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Kololo Hill

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Very much a personal story, rather than a political one, it was well told, though a little more clarity around the historical detail would have helped me. The story follows the lives of a Ugandan Indian family, Motichand and his wife Jaya, their two sons, Pran and Vijay and Asha, Pran’s wife, and also their houseboy December an Acholi Ugandan, whose tribe was also being hunted by Idi Amin.

This is a world the reader experiences rather than just reads about, highlighted by the choice detail of the unusual: the specificity of light on the trees; the feel of red dust; the precise way a cooking pot resonates in the silence. There were also the cultural differences, the hardship, and the hostility that they faced on a daily basis. Shah brought the novel to its end point with authenticity and a sense of what the future would hold for all concerned. The characters are beautifully portrayed, each grappling with their own fears, hopes, and losses as they navigate the complexities of leaving everything behind.Navigating a new path and the challenges that come with it, he depicts the continuous efforts made by refugees to reinvent their lives.

In 1972, a devastating decree was issued that all Ugandan Asians must leave the country in ninety days. Despite beginning her life in Uganda during her teen years after marriage and thereby being sentimentally connected to the land, Jaya shows strength and is determined to guide her family towards England to start anew. His Ugandan passport means he’s stateless, he has no safe exit route and yet will more than likely be killed if he stays. This is an astonishingly assured debut, written with passion and emotion for its subject matter without resorting to sentimentality or political agenda. Growing up, I had heard his name thrown around and I knew he was a bad person but I didn’t understand why.The country rapidly descends into administrative anarchy as the supposed protectors (soldiers) became the aggressors thieving, raping, killing, with impunity. At times devastating, I found myself gripped to this story rooted in our history yet scarily still relevant. Unfortunately the choice is not theirs to make, they need to find refuge but not everyone has a valid passport and certainly not all to the same countries. Neema Shah evokes Amin’s Uganda and early 1970s suburban England with both nuance and a fresh and wonderful vivacity.

In this way, Shah allows the actions and moral compass of Amin to become a dialogue between reader and text, as opposed to a one-sided diatribe. It furthermore shows the cruelty, harassment and public beatings by Idi Amin’s soldiers towards Asians and other minor Ugandan tribes. I also remember the day he died because when my parents discussed it, there was a feeling of relief which, even though I didn’t understand at the time, I never forgot. 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. Shah explores the chaos and fear of ordinary people’s lives during Amin’s rule, weaving personal stories of love and betrayal into heightening tension and violence .Not many books explore what it was like for Ugandan Indians under Idi Amin’s rule so it was interesting but also heartbreaking to find out more about this not-very-well-known period in history. Reading about African Indians felt comforting for me because of my own family’s migration from India to Kenya to England and it makes me wish I knew my own family’s history better.

The transition between the two halves of the novel is not only in terms of location and people but also in terms of the emotions running underneath, and she depicts this with clarity and ease. The writing is elegant and poignant, capturing the emotional turmoil and resilience of the characters. From a powerless position these people had to try to rebuild their lives somewhere where they felt largely unwelcome. Kololo Hill” is a testament to the enduring human spirit in the face of adversity and a reminder of the importance of remembering and honoring the stories of those who have experienced displacement and upheaval.A very powerful storyline — a family displaced from their home and struggling to get on with their new life continuously being haunted by the ghost of their pasts and mistakes they’ve made. It is Asha with whom this resonates most profoundly, as a young Asian woman gradually realising the potency of her own agency removed from the assumptive constraints of what she thought she wanted from life. The identity crisis that comes as a part of being a refugee, the heartache that arises from the loss of loved ones, the struggle to safeguard present relationships while trying to figure out “why me? In 1896, the British government took Indians under compulsion to East Africa to build the Kenyan-Ugandan railway, one of the most difficult to be built in the history of the railways.

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