As St Andrew's Day nears we celebrate the changing face of Scotland

Born in Zanzibar, he came to Scotland as part of an exchange programme operated by universities in Glasgow and Nairobi, joining up after falling for his Scots-born wife Meg, who he met in the Kenyan capital. “She was coming back to do her health visiting,” he said, “So I came too.”

That was back in 1972, and three children and six grandchildren have since followed.

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His children, Kapasi says, “all feel very Scottish”, something the family have expressed through the creation of their own tartan. Designed with the help of Kapasi’s former GP practice manager while they lived in Greenock, Inverclyde, it features colours that reflected their lives – green for the hills viewed from their window, red for the sandstone of their home, and blue for the River Clyde. All family members wear it, with ties sent to far-flung relatives in the US and Canada.

The officially registered plaid was a talking point when Kapasi, from Newton Mearns, East Renfrewshire, received his MBE in 2006. It was conferred for service to healthcare during a career that took him from general surgery to the GP’s surgery.

There are so many stand-out moments in his medical service – establishing the first out-of-hours GP service in the UK, writing clinical guidelines for the treatment of children with diabetes and going pub to pub to raise the cash to create the first defibrillator-equipped ambulance service in Scotland – that it is impossible to include them all in print.

“I love the NHS,” he says, summing it up. “I didn’t do it for the money.”

His time here, he says, has been positive and he “didn’t find any barriers” professionally or personally – but, he notes, “I always had to prove myself more than a Scottish doctor”.

“When I changed from being in general surgery to general practice in Greenock, there was slight racial resistance from patients,” he explains, “But that quickly faded away once they came to know me, and that became a rewarding experience.”

For Hermine Makangu-Kinkela, that “racial resistance” sometimes took the form of verbal abuse.

While there has been growth in the country’s African population, the combined African, black and Caribbean communities made up just one per cent of the Scottish people in the 2011 census.

Moving to Glasgow from the Democratic Republic of Congo at the age of 14 to join her mother, Makangu-Kinkela became aware of race for the first time. “In Congo,” she says, “Race was not apparent. Here, there were people at my school from all over the world.

“It made me more aware of my own culture, but also that I was different. People remind you that you are different. But I knew that different is a good thing so when I was told that, it would open up a conversation.

“And when I understood it came out of ignorance, I felt powerful – ‘you are ignorant, and I am not’.”

However, not all conversations were positive, she recalls. “There were insults – one was ‘black bastard’. I didn’t understand it, I only understood its dictionary meaning. I’d say, ‘my parents are married’. I saw it as a joke until I was old enough to understand what it really meant.

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“It’s a funny thing, it didn’t sting. I was going to school in Royston and living in the Red Road Flats. It was a very deprived area and the people I was meeting were going through so much. I could see where it comes from.”

Identifying firstly as African, the entrepreneur’s position began to shift while studying in Italy. Enrolled at university as a UK student, people were confused by her answer to “where are you from?” For easier conversations, she began saying she was from Scotland. And she said it so many times that it began to stick.

Makangu-Kinkela – whose Mbikudi social enterprise makes beauty products and works with women from minority ethnic backgrounds – now defines herself as African-Scottish.

“In Italy I missed being in Scotland,” she says. “It made me appreciate things and see them differently.

“My idea had been to go back to Africa, but I realised I was actually part of this community. Setting up the business here was my way of giving back.”

NIGEL Tiddy, co-founder of Lossiemouth’s Windswept Brewing, established his craft beer business for another reason. The Sheffield native had come north thanks to an RAF posting and didn’t want to leave. He and fellow serviceman Al Read had been “playing” with home brewing and wondered if they could make that take off to create sustainable futures in Moray.

“I didn’t come to Scotland by choice,” Tiddy says, “But it’s my choice to stay here.”

At the time of the 2014 referendum, there were around 500,000 English-born voters in Scotland – and around 750,000 Scots-born citizens living south of the Border.

Tiddy’s grandfather moved south decades earlier, heading from Dundee to London and then on to Sheffield.

But it’s not family roots that keep the businessman here, it’s the quality of life. His love of the outdoors – skiing, cycling, running – is brewed into the beer he sells, with the brand sponsoring the Tiree Wave Classic surfboarding contest. “The outdoors is such a great playground,” he says. “There’s so much to do.

“I was surprised how warm the welcome was when I came to Lossiemouth, because quite often the military can have an odd relationship with an area. Here it was so friendly.

“My wife is a teacher, my kids are at school, we have no wish to leave.”

Positioning Windswept as distinctly Scottish, something tied to the people and place, Tiddy retains a strongly British identity. “Nobody in England ever saw my granddad as anything but Scottish,” he says, “and here no-one sees me as anything other than English.

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“I feel British, even though I have lived in Scotland for more than half of my adult life.”

For Gloria Macleod, setting up life in Scotland has been far harder. Born in India, she became caught up in a torturous visa wrangle when moving back to her husband Robert’s Highland hometown. The couple, whose ordeal was revealed by The National, had been living in Dubai and, despite having responsibility for their two daughters, Macleod found herself facing deportation.

The problem centred on a permanent residence application, despite Macleod, already the holder of a 10-year UK C-passport, following advice about the application process.

That was two years ago and, though she was granted permission to remain, the period has left a lasting mark on her. “I’ll take it to my grave,” she tells the Sunday National. “I was literally treated like a criminal. It was humiliating.

“But I have found so much support, so many friendly people here. In the Middle East, I wouldn’t say I felt I belonged. I was a fish out of water although I was there for 24 years. This is our home, we belong here, and my daughters are proudly Scottish.”

