By Steve RE Pereira
For those of us who are East African Asians and of a certain generation, Hafsa Zayyan’s novel We Are All Birds of Uganda is far too disturbingly familiar. Published by #Merky Books, a British imprint founded in a collaboration by the British rapper Stormzy with Penguin Random House UK to publish stories ‘far too often underrepresented’, the novel is a timely reminder of a watershed moment in the history of the South Asian diaspora.
In August 1972, the then President of Uganda, Idi Amin Dada, declared Asians in Uganda personas-very-non-grata. Amin gave the Asian community ninety days to surrender all properties and possessions and exit the country. Dispossessed of everything bar two suitcases and fifty pounds per family, the Ugandan Asians, in a mass evacuation, dispersed across the western world, particularly to Britain as its colonial subjects.
We Are All Birds of Uganda is centred around that Uganda expulsion. The novel’s themes of displacement, the schism between cultural and a national identity, anxiety around belonging/not belonging are not particular to East African Asians. However, Zayyan, herself of Pakistani West African heritage and married into a British Ugandan Asian family, is clear-eyed in capturing the specifics of the race politics of the Asian East African experience and its impact across generations.
Despotic lunacy notwithstanding, the issue of race was central to the Amin edict. In the ’60s and ’70s, as the newly independent nations were unshackling themselves from colonial chains and grappling with nascent notions of national identities, the question of the minority Asian populations was troubling. The social construct in East African countries was still colonial in its racially determined social segregation. We Asians largely existed in our self-contained communities. There was very little integration with the African Ugandan population who sat beneath us in the social hierarchy or with the Europeans (British and anybody white) perched far above the fray. Amin’s main complaint that we had kept ourselves apart as a closed community and refused to integrate with Africans was patently true.
The problem was exacerbated by economics. While there were Asian traders in East Africa centuries before Livingston got lost and found there, most of us were brought into East Africa in the 1890s by the British to construct railways. Over the years, others came, particularly those with an entrepreneurial bent. We had thrived in East Africa under the colonial system. In Uganda, by 1972, though we were less than 1% of the population, Asians controlled 90% of the economy. We possessed all the major industries, owned all the shops on the main streets, and monopolised the supply of all goods and most services. The African were locked into cycles of subservience in the Asian-controlled market.
When Amin kicked us out of Uganda, it really shouldn’t have been the shock we claimed it was. There was precedence. The bloody Zanzibar revolution in 1964 was an attack by African nationalists on Arab and South Asian economic and cultural dominance. In 1967 Tanzania nationalised major industries, including swaths of Asian-owned private property, and in 1968 Kenya introduced restrictions around work permits, which prompted a mass immigration of Asians to Britain.
So many of us left for pastures we presumed safer. Some of us could relegate our African experience to just another hyphen in our much-hyphenated notion of identity. For others, it was a traumatic negation of a hard-won and much-deserved identity and sense of belonging.
It is against this background that Zayyan sets We Are All Birds of Uganda. The novel’s narrative is split over two locations and two timeframes, moving between a young, corporate lawyer Sameer living in contemporary London, and his grandfather Hasan in 1970s Uganda. The dual narratives explore racial tensions, culture, and the search for belonging.
Born in Britain after his parents and grandparents arrived as refugees from Uganda, Sameer lives the dream life he thought he wanted. His father’s booming chain of restaurants (called Kampala Nights, natch!) gets Sameer a private school education, a Cambridge law degree and lands him a highly paid job with a renowned firm. But then things start unravelling for Sameer, who has until that point has managed to cocoon himself somewhat naively and myopically from British racial politics by his economic privilege. A series of unsettling events brings his Indian Muslim identity into sharp focus. Feeling betrayed and estranged from his British identity, Sameer impulsively decides to go to Uganda, explore ancestral roots, and find himself.
In alternating chapters, Zayyan thematically twins Sameer’s story with his grandfather Hasan’s narrative. Hassan’s story is an epistolary one: a series of letters to the love of his life, his deceased first wife, Amira, who died somewhat mysteriously in a storm. Beginning in Kampala 1945, then Britain in the ’70s, and ending back in Kampala in 1981, the letters detail the trajectory of Hasan’s life. He recounts the halcyon childhood of the colonial days, the growing hostility of the post-independence period, and the trauma of exile and relocation in Britain. It is an account of an increasingly fraught struggle with an overwhelming sense of dislocation and fragmentation of identity of and purpose.
Hasan’s preoccupation is his relationship with Abdullah, an African Ugandan. As was typical for the time and place, Abdulla was brought into the family as Hasan’s companion when they were both children. Despite the social constraints dictating relationships between Africans and Asians, Abdullah becomes Hasan’s trusted friend and second-in-command in the family business. Tragically, that friendship becomes Abdullah’s undoing. Zayyan’s nuanced account of the power dynamics and politics of that cross-racial friendship in the 1960s and 70s Uganda rings far too disturbingly true.
Zayyan leaves a potentially potent love triangle storyline involving Hasan, Abdulla, and Hasan’s first wife Amira frustratingly opaque and underexplored. However, it sits rather too neatly alongside a romance that blossoms between Hasan’s grandson Sameer and Abdulla’s granddaughter Maryam when Sameer returns to Uganda. Maryam, living with her father, Abdulla’s son, in what used to be Hasan’s house, is initially suspicious of Sameer, this returned Asian, and his motives. She is not unnaturally concerned that he is on a version of a neo-colonialist reclamation project. But Sameer is newly ‘woke.’ He is a harbinger of a new future, tidily offering a bridge linking generations of the race divide.
It’s not quite a happy-ever-after ending, though. Zayyan is savvy enough not to take that simplistic way out. There is no easy solution to the racial tensions bubbling and festering through generations and continents. The last few lines of the novel make that rather abruptly clear. Being ‘other,’ never entirely belonging anywhere anymore, that sense of dislocation and discombobulation is the permanent lot of us diasporic Asians.
The study guide that concludes We Are All The Birds of Uganda suggests that the novel targets a young adult audience and it does sometimes, particularly the Hasan sections, read like a primer. However, it is a resonant, powerful, insightful read that offers a rare perspective on race, culture, and belonging. It is a moving recount of a time that is far too swiftly becoming a forgotten historical footnote.
Image credit: Merky Books
Steve RE Pereira is a Melbourne based Goan-Tanzanian-Canadian-Australian queer-identified writer and Cultural Producer