Ugandan Asians in Dialogue (Part II)
As an episode of BBC series The Reunion demonstrates, the way the Ugandan Asian experience is articulated to a wider audience depends much on format and mediation.
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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; Anti-Blackness; Mental illness; Alcoholism.
This is the second section of a two-part post. You can find Part I embedded below:
Multi-person conversation on The Reunion
The other instance I will discuss here is an episode of The Reunion broadcast on BBC Radio Four a month previously. The Reunion is a series made by Whistledown Productions for the station, in which an event from modern history is discussed by its host – which was broadcaster Sue MacGregor from the show’s inception in 2003 until 2019 – with four or five participants in that event. In the episode on ‘Ugandan Asians’, MacGregor reflected on the experiences of Asian refugees from Uganda to Britain following expulsion, with a panel comprising Manzoor Moghal, who at the time had been a businessman and a prominent member of Uganda’s Asian community when he was forced to leave; Tahera Aanchawan, who had been training to become a physiotherapist; Ravi Govindia, the Conservative leader of Wandsworth Council, then just completing his A-levels; Chandrika Joshi, a dentist, who was 14 years old when her family were expelled; and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who was a postgraduate student in Britain at the time.
One of the principal tropes about Uganda that was raised almost unprompted by the panellists from the outset was the idea it had been a ‘paradise’; however, they generally made it clear that this was more myth than reality, identifying its more pleasant aspects such as climate, but highlighting instead the growing insecurity Asians felt by the early 1970s. Chandrika Joshi and Ravi Govindia also tended to downplay the aspects of the privilege they had enjoyed as Asians in Uganda, such as having servants. By contrast, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Tahera Aanchawan (being of mixed Asian and African heritage herself) were far more willing to confront the question of anti-Blackness in the community, with the former asserting that Ugandan Asians ‘loathed’ their African counterparts, while the latter highlighted the racism that she had herself experienced. The question of why Ugandan Asians were so nostalgic for Uganda was a theme that recurred at later points in the programme, with the panellists implying that it was a tendency principally confined to an older generation.
Nonetheless most of the guests also displayed a degree of persisting emotional connection to Uganda themselves. This included recognition of the severe suffering of Ugandan Africans after 1972, although Alibhai-Brown accused other Ugandan Asians of being overly focused on their own suffering rather than recognising this). They also noted the economic difficulties that had beset the country since 1972, the contrition expressed by Ugandan leaders post-Amin, and a general sense that the country had lost many of its most promising young people – Asian and African – to exile, political violence, and illness. Most of the guests spoke of return trips they had made to Uganda, such as Govindia to his old school, and Aanchwan in her role with the charity Advance Africa. Only Joshi said she had not gone back for fear of erasing the nostalgic memories she had of it.
Accounts of the panellists’ arrival in Britain combined the heartwarming, the amusing, and the much more negative. Joshi, whose family had first been placed in a refugee camp in rural Wales, recounted her first sighting of the sea and of sheep. Govindia told a comical story about his mother struggling to learn to use a vacuum. Alibhai-Brown, already a student at Oxford at the time, had helped at the time in a local refugee camp and emphasised the togetherness and kindness of the volunteers. On the other hand, Joshi revealed how her mother had become extremely ill with rheumatic fever and that her symptoms were initially ignored by the camp officials. Moghal