Paradise Found, AD 68–1920

AS TIME PADDLES ON and the cavernous past slowly opens up behind me, I sometimes feel marooned on these isles. An irrepressible yearning takes over, and a quest begins to discover where and when it all began for my roaming tribe, the long search for what Simon Schama has evocatively named the ‘loam of memory’.¹ Older exiles I know from Uganda also find that the old country loiters and calls out to them. They fear that these memories of African days and nights will end up in unremarkable graves or on funeral pyres. I sought out some of them, asked them questions they struggled to answer. It had been too long, many said. Some cried softly; their chests, weakened by the long winters, rattled and whistled. Mr Ravinder Singh thought he was ninety-two though he wasn’t too sure. A civil engineer, he vividly recalled his journey from India to Mombasa when he was just fourteen and the golden years in Uganda: ‘Dear girl, nobody knows about us. Nobody wants to. Blacks have been completely ungrateful. These British would have been nothing without us in East Africa. Always the same with these whites, they rule countries and walk away, never caring. We were over there long before them, that much I know and you must be sure to say in your book.’ I promised that I would. He has since died.