Kololo Hill

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.