Neema Shah’s grandparents left India in the 1940s and moved to Kenya and Tanzania, where her parents were born. Her family was so-called ‘twice migrants’ who had roots in one country, built a life in another and moved to a third (the UK).
“I often wondered where our stories were on the bookshelves and this spurred me on to write. There was also the wider story of the 80,000 Ugandan Asians who were expelled by brutal ruler Idi Amin with only 90 days to leave. This story always fascinated me. Like many immigrants and children of immigrants, I’d often wondered what it would be like to leave everything you know and love behind, to start again. I decided to write a novel – Kololo Hill - focusing on a family who are forced to leave everything behind except their devastating secrets,” said Neema Shah, as she spoke to Asian Voice about her debut novel, published by Picador in hardback, ebook and audiobook and available to buy now.
The contemporary relevance of the book
Unfortunately I think the concept of forced migration and starting over again will always be topical. I wrote the novel against the backdrop of Brexit, the Windrush Scandal and the rise of Trump and all those elements fed into my writing.The ground beneath me felt a lot less secure, I found myself asking where my home was as a first generation British Asian and whether others could force me out? It was inevitable that I explored those feelings and experiences in Kololo Hill.
What makes people resilient in migrating and adapting to a new place?
One of the things I’ve learnt during the writing of the novel is that there is no one type of person that will remain resilient under the circumstances of forced or economic migration. Some thrive by adapting, integrating and ‘accepting their lot’ in their new country, some survive solely by convincing themselves that they’ll be able to go back to their home one day. I explore these differing views through the various characters of Kololo Hill because I wanted to show the nuances and the conflicts that come with that. We need to remember that those who migrate could be any one of us and that we’d all develop resilience in different ways.
On an emotional level though, I think many migrants maintain connections to their homelands through music, through language and food – all things I explore in my novel. On the flip side, they also learn to adapt those familiar things, absorbing different elements of their host cultures. For example, in my family we eat coconut cassava – or mogo, as it’s known in Swahili. We spice this Kenyan staple vegetable with cumin and coriander. My view is that the people who survive best are those who are willing to be flexible and adapt, but who do so without forgetting and losing their connection to home.
Idea behind the title
Kololo Hill is a real place on a hill in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. Traditionally, the top of the hill was where the white Europeans tended to live, in beautiful villas and mansions. After Independence, wealthy Asians moved into those empty homes. Below them lived the middle class Asians, below them were the ethnic Ugandans. The family in Kololo Hill live somewhere in the middle of the hill and it’s the home they leave behind. Aside from that, I love the way it sounds and looks on the page!
Why should Asian Voice readers grab a copy?
My novel explores the lives of a single family, recently married Asha and her husband Pran, his brother Vijay and their parents Jaya and Motichand. The story looks at their lives in Uganda pre-expulsion and how these different characters cope with fundamental changes to their entire lives, which are of course the echoes of the real-life stories of many Ugandan Asian refugees of 1972. I hope that people will help people understand more about the Asian diaspora and learn more about a key point of both British and Asian history.
