We Are All Birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan: book review

We Are All Birds of Uganda (2021) is set in England and Uganda.

Sameer Saeed is a young hard-working lawyer in London who has just been promoted to the Singapore office to begin in five months time. His colleague Rahool has been attacked and is in intensive care.

Readers learn from letters dating from August 1945 to 1981 that Sameer’s grandfather Hasan from Uganda greq up amid the rise of anti-colonialism, Idi Amin’s regime, and the expulsion of Asian Ugandans from the country. Hasan fled Uganda and decided to stay in England to raise his family.

Hasan’s best friend from Uganda – Mr Shah – fled his country at the same time. Instead of staying in England with Hasan, he chose to returned to Uganda. Mr Shah now has sugar factories in Uganda.

Mr Shah is visiting England. Sameer has six weeks before he starts his new job in Singapore, so he travels to Kampala, Uganda, with Mr Shah in Kampala, for a two-week holiday. In Uganda, Sameer goes to his family home that he has never known.

We Are All Birds of Uganda likens people to birds – residential and migratory: ‘You can’t stop birds from flying, can you Sameer? They go where they will,’ says Mr Shah.

The novel is written in three untitled sections: 1) England, 2) Uganda, and 3) love, religion, and decisions. Sections one and two are reasonably interesting and well-written. However, the final section is rushed, unsatisfying, and disappointing.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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