Kololo Hill: Neema Shah

Having spent 4 weeks in Uganda only recently, others will be better positioned to evaluate Neema Shah in terms of authenticity. Kololo Hill deserves praise as a novel and seems realistic to this traveler and university economist. I'm also interested in the writings of Goretti Kyomuhendo and Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, who grew up in Uganda. I gather the experience of Indians in Kololo then was so fraught. Shah still adds moving flourishes of generosity and life beyond survival. A few storylines have novel twists. The narrative is strong and artful in the hands of a professional writer. It didn't all come alive as often as I hoped, putting me there in the flow of drama, largely due to my limitations as a reader. Overall, I'm very glad to have spend time with it. When I finished, I passed it to a hotel receptionist in Gulu who asked to read it.

Uganda, 1972—A family of Asian immigrants now into their second generation in Africa has carved out a life for themselves in this foreign country. As they strive to improve their fortune by reviving the family business, they meet complications beyond mere financial worries. The Ugandan President, Idi Amin has been spreading propaganda accusing Asian immigrants of greed that has native Ugandans at a disadvantage. The family's home of Kampala has turned into a militarized zone where the community does everything it can to avoid run-ins with or even detection by Amin's forces, or else risk being the subjects of the screaming and gunfire they hear just outside their windows every night. News reaches them daily of friends and neighbors who are harassed, assaulted, and abducted.Then, Amin orders the expulsion of all Asians from Uganda within 90 days, and the families must scramble to remain together as they move their whole lives to new countries that may not want them—if they can even get out of Uganda alive in the first place.Kololo Hill follows a family of five, including Pran and Asha, Pran's parents, and his brother. Pran and Asha are newlyweds learning to lean on and trust each other, but distrust and uncertainty roil beneath the harmonious surface. Each of the main characters undergoes levels of introspection and growth as they come to terms with their definitions of home, freedom, and what caring for family truly looks like. This novel is told from the viewpoint of several family members as they strive to do what's right for their loved ones and ensure their safety, financial stability, and relational harmony.Neema Shah opens the novel with dexterity, plunging us right in the middle of the cultural conflict and the tensions growing within the viewpoint family, using visceral images to set the scene and a close third-person viewpoint to immerse us in the minds of the characters. The switch between viewpoints from one chapter to the next keeps us on our toes as we feel the full impact of the dramatic tension between the characters and the disharmony of their individual goals. The characters are complex in their motivations; they truly care for their friends and family, but our trust in each character's judgment wanes as their actions create devastating consequences. The narrative hits us in our nostalgic center as, throughout the novel, each character grapples with their definition of home.In historical novels following refugees, the common theme emphasizes the devastating risk and consequences of flight from the oppression of one's home country, but often times this focus zeroes in on the physical losses and the struggle for equality even as they have accepted a new life in a new country. But Shah's novel takes us beyond the cultural oppression facing refugees and into the aftershocks of being uprooted and the emotional and psychological toll this can have on the family unit. Kololo Hill is about physically reuniting a family once they cross the border, but it's also about the pursuit of their reuniting relationally.My thanks to the publishers for an electronic ARC.

The tale of a first- and second-generation immigrant family who came from India to Uganda and were then expelled, Kololo Hill chronicles a diaspora that isn’t well known outside of the US and mostly forgotten within the UK. That alone makes this novel worth reading. Shah, is perfectly suited to tell this story as her own grandparents and parents made the same journey.What elevates this novel is Shah’s outstanding prose. Her descriptive passages are so deftly written you are immediately transported wherever she needs you to be – a damp London flat, an open air market, crouched in terror in the back seat of a car – so that when the plot pushes you unrelentingly forward you do not resist or second guess. There are multiple narrators in Kololo Hill, but the most compelling for me, by far, was the voice of Asha. Born in Uganda, she grew up in an African country surrounded by an insular Indian community and is suddenly transplanted to England as an adult where she must adjust to yet another culture.Each of the narrators have a different take on the meaning of home and how we struggle to define our own identities in the face of larger political and social forces. Where is home if how you see yourself is tied to a people and not to a land? And where is home if you feel the opposite? Shah offers up both views and skillfully shades the in-betweens.

I had to force myself to keep reading this book, but gave up by page 100. Maybe it was a problem with translation, but the prose had the feel of a not particularly talented ninth grader’s attempt at creative writing. I’m sorry to say that some of it was downright cringeworthy.

I appreciate the insight into the difficult time for Indians living in Uganda under Idi Amin's reign of terror. I was young and grew up in Nairobi at the time. I knew we had family there that managed to get out. Sadly, I never asked them about it once we left Kenya, as everyone dispersed to different parts of the planet, and many are no longer with us. Still, this book gives an excellent account of the challenges facing Indian East African families leaving to go live in the West.The characters are all deeply familiar, and the conversations are too. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting a great read, whether you were there at the time or had nothing to do with East Africa.

