The Asian diaspora did not produce a seminal or voluminous legacy of literature although Asian businesses founded and supported pioneer newspapers in East Africa.
Neema Shah joins this sparse but important canon of Asian-African literature with her debut novel Kololo Hill (Picador, 2021), the focus of which is also the interrupted and scattered lives of the Asian exodus. Nazareth, a friend, long-time faculty member of the renowned International Writing Programme (Iowa), and author of The General is Up (1984), follows the unravelling of Asian lives in the wake of Idi Amin’s expulsion order. Vassanji and Peter Nazareth remain the gold standard in fashioning the Asian protagonist out of East Africa.
While academic research can document history, it is only in the storytelling of fiction narratives that we can experience the intimacy and interiority of the people who inhabit history. Metcalf and Mangat, latterly, have somewhat remedied this lapse with their investigations into the Asian presence, in what came to be known in the late 19th century as British East Africa. Despite the centrality of the transoceanic trade between the Indian peninsular and the Swahili coast which predates colonialism, Africa has been largely interrogated through the colonial gaze of Europe. Will they all make it to safety in Britain and will they be given refuge if they do?Īnd all the while, a terrible secret about the expulsion hangs over them, threatening to tear the family apart.Undoubtedly, as Metcalf in Imperial Connections, wryly notes, the historiographies of sea-empires and their outposts in Africa have been Eurocentric. But violence is escalating in Kampala, and people are disappearing. For his mother, Jaya, it means saying goodbye to the house that has been her home for decades. They must take only what they can carry, give up their money and never return.įor Asha and Pran, married a matter of months, it means abandoning the family business that Pran has worked so hard to save.
When you're left with nothing but your secrets, how do you start again?Ī devastating decree is issued: all Ugandan Asians must leave the country in ninety days. From the green hilltops of Kampala, to the terraced houses of London, Neema Shah's extraordinarily moving debut Kololo Hill explores what it means to leave your home behind, what it takes to start again, and the lengths some will go to protect their loved ones.
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