Ugandan Asians in Dialogue (Part I)
The way the complexity of the Ugandan Asian experience is articulated depends not only on the politics of the narrator, but the format within which they tell it.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s regular ‘Research and Reflections’ series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal development.
Content warnings: Anti-Asian racism; Ethnic cleansing and displacement.
In my post last month on the question of minorities on the right, I reached for Ugandan Asians as an example of a minority group whose complex (and internally varied) experience of persecution and privilege had translated into a pretty heterogenous set of political sensibilities. As I suggested in that piece, the way Ugandan Asians with public profiles articulate that experience, and particularly its pivotal event, their expulsion from Uganda by Idi Amin, often has explicit political cues for their audience to take; whether that is the need for refugees to be welcomed and supported, or for minority groups to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.
The nature of that story is not solely dependent, however, on the political inclinations of its teller. It is also a matter of the format in which the story is told. This two-part post, therefore, is on precisely that issue: how the dynamics of a personal account of a more broadly recognisable history vary when recounted to an intimate who nonetheless did not experience it firsthand in a one-on-one discussion, compared to when discussed as part of a multi-person panel of people who all have a particular firsthand experience of those events, broadly speaking. It focuses on two publicly available recordings hosted and produced by the BBC about the experiences of Ugandan Asian refugees during and after expulsion. Part I of this post provides some context on the experiences of Ugandan Asian refugees, before looking at the first of these recordings, for the BBC’s The Listening Project.
The Indian diaspora in Uganda
6.58m people migrated out of India between 1834 and 1924, the majority as free labourers to other British colonies in South and Southeast Asia, but over one million travelled further as indentured labour, replacing freed slaves working on plantations in the British (and other imperial powers’) colonies in the Pacific, Caribbean, and Southern Africa. Between 1895 and 1922, nearly 40,000 indentured labourers travelled from India to more recently established British colonies in East Africa, primarily to build the Ugandan railway, and though most departed after completing their work on the project, they were followed by larger numbers of Indian migrants seeking to take advantage of opportunities for commerce created by British opening of markets there, and who established a more permanent community.1
Tension developed over this diaspora’s role in Uganda, as they were denied opportunities available to the White minority (who dominated political administration) but enjoyed overall a higher standard of living as a broadly commercial middle class than the Black majority who patronised their businesses and provided servant labour. They also contested and established dominance over certain urban spaces and married and formed associations within their own communities (themselves divided along caste and religious lines). Ugandan Asians’ situation was complicated by Ugandan independence in 1962, after which they were presented with the choice of applying for Ugandan citizenship, or for the status of British subjects, with the majority opting for the latter. Their situation was rendered more precarious still firstly by the Africanisation policies implemented by Uganda’s increasingly dictatorial leader Milton Obote, which curtailed the Indian population’s economic freedoms and privileges from the late 1960s, as well as the British government tightening regulations on overseas subjects’ rights to come and settle in Britain.2
Idi Amin came to power by military coup in 1971 and accelerated the Africanisation policies implemented by his predecessor. In August 1972, Amin announced that all Asian British subjects in Uganda had three months to leave the country, while all their property in Uganda would be seized. He accused them of draining Uganda’s economic wealth and fostering corruption and claimed that they were now Britain’s responsibility. This decision was in part an act of economic populism designed to shore up Amin’s precarious position amid a worsening economic situation. It must also be understood within the broader context of a nation-building project that resulted in the persecution of African ethnic groups deemed disloyal as well, and of the increasingly anti-colonial, anti-Western stance he adopted within African international politics.3
Ugandan Asians in Britain
Britain’s response to the situation was to firstly to try to pressurise Amin directly and indirectly into reversing his decision. It then successfully persuaded India and Pakistan to accept some of the 50,000 UK passport holders leaving Uganda, and for other states including Canada, West Germany, and Malawi to receive a portion as well, with Britain accepting 28,000. In internationalising the crisis and presenting it as a humanitarian rather than postcolonial one, and the fleeing Indian population as refugees rather than British subjects, Ted Heath’s government aimed to reduce its own perceived obligations to them, while also mitigating criticism from right-wing elements in the British media and politics. While the likes of Enoch Powell and the Daily Express did stir up hostile sentiment towards the arriving Ugandan Asians, this was overwhelmed by a more positive, sympathetic representation of the refugees as helpless victims and solidly middle-class, which emboldened the government’s relief efforts. Administration of the refugee camps and relief work within it was undertaken by both the state and a range of voluntary organisations, and the nature of their relationships with refugees varied from neo-colonial and hierarchical to cross-racial political and generational affiliation.4