In a recent interview, Hilary Mantel astutely summarised our enduring fascination with historical fiction when she declared “history is a process, not a locked box.” The charm of the genre resides largely in this fact - that both in its own time, and through the gaze of subsequent generations, history will always be subject to revision. So it is with Kololo Hill - Neema Shah’s extraordinarily moving and timely debut set amidst Idi Amin’s Ugandan Asian expulsion of 1972.It is perhaps only through the lens of this distance that we can truly appreciate the legacy of these events, beautifully humanised through the struggle of one extended family as they are fractured and forced to leave behind everything they have known and owned in Kampala to make new lives in the UK. Amin’s dictate, motivated by insecurity and greed, was particularly cruel in this regard, giving families only 90 days notice to leave the country, under the threat of rape, internment or, in many cases, murder.This last threat is where the novel begins, when Asha, a new bride, unwittingly stumbles across the terrifying evidence of just how far Amin’s forces will go to enforce their power in Uganda. Her silence about what she has witnessed may seem counterintuitive at first, until we realise that we have been placed in the midst of a situation where silence is the least dangerous of options.Here, and throughout the novel, there is a beautiful symmetry of theme, reflected in both its macro and micro worlds. Hence, the idea of secrecy and silence is not only symptomatic of the response to political events, but within the very fabric of the family the story follows: Asha, the young newlywed who discovers her husband Pran has not been entirely honest with her; Jaya, Pran’s mother, whose secret debt to their black Ugandan “house-boy” has profound and long-lasting repercussions, and Vijay, Pran’s younger brother who, hindered by a genetic disability, harbours frustrations about a life not entirely lived.The growing tensions of their life in Kampala are the subject of the first half of the book and the stakes are necessarily high. Pran, having rescued the family business from his good-natured but woefully lackadaisical father Motichand, is at last approaching some semblance of economic success, giving the family the material comforts that some in the area can only dream about. The African-born son of immigrants from India, Uganda is the only home Pran ( as well as Vijay and Asha) have ever known and this sense of identity and belonging is embedded in the narrative, making the emotional rift of Amin’s declaration even more profound. The novel is assiduous in the detail of their lives - the conversations, the climate, the assumed day-to-day routine of their existence, rendered in beautifully cinematic prose. 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. Food features prominently and exuberantly in the novel, both as a touchstone of culture and a measure of psychological and material well- being.At the same time, there is an elegance and balance in the way Shah acknowledges and explores the differences between the Asian Ugandans and their black counterparts who have often been sidelined economically in the rise of Asian success. The metaphor of Kololo Hill is striking in this regard, acting as a physical barometer of the sociopolitical landscape whereby the black Ugandans historically live at the bottom, near the rubbish tip. 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.This theme of choice is hugely important to the book, specifically in its exploration of the things that are both within and without our control. Given the circumstance of change, is belonging ultimately a state of mind?It is this question which is explored in the second half of the book, once the sadly incomplete family lands in the UK and are faced with the challenges of language, culture and the casual and overt racism of their new environment. Some characters cope better than others, underlining both the generational and psychological differences which exist within individuals. Once again, Shah’s observational skills are admirable, with 1970s London skillfully conjured via both the general and specific details as seen through the eyes of the unfamiliar. Particularly striking in this regard is one of the characters’ adaptation to shopping which involves recognising the colours and shapes of brand logos in the absence of being able to read English, and their humorous distaste for the architecture of Arnos Grove. In a particularly beautiful passage, set during a harsh winter, the appearance of snow is likened to watching stars falling from the sky, mirroring both the interior and external world of the characters in a succinct and powerful way. The novel is also masterly in its handling of flashbacks which never feel forced; weaving fluidly through the present narrative and enhancing it with the presence of memory revisited and subsequently changed by experience. Why is it we only appreciate the things we had, the novel asks, when they are gone?This latter section may seem to lack the considerable tension and pace of the first half of the novel, but to criticise it for that would be a mistake. After the gruelling events in Uganda, it is absolutely psychologically correct for the characters to express their cultural and material shock in these moments of quiet reflection, for it is only after reaching a state of relative safety that the legacy of their experience can be measured. The conflict here is quieter but no less urgent, as individuals come to question not only their culpability in past events but their choices going into the future, with the realisation that dire circumstances can sometimes be the precursor to change for the better. 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.This is an astonishingly assured debut, written with passion and emotion for its subject matter without resorting to sentimentality or political agenda. It is also an incredibly important novel in both the current and enduring climate of interrogating history through the filter of time in order to examine how we may do better for future generations. For this reason alone, it would be disingenuous to give it less than five stars.My thanks to Netgalley and to the publishers Picador for the ARC in return for an independent review.

