📰 Newspapers

‘Like many men of his generation, he tends to push his feelings down from his heart to his toes’: Meera Sodha on her father’s homecoming

‘Like many men of his generation, he tends to push his feelings down from his heart to his toes’: Meera Sodha on her father’s homecoming

After a childhood of grief, hardship and hunger, the Guardian food writer’s father Raj always resisted going back to Uganda. What happened when he finally agreed to accompany her on a bittersweet journey into the past?

The moment I step off the plane and on to the soil of Entebbe it hits me. Uganda is in my blood. This country that had once existed only in my imagination is finally real. The heat is heavy, the earth bright and rich like dark terracotta. I want to capture this moment – me with my 75-year-old dad, back where he was born. A place he never imagined he would return to. I whoop and reach for my camera, turn it towards my father’s face.

“You’re back!” I say.

Continue reading...

In brief

After a childhood of grief, hardship and hunger, the Guardian food writer’s father Raj always resisted going back to Uganda. What happened when he finally agreed to accompany her on a bittersweet journey into the past? The heat is heavy, the earth bright and rich like dark terracotta. I whoop and reach for my camera, turn it towards my father’s face.

This is the opening of the story, shared with credit to The Guardian — Africa. The rest of the report — with every detail — continues on the publisher’s website.

Continue reading at The Guardian — Africa ↗

Cookie settings

Choose which cookies we may use. You can change this at any time from Cookie settings in the footer. Details of each cookie are in the Cookie Policy.

Strictly necessary

Needed for sign-in, security, payments and remembering these choices. Always on.

Preferences

Remember settings such as dark mode.

Analytics & performance

Help us count visits, understand which pages, devices and countries our readers use, and measure how well the site performs – anonymous and aggregated.

Advertising & marketing

Lets advertising partners show and personalise adverts, measure impressions, clicks and visits, prevent ad fraud and pay us – this is how the free site is funded.

🔔 News notifications

Get headlines from NewsHub on this device — even when the site is closed.

You can switch this off at any time. Works on Android, Windows, Mac and Linux browsers; on iPhone/iPad add the site to your Home Screen first.