![]() ![]() The South Asian community, in fact, amassed large amounts of wealth and gainfully employed the locals in their homes and businesses. Pran runs a marginally successful business - as did many Indians at the time in Uganda’s capital city Kampala. The characters are fictional, but the incidents narrated are based on actual events. The four main protagonists, whose perspectives propel the story forward, are a family of Indian Gujarati origins: Jaya, her sons Vijay and Pran, and Pran’s new bride Asha. Shah’s well-researched debut novel Kololo Hill explores the life and times of those South Asians who called Uganda home. Her family left the Subcontinent in the 1940s and settled in East Africa, from where they moved again to the United Kingdom, where Shah was born. A few thousand of these workers chose to stay back in Uganda and thus created a small community of South Asians, which grew to almost a hundred thousand by the mid-20th century.Īuthor Neema Shah’s background is similar. However, a more obscure chapter in the gambit of post-colonial horrors is the story of a group of unsuspecting Indians, who were shipped by the British to Uganda in the late 1800s, to work as indentured labourers on the Kenyan-Ugandan Railway. ![]() ![]() The horrifying accounts of Partition and slavery are indelibly etched in our collective consciousness. ![]() The reverberations of British colonialism and imperialism are profound enough to be lapping at our cultural ideology and intellectual identity to this very day. ![]()
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