While Macleod moved to connect with her in-laws, it was family tragedy that prompted Iza Szczepanska to relocate from Poland.

Szczepanska, whose Heavenly Deli in Inverness opened in January, spent years working in various jobs before setting up the sandwich shop with her chef husband Rafal.

She had long considered a move to the UK but held back until the deaths of her parents, who were killed in a car accident while travelling to celebrate her son’s fourth birthday in 2005. The grief was overwhelming. “I wasn’t able to go to the cemetery, everything reminded me of them,” she says. “I needed to do something.”

The 42-year-old settled on Inverness before leaving in 2006 to become one of 86,000 Poles in Scotland. She had seen Inverness mentioned in the Polish press, with the report stating that the city was welcoming. That, she says, turned out to be true and she has never experienced prejudice based on her origins.

However, her son, now 17 and aiming for a career in the police, suffered playground taunts.

“They would call him stupid names, and Polish was one,” she says. “But I’m not sure it was the origin of the trouble. It was hard for him because although he went to English lessons in Poland, they were rubbish and he landed in school here with hardly any language.”

The police plan, she feels, is evidence that he has embraced life in Scotland. “He’s fully integrated,” she says, “And he’s still friends with kids he met on the day he arrived. I love that. I love Scottish people and I have met so many wonderful friends.

“I think of myself as international now. I don’t have any regrets.”

FAHIM Rahimi expresses no regrets about his move to Scotland, but it hasn’t been easy. Living in Ayr, the 28-year-old housing support worker was once an interpreter for the British Army in Afghanistan. Like many of this cohort, he moved to the UK for his own safety, but left every member of his family behind in Kabul. It’s lonely, he says, and he has little social life outwith the work he loves. But it is also lonely because his wife remains in Afghanistan.

Rahimi, who works for charity seAscape, is part of a campaign seeking to win the right for the wives of ex-interpreters to come to the UK. Under existing rules, couples who wed prior to the husband’s move are already able to live here together, but the same is not true for those who tied the knot after the men had secured sanctuary in Britain, away from the hostility of the Taliban and similar groups.

“It is very hard,” Rahimi says. “Afghanistan is not in the mainstream news any more, but I know what is going on through Facebook. Whenever there’s a bomb, I’m on the phone to my mum to check everyone is alright. There are hundreds of interpreters with these issues.”

For safety’s sake, he cannot live in his home country any more. But he is yet to build the life he craves in Scotland. “People always ask if I’m happy in Scotland and miss Afghanistan,” he explains.

“Afghanistan is my country and my culture. I’ve only been in Scotland for two years, it’s not enough. It’s taking a bit of time.”

Whatever the differences, Rahimi, who aids often vulnerable people with housing problems, says he draws on skills honed supporting the British Army for his current work. It’s all, he reveals, about listening and trust.

“We would go out to villages,” he recalls “And my responsibility was to translate and help with food or clothes. Here my responsibility is to report their problems and try to assist them.”

Adeline Amar’s work in Edinburgh is all about communication. A representative for a leading private gallery, the 34-year-old Frenchwoman arrived in the capital as part of the Europe-wide Erasmus student programme. That was 12 years ago, and she has never left – though the Brexit outcome may change that.

Attending Edinburgh University, it took a while before she met any Scots, aside from those who worked in the shops she visited, but the sense of belonging she subsequently found has been disrupted by the Leave result. “It’s difficult to say, but I feel uneasy around people,” she explains. “You wonder how your neighbour feels about you.

“I’ve had a few comments since Brexit but, being from France, I’ve been mostly lucky.”

Amar thinks her French nationality means she is less likely to attract negative remarks than those from Poland or Slovakia. But the “sense of ownership” she had before the Brexit vote that made Scotland her “home away from home” is less sure than it was. “This has made me reassess,” she says. “I was in Berlin recently and it made me feel really international and European. I miss feeling like that.”

HOWEVER, Brexit has had little impact on Frank Murtagh, even though identity and nationality are live issues in his Renfrewshire home. An IT worker for the British Red Cross, the Irish citizen professes to “bleed green”, while his Scottish wife “bleeds tartan”.

The pair have two children, one of whom declares an Irish identity and plans to turn out for the country’s national football team. The other says he is Scottish. “Their mother says they’re Scottish”,” Murtagh remarks, “I’m happy to let them make up their own minds about what they want.”

Residency in Scotland became part of the plan for Murtagh, from Bishopton, after he met his wife while bartending. At the age of 19, he’d come here with four friends to study because “Scotland seemed like the place to go for Paddies and it seemed like a bit of craic”.

“Someone once said the Scots can be more amenable to the Irish than their own, and I’ve found that,” he adds. “The accent is an ice-breaker. You’ll be out and somebody will hear it and start talking to you.

Brexit hasn’t shaken his foundations, but it has led to some conversations about whether to get Irish passports for the children. However, the community football coach feels secure and has not considered relocating to his country of birth. “I don’t think that’s something that’s going to happen,” he says. “When we go home, it’s great to have all the family around and the boys have their cousins.

“But we’ve great friends here, really good friends with children and the boys see them as their cousins. I don’t think the draw is strong enough to make that need to go back.”

With St Andrews Day just five days away, many Scots are preparing to express and reflect on their national identity, something already enshrined in Irish culture. But to Murtagh, there’s no comparison with St Patrick’s Day. “St Paddy’s Day is within the psyche of the people,” he says, “But St Andrew’s Day is different.

“Do people want to celebrate it the same way? I’m not sure.”