After arriving in Britain, Ugandan Asians predominantly settled in Greater London and the East Midlands and have subsequently enjoyed varying but generally strong socioeconomic progress, being well represented within Britain’s own lower middle class and having generally enjoyed higher social mobility than wider population and all south Asians in Britain. They are also well represented in British public life, from left-wing journalist and author Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to hardline former Conservative home secretary Priti Patel.5 Geographer Rina Valeny conducted both longitudinal statistical and qualitative analysis of social mobility among Ugandan Asians in Britain during the mid-to-late 1990s. She attributed their level of mobility to prior acquisition of skills and experiences in Uganda that they could retain and draw upon, the centrality of status consciousness and entrepreneurialism to their culture, the first-generation arrivals’ strong focus on the educational outcomes of their offspring, and the strength of the social networks they developed within Britain. While their external depiction as a successful minority has owed to their material success, the Ugandan Asians whom she spoke to themselves tended to define success only partly in materialistic terms (which many rejected), but also in terms of the acquisition of social and cultural capital, familial achievement, and residential location and comfort.6
Beneath this broad picture, Ugandan Asian experiences of migration to and life in Britain varied drastically, depending on gender, social class, religious affiliation, political leanings, and location of settlement. These variations have shaped the way the story of Ugandan Asians in Britain, and their prior experiences in Africa, have been narrated, as has the format and context in which that narration has taken place. Oral histories of Asian women who came to Britain from Uganda as refugees, for example, express a profound sense of loss in relation to the lives and communities they had left behind in Uganda, but also a sense of belonging in their new places of settlement and pride in the resilience they had shown. This contrasts with the narrative of male breadwinner and pioneer that had previously characterised representations of Ugandan Asians in Britain, with women relegated to a passive role; these oral histories, by contrast, demonstrated the sense of agency in the lives they had made for themselves. Heritagisation of the Ugandan Asian experience has been visible in museum, school, and online spaces, especially in response to the fortieth anniversary of expulsion in 2012. This event and these spaces have enabled Ugandan Asians to articulate their identity as a community but have also been guilty of presenting a simplistic narrative of Ugandan Asians as a ‘model minority’ and of centring on some narratives, such as of those who settled in Leicester, and only those who came in 1972 rather than earlier, over others.7
Two-person dialogue on The Listening Project
Based on a similar US-based project, StoryCorps, The Listening Project was launched in March 2012 by BBC Radio 4, in partnership with other local BBC stations, and the British Library. People were invited to send their ideas for intimate conversations (usually with one other person) to a local radio station, with producers contacting those who they wanted to record, while there was also the alternative option for people to record a conversation themselves and send it to the BBC. BBC Radio 4 broadcasted a three-minute snippet of a conversation each day, with an omnibus on Sundays, while local stations also had their own Listening Project programming. Full versions of the conversations were made available to listen to in full online via the British Library’s Sound Archive.
The conversation I want to focus on is one recorded by BBC Stoke on 4 September 2012 – just over 40 years after Amin had given the expulsion order – between 58-year-old Prakash Samani, now retired after a career working for a publishing company (and who had recently been appointed Deputy-Lieutenant of Staffordshire), and his then 29-year-old son Sunil, a solicitor. The subject of their conversation was that of Prakash and his family coming over to the UK as refugees from Uganda in 1972, and his experiences of settling and building a new life in Leek, Staffordshire. A short excerpt of the conversation was subsequently earmarked for radio broadcast.
The first portion of the recorded dialogue, which lasted around 45 minutes in total, centred on Prakash’s life in Uganda itself. During this, Prakash did not recall experiencing racial tensions in Uganda prior to the announcement, albeit while noting the socioeconomic differences between Ugandans of Asian and African heritage, and their residential segregation. He also implicitly highlighted own family’s relative lack of advantage within this social hierarchy, noting that while some Ugandan Asians would have inherited the family business or gone on to university to become professionals such as doctors, neither option was available to him, as his father was a clerk and as he was the eldest of seven children, his parents could not afford to send them all on to higher education.