I recall coming through Heathrow Airport in the early 1970's and being surrounded by Asian Ugandans of all ages in various stages of dress and confusion as they negotiated new difficulties after being expelled from their country by the madman who had charge of the country at that time.Although this is fiction, it is a creative non-fiction in as much as it portrays families who- through no fault of their own other than being industrious - were expelled from the country on ninety days notice having to leave everything they worked for and handed down to them behind, including money.I enjoyed reading this book in as much as it filled the gap in my knowledge of how this affected these victims and how they instantly applied their industry to forging new lives for themselves in a strange country that enjoyed only a temperate climate.It ended a little abruptly for me, after going on overlong in length. It was an uplifting revealtion to me to aspects of my country that we take for granted and without thought- deciduous trees in wintertime, appearing to people for whom such trees are a new experience ina similarly novel climate as 'dead sticks beside the roads' An enjoyable novel

Everytime I read historical fiction my heart breaks into a million pieces, history in many ways is a constant reminder that humans have been prejudiced to their own kind for reasons that cross the clear line of morality by whim or greed.Kololo Hill is a premise that introduced me to a slice of history I was totally oblivious about. A decree by Idi Amin, that changed lives of the Ugandan Asian community in the most unsettling and ruinous manner ordering expulsion with limited means.The author Neema Shah pens this terror through Asha, Pran, Vijay, Jaya and Motichand and December (Adenya) who spent a major part of their lives on Ugandan soil either by birth or as a land of opportunity to start a new life.Jaya, the aging matriarch bears the burden of keeping her family united in the unsettling times of curfews, gunfire and army checkpoints. Asha, the new bride longs for security that a marriage and home offer. Pran, the elder son endlessly works to revive and retrieve all that he can from the family business eventually losing it all to Amin’s devious decree. Vijay, has struggles of his own for being differently-abled.The book is divided into two where the reader gets to discover the horrors of the decree, the destruction of loot, killings and sexual assault by the army on those who are powerless and the escape of the Asian minority community to the safety of UK, Canada, India, USA, etc. The later half speaks about the changed lives of the family and their struggle coping in London to make ends meet; the fear, insecurity, lack of intimacy due to separation in the early months of marriage, loss of pride and the insolent reminders to “go back to your own country” by those around. From a life full of sunshine and lustrous nature to the formal and manicured London life, be it living in army barracks to finding a rooftop home in the cold and dull weather of their new place of living. Kololo Hill is a constant reminder of being forcefully uprooted and deprived- of a home, occupation and respect. It highlights human frailties and insensitivity that take toll of relationships that make life worthwhile.Neema Shah writes her debut with sensitivity and a comprehensive narration with multiple perspectives of all characters who are struggling trying to move on in their own ways trying to find the warmth of traditional home cooked meals, family banter, pride of proprietary and social gatherings of their old home in their new life. I would have loved a little more focus on the disturbing political scenario in Uganda and globally describing the expulsion in more detail than what was described but I’m not complaining, reading Kololo Hill has been gratifying and wholesome in more ways than one!Verdict: Highly recommended!

A poignant, beautiful book that explores what it is to be forced to leave your country and rebuild your lives in another.Focusing on the lives of an Ugandan Indian family, it follows them in the run-up to the expulsion of South Asians by Idi Amin in 1972 and then their later lives in England, a cold and distant country which seems so at odds with everything they have known thus far. It feels like a very relatable story to me as a result of the author's excellent use of details to add depth to the layers within this multi-faceted tale such as the foods they eat, a blend of Indian and African which is something that I recognise within my own family.The Ugandan Indian culture feels spot on to me and I can empathise with the positions of all of the main characters, all of whom are well fleshed out by the author and offer their own nuanced perspective upon each situation. I particularly loved the point of views from both Jaya and Asha as they served to demonstrate the changing position of women with their opposing views at times, coming from two different experiences as Indian women. However, I adore the mutual respect that they have for each other and the way that their relationship deepens throughout the book! The character dynamics are fascinating, there is a richness to each relationship and each of them have a complexity that makes for a vivid and immersive story.One of my favourite things about this novel is the sensitivity with which the author tackles themes of displacement, identity and belonging with the contrast between the two halves of the book. The first half comprises of Uganda, a sunshine land where happiness abounds for the family and where prosperity is theirs, and of Britain, a frozen place where they slowly start to find themselves again despite the challenges. The settings are vivid, visual images as result of the beautiful prose employed by the author and you feel as if you are transported along with the characters in their journey from Uganda to Britain.The novel is brilliant in that it highlights the trauma and pain that many South Asian families faced during this time in an emotive manner that truly is a heart-wrenching tale to read!