By Selma Carvalho
Undoubtedly, as Metcalf in Imperial Connections, wryly notes, the historiographies of sea-empires and their outposts in Africa have been Eurocentric. 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. 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. 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.
M. G. Vassanji and Peter Nazareth remain the gold standard in fashioning the Asian protagonist out of East Africa. 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. 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.
The Asian diaspora did not produce a seminal or voluminous legacy of literature although Asian businesses founded and supported pioneer newspapers in East Africa. These small lives busied themselves with clerical jobs in the colonial administration or running dukans and socialising at ‘the club’ an affectation borrowed from the English, designed to create tiny hubs of exclusion. Club-life laid much emphasis on sportsmanship but there was little aspiration to produce literature or art. So, it has fallen largely to the sons and daughters of those who left Africa and settled in the new worlds of Canada and UK to tell this story. Shah’s mother was born in Kenya and her father in Tanzania who then migrated to the UK.
The re-telling of the story from a distance has its advantages. It has allowed time to heal wounds, it has allowed the story-tellers to view it through a prism of empathy and compassion for both Asians and Africans. Colonialism created a fractured society, dichotomous in nature, those oppressed could also in turn be oppressors. A layered hierarchy loosely based on race and those willing to articulate the values of the dominant race, ensured Britain a place on top, Asians in the middle and indigenous Africans languishing at the bottom, disenfranchised politically and exiled from their lands. If the white highlands were reserved for Europeans, the “brown lowlands” (mostly commercial urban centres) were dominated by Asians. There could be no equality of outcome or indeed even opportunity where so little was yielded to the African. It is against this backdrop of marginalised lives that the Asian exodus following the decolonisation of Africa, has to be examined.
Shah’s novel is set in Kololo Hill, Uganda, 1972, where newly married Asha is just discovering her husband Pran’s peculiarities. Like most Indians of the era, she lives with an extended family of in-laws, Motichand and Jaya, and unmarried brother-in-law, Vijay, who is struggling to rein in his unsettling attraction to her. Their material formations—ownership of a home and a family-run store—afford them a life of privilege, one in which they assert tremendous influence over black populations. There are ‘houseboys’ and ‘housegirls’ (a term which infantilises fully grown men and women) gliding in and out of these lives, largely unobserved, but whose very invisibility is about to exact a collective vengeance. December, the ‘houseboy’ of the Motichand household holds a mirror to the economic disparity within Uganda. Asha and Jaya’s increasing self-awareness leads them to examine how not engaging with Uganda’s systemic problems and by living lives apart from indigenous populations, has led to Asian complicity in the skewed power dynamics within Ugandan society.
But these larger conversations of engagement in a newly constituted, post-colonial Uganda, encounter a seismic shock when Idi Amin’s despotic regime assumes power, disrupting lives, and creating exiles and stateless refugees with a 90 day expulsion decree. The most compelling aspects of Shah’s novel are the atmospheric detail and conversations that take place within the Modichand household as chaos unfolds, lives are dismantled, a lifetime of accretion packed into suitcases, documents hastily organised, and journeys undertaken to unknown destinations. Between 2011-2014, I headed the HLF funded ‘Oral Histories of British-Goans’ project (British Library) and many of these fears were echoed in recordings of East African Goans. The political becomes personal as Shah draws on similar oral histories, ‘Exiles: Ugandan Asians in the UK’ (SOAS), to give voice to the voiceless, recreating familiar echoes of the apprehension felt across bedrooms, kitchens, and reception rooms at the time. Shah narrates absorbing histories of grandparents who arrived in Africa at the turn of the 19th century, possibly from stories she must have gathered as a child. The oral tradition has largely been the only custodian of this narrative. A nod here to Cynthia Salvadori who worked tirelessly to record the oral histories of the pioneer generation in We Came in Dhows (1996).
Back in Britain, conversations about the future of Ugandan Asians were equally stilted with a Conservative government hesitant to assume guardianship over people who were essentially British citizens. Eventually relenting, the resettlement of Ugandan Asians in Britain remains a stellar example of British administrative and logistical efficiency. What often does not get due credit is the part played by numerous Indian businessmen who aided this resettlement by housing and employing those coming in. Shah skilfully re-imagines the Modichand family’s arrival at Stanstead airport, their profound sense of displacement and loss as they struggle in the army barracks-turned-refugee shelters, and their eventual assimilation into an alien society, at times charitable and at other times racist and unyielding.
More than anything, perhaps Kololo Hill opens up conversations about the plight of refugees in the 21st century, the precariousness of domicile, its vulnerability to wars and civil unrest, and at a more personal level, what it means to leave homelands and seek new ones, creating for ourselves a space of shared citizenship and neighbourhood.
Selma Carvalho is the author of three non-fiction books documenting the Goan presence in East Africa, among them Baker Butcher, Doctor Diplomat: Goan Pioneers of East Africa.
Kololo Hill can be purchased here.