His and Sunil’s discussion of the expulsion itself centred on the shock and disjuncture that the event caused him. Prakash was aged 18 at the time and while he was a British subject, his father was not and was effectively rendered stateless and not able to travel to Britain with them, instead ultimately ending up as a refugee in Austria before finally being reunited with his wife and children the following year. As he framed it, the expulsion order effectively brought an end to his childhood as he became responsible for ensuring the safe passage of his mother and siblings – who, unlike him, did not speak English – to Britain. The most arduous element of this was that, because of the family’s frequently moving around due to the nature of his father’s job, the births of his three youngest siblings had not been registered, and the British Embassy repeatedly refused to add them to his mother’s passport based on the documentation he had. He recounted the brinksmanship he felt forced to engage in when, with the deadline for departure rapidly approaching, he placed his then two-year-old sister on the desk at the Embassy, telling officials there that she was their responsibility now, and walked out of the building ‘tears in my eyes’, before being called back by staff now willing to believe that the younger children were his siblings and to add them to the passport. Once Prakash had recounted his family’s departure from Uganda, there were only a few further references to the country over the remainder of the conversation. When asked later by Sunil if there was anything he missed about Uganda itself, he only mentioned the climate and his adolescent friends.
Prakash and his family arrived at Stansted Airport in Essex in November 1972, before being bussed with other families to a refugee camp in Raleigh Hall in Staffordshire. His account of arrival stressed how different Britain was, from its colder weather to its much more advanced transport infrastructure, and emphasised his excitement, uncertainty, and naivety. He attributed the subsequent move to Leek to ‘fate’: feeling the pressure to secure work so that he could provide for his family, he made a three-hour trip to Baddley Green for a job interview for a clerical role only to find by the time he eventually arrived that the post had already gone; he promptly asked if there were any other jobs available at the factory, and upon being told there was only one as a labourer, he agreed to take it. Seeing that the address of the factory was Leek Road, staff at the refugee camp overestimated its proximity to Leek itself and arranged with Leek Council to provide them with housing. This, as Prakash explained, was why they ended up living there, unlike in other more common sites of resettlement such as Leicester, Birmingham, or London where many families relocated to with help from existing friends there (and necessarily forsaking the support of the refugee camps and the various councils they were working with).
Throughout his account of resettling in Britain, Prakash centred work and family as his principal imperatives, and again stressed the loss of youth that this entailed, lacking time and money for continuing his education or pursuing leisure activities. He had remained the main breadwinner in family as his father could only find work as a labourer upon arriving in Britain, and then had to take over the childcare when his mother died in 1975. Prakash’s and Sunil’s continued peppering of the conversation with references to extended family and their present situations illustrated its ongoing centrality to Prakash’s life even after he had married and had children of his own. By contrast, Prakash presented participation in the developing Ugandan-Asian community within Britain, including local gatherings, as more important to his parents than to him. He eventually reconnected with friends from Uganda whom he had been separated from upon expulsion, aided by the internet and social media, but emphasised how much time had passed and how people had changed since his adolescence.
By contrast, Prakash’s narrative emphasised a strong sense of belonging within Leek. Throughout his narrative he highlighted the role of local institutions in supporting his and his family’s integration: the local Round Table club that gave them a warm welcome and provided them with support upon arrival; the assistance of local Conservative MP David Knox – who he said remained a family friend – in securing permission for his father to come over; and the way the Leek Post had given him his break in the publishing industry, enabling him to rise up through the ranks of the business and to complete his studies. This strong sense of attachment to place was underpinned by the specificity of his references to local geography, while he also highlighted the relative lack of change in the area, given the longevity of their and other families’ residence there.
Asked by Sunil whether he had experienced racism upon arriving in Britain, he replied that he had not and that if it was present, he would probably not have noticed it, given his single-minded focus on supporting his family and sense of gratitude to Britain for having allowed them to come. He suggested that this was because they were the only Asian family locally and were thus taken and welcomed on their own merits, admitting that his experience might have been different had they settled elsewhere, given that he had noticed more racial tension in areas with larger Asian communities. He and Sunil did discuss another Asian family they knew that had moved to their street, but he was vague on the details of this.
