such changes, as their affiliation to a word called home is different. Men are more prone to identity crises. In addition to the normal plight of the move, one has to face racism too. The book covers the complex process of immigration and refugees, and how different people react to them, with some showing great humanity in the process of embracing them.  So there is kindness and prejudice as well. Anthropologist in Neema shah, with idea of absorbing different culture in food - have included interesting food as well in the book.

What is it like for a family to be forced to leave everything behind and start again? This is the terrifying question at the centre of debut novel “Kololo Hill”. The story hinges upon a significant moment in Ugandan history when in 1971 an officer named Idi Amin became dictator after a military coup. Amidst the brutalities of his new regime, he forcibly removed the entrepreneurial Indian minority from Uganda.  Neema Shah positions Amin's decree halfway through her novel so we follow a family's life in the before and after of this enforced expulsion. This makes it a dramatic and gripping experience because just as we become familiar with the daily life of this family they are uprooted and flung into a new life in England. 

At the start of the novel we find out that Asha is in danger. She has seen something that makes it very dangerous for her. Silence is dangerous as is telling someone what she knows. However, silence seems to be the lesser of two evils. Every one of the characters seems to have a dilemma of epic proportions. This is their country but they are being forced out. They have no choice but to survive. Survival is everything. Life in Kampala is on a knife edge and it’s painfully hard to read how people were so persecuted and worse. When you think that this actually happened although fictionalise in the book, your heart bleeds. For couple Asha and Pran who were recently married it presents an even greater complication because they have different passports so are no longer allowed to live in the same country. They are living with Pran’s father Motichand, mother Jaya, and his brother Vijay. They have a houseboy too by the name of December, ( though he’s much too old to be a boy). December has been with the family since Motichand and Jaya arrived from India, and he means a lot to the family, particularly Jaya, and he too, is one of the minority’s who are in danger at the hands of Idi Amin’s regime. Motichand and Jaya arrived in Uganda from India many years ago, and the beautiful green hilltops of Kololo Hill are very much their home now, they’ve made a decent life for themselves and have been very happy. That was before the expulsion was announced, and Amin’s curfews began, accompanied by an increasingly alarming and violent military presence, mainly directed at those of Asian descent. Not only does this family have to face the fear and challenge of starting a whole new life in a strange country, but to do it with very little money. There was the initial shock of the holding camps, and when our particular family eventually found somewhere to live, it was so vastly different from their beautiful hilltop home in Kampala. Their new home is an old damp, and freezing cold, terrace house in London. There were also the cultural differences, the hardship, and the hostility that they faced on a daily basis.

The catastrophe of the expulsion and the violence this family experiences and witnesses transforms each individual as they struggle to adapt and adjust to their changed circumstances. It's powerful how this novel prompts the reader to question how they would cope if suddenly forced to leave behind the only home they ever knew.

The question of nationality and the meaning of home become so complicated when considering the history of colonialism and the economic disparity between classes in Uganda. The family's community built on an area known as Kololo Hill has clear demarcations between the higher area inhabited by the prosperous Asian community and the lower area with cramped accommodation for black Ugandans. Shah sensitively probes the tensions of these divisions while faithfully representing a family caught in a larger thorny social and political system. The question of their moral responsibility is intriguingly represented in a central mystery concerning what happened to the family's “house boy” December. It was moving following their emotional and physical journey through the revolving perspectives of Asha, her mother-in-law Jaya and her brother-in-law Vijay. Each has a very different point of view and way of coping so I thought it was clever how the author split the story between them. It's especially poignant the way the family recall to each other specific details about Uganda that they loved as a way of not allowing the harrowing experiences of their escape from dominating the memory of their lost country. The novel artfully represents this complex history. 

A poignant story of a family who lost everything they loved, trying to rebuild their lives in a country so different from their own, and one where the welcome they received, was as cold as the weather.