She finds an unlikely companion in December the Ugandan houseboy. He creates friction that constantly threatens the family’s peace and unity ironically being like Amin the autocrat, who hangs over their lives constantly.Īs the family matriarch, Jaya wields the soft power to keep the family peaceful and united. Being the firstborn male and seemingly more physically adept sibling of the family, Pran takes up a dominant position because it is imagined it is his to occupy. Pran’s passion is admirable but it is difficult to like and trust him all the time as one weighs his actions against his own or the family’s benefit. His drive to save it – even after they have been forced to abandon it – hangs over his relationship with his wife Asha, with his brother Vijay, and eventually with his mother Jaya. To Pran, the family business is not only a means of livelihood but also a sense of pride and identity. Told by an omniscient narrator, the story is character-driven with each chapter focusing on one character – the exception being Motichand and Pran who get weaved in the others’ story. After the expulsion decree they are too embarrassed to admit their folly but still hear it from Ugandan servants like Gres who says, ‘Perhaps if you’d all spent a little more time worrying about other people before, they wouldn’t hate you so much that they want you gone.’ ‘ We helped them build this country up, made Britain wealthy too, but they’ve forgotten all that commonwealth business now.’ They seem remiss to the fact that they created a social and political divide from the Ugandan community and its problems, by only focusing on their businesses and setting up comfortable lifestyles for themselves.
The Asian community is left feeling bewildered and betrayed because history is not on their side as Pran puts it. The novel is divided in two sections Shah manages to navigate the layered tensions that occupy the characters’ lives first in Uganda in those last days before their expulsion, then in their new lives after they have been driven out of Uganda.
In Kololo Hill, Neema Shah has put human faces to a horrid scar on Uganda’s history, while tactfully navigating themes of the British Empire, nationalism, home, and displacement of people whom various histories seemed to be in cahoots to erase. The story is set against a morbid backdrop of curfews and military night patrols, disappeared people, and rumours of hacked bodies floating on the Nile Ugandans and Indians alike being violated in all manner of ways by Amin’s soldiers. Motichand, Jaya, Pran, Asha, and Vijay are no exception to the panic that builds up in the Asian community as they face the grim reality that they must leave the life they have built in Uganda. The novel Kololo Hill follows one Ugandan Indian family in 1972 when Amin issues a decree expelling all Ugandan Asians within ninety days.
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