Though Prakash did most of the talking throughout, and his own life and experiences were at the centre of the discussion, its dialogic structure nonetheless played a key role in shaping his narrative. It was Sunil’s questions that gave it its overarching structure, prompting his father to relate events in a largely chronological fashion. He also asked questions that sought to connect his father’s experience with a more general narrative about Ugandan Asians, including experiences of racism, or better-known locations of Ugandan Asian settlement. At other times, he was clearly building on an existing dialogue between himself and his father, questioning him about events he already knew of, and occasionally getting Prakash to acknowledge things he had not included in his narrative, such as his enthusiasm for motorcycling (which he had to be prompted to mention, having previously insisted on his lack of time for leisure). The conversation also was framed through an opposition between the 1970s and the present, with there being far less time and detail devoted to events after Prakash had gotten married in 1980. Sunil was eager to stress the differences in their experiences, noting for example that whereas at age 18 he had been preparing to celebrate his birthday and getting ready to go to university, his father had had to go ‘from 18 to 38’. Prakash, meanwhile, accentuated differences between life in the 1970s and in the present, noting the greater privations they had had but also the greater simplicity and innocence of life, comparing this favourably to what he saw as the materialism of contemporary youth.
This is the first section of a two-part post. You can find Part II embedded below:
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On migration from India to East Africa and more broadly, see: David Northrup, ‘Migration from Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific’, in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 88–100; and Stephen Constantine, ‘Migrants and Settlers’, in Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 163–187.
On the Asian experience in East Africa, and in Uganda more specifically, see: John Mattausch, ‘From Subjects to Citizens: British ‘East African Asians’’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1998), pp. 121–141; Chrispas Nyombi and Ronald Kaddu, ‘Migration and Economic Development: The Case of Ugandan Asians’, SSRN Electronic Journal (2015), DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2645079; Edgar Curtis Taylor, ‘Asians and Africans in Ugandan Urban Life, 1959–1972’ (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2016).
On the rationales behind expulsion, see Meir Amor, ‘Violent Ethnocentrism: Revisiting the Economic Interpretation of the Expulsion of Ugandan Asians’, Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2003), pp. 53–66; Holger Bernt Hansen, ‘Uganda in the 1970s: A Decade of Paradoxes and Ambiguities’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2013), 83–103.
On the British government’s response to the 1972 expulsion, and Ugandan Asian refugees’ reception in Britain, see: Sara Cosemans, ‘Undesirable British East African Asians: Nationality, Statelessness, and Refugeehood after Empire’, Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora, Vol. 40, Nos. 1–2 (2022), pp. 210–239; Yumiko Hamai, ‘‘Imperial Burden’ or ‘Jews of Africa’?: An Analysis of Political and Media Discourse in the Ugandan Asian Crisis (1972)’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 22, No. 3 (2011), pp. 415–436; Becky Taylor, ‘Good Citizens? Ugandan Asians, Volunteers and ‘Race’ Relations in 1970s Britain’, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 85 (2018), pp. 120–141; Chibuike Uche, ‘The British Government, Idi Amin and the Expulsion of British Asians’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 19, No. 6 (2017), pp. 818–836.
On the longer term Ugandan Asian experience in Britain, see: Jake Anders, Simon Burgess, and Jonathan Portes, ‘The Long-Term Outcomes of Refugees: Tracking the Progress of the East African Asians’, Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2021), pp. 1967–1998; Vaughan Robinson, ‘Marching into the Middle Classes? The Long-term Resettlement of East African Asians in the UK’, Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1993), pp. 230–247; R. R. Valeny, ‘From Pariah to Paragon?: The Social Mobility of Ugandan Asian Refugees in Britain’ (PhD Thesis, University of Wales Swansea, 1999).
Valeny, ‘From Pariah to Paragon?’.
On Ugandan Asian refugees’ life narratives and commemoration of their experiences, see: Felicity Hand, ‘‘Picking up the Crumbs of England’: East African Asians in Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s Autobiographies’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 53, No. 1 (2018), pp. 61–77; Joanna Herbert, ‘Oral Histories of Ugandan Asians in Britain: Gendered Identities in the Diaspora’, Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2009), pp. 21–32; Saima Nasar, ‘We Refugees? Re-defining Britain’s East African Asians’, in Jennifer Craig-Norton, Christhard Hoffmann, and Tony Kushner (eds.), Migrant Britain: Histories and Historiographies: Essays in Honour of Colin Holmes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 138–147; Maya Parmar, ‘Memorialising 40 Years since Idi Amin’s Expulsion: Digital ‘Memory Mania’ to the ‘Right to be Forgotten’’, South Asian Popular Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2014), pp. 1–14; Emma Robertson, ‘‘Green for Come’: Moving to York as a Ugandan Refugee’, in Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee (eds.), Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 245–267.
Thank you for writing this. Will comment further when I've read Part II, as it feels like there's a 'conversation' between these two pieces. (I admire what The Listening Project has tried to do, but it is not an unproblematic format).