![]() There was also a plantation model in Uganda, with large land grants being given to former British soldiers who grew rubber for export. Eventually a third of the territory of Bunyoro-Kitara was transferred to the Buganda monarchy as a reward for its collaboration and eight thousand square miles of Baganda land were distributed as freehold to Protestant notaries, laying the groundwork for a land aristocracy. The British played a key part in this process: first, they intervened in Buganda when a civil war broke out between three factions, followers of French (Catholic) and English (Protestant) missionaries, and Muslim supporters of Kabaka Muwanga, tipping the balance in favour of the English-aligned faction then they drafted most of Buganda’s adult population into military service and set about subduing Bunyoro-Kitara. As it absorbed new territories, it sought alliances against its dominant neighbour, the kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara. Buganda itself was an expansionist state, with a standing army and civil administration. Unlike the neighbouring colonies of Kenya and Tanganyika (which was German until after the First World War), Uganda had a ‘native’ elite, whom the British administration had handsomely rewarded for their role alongside colonial forces in enlarging the protectorate. The third group was brought from India to serve in the British colonial administration. The second group was drafted from India by the British after 1895 to build the Ugandan railway: 35,000 Indian labourers, mostly from Punjab, were recruited to work on the project after its completion in 1901, about seven thousand of them stayed on in British East Africa. ![]() Visram had made his fortune in Zanzibar and Mombasa and encouraged small and medium-size commerce deep in the hinterland, including Uganda and eastern Congo. The first were those who arrived to run a string of dukas (shops) set up by Indian merchant financiers on the initiative of Allidina Visram. It was already possible to identify three groups of Indians in Uganda by the time the Punjabi regiments were withdrawn in the 1930s. In 1895 a 300-strong contingent of Punjabi troops was brought in to put down an uprising by the Nubi in the north-west, which had led to the killing of several British officers. The kingdom of Buganda became a British protectorate in 1884 and the territory was rapidly expanded to roughly the size of modern-day Uganda. At that time, they had been a presence in the country for about seventy years. The answer, I learned, is that what happened in 1972 was the culmination of a process that had started a few years earlier, when many Ugandan Asians were disenfranchised both by British and Ugandan law. Why did an overwhelming majority of current or former residents in Uganda, brown or black, feel this way? To my surprise, more than 90 per cent of them said they would not want to return to the years before Amin ordered them out: whatever they experienced at the time, they – like the ‘indigenous’ Ugandans I’d been questioning since 1980 – had nothing against the expulsion. Ten years later, whether we met in Uganda or in Britain, I put the same question to friends, former neighbours and schoolmates of Asian heritage from the pre-1972 period. ![]() For most of them, it wasn’t the decision to expel the Asian population that was troubling, but the way the expulsion had been carried out: this was the beginning of wisdom for me. I made a point of asking most of the Ugandans I met to share their thoughts about the expulsion. The following year, I joined Makerere University. After the fall of Amin in 1979, I returned to Uganda as an intern with the All Africa Conference of Churches, a Nairobi-based ecumenical Christian alliance, working at the Church of Uganda’s offices in Kampala. Six months later I took up my first academic post at the University of Dar es Salaam. With at least 25,000 other Ugandan Asians I headed for Britain, and was placed in a youth hostel on Kensington Church Street, just behind Kensington Palace, which had been turned into a transit camp for the refugees. I was among those who had registered as a Ugandan citizen at independence and whose nationality was later rescinded. Then there were those who had never applied for citizenship or a passport. Roughly the same number had applied for citizenship, but their applications remained unprocessed – a sign of how politically explosive citizenship had become. Around twenty thousand had Ugandan citizenship. ![]() The expulsion of Uganda’s Asian population, estimated at seventy thousand, was announced in August we were given three months to leave. I was in my mid-twenties in November 1972 when I left Uganda on the orders of Idi Amin, who had seized the presidency in a coup the previous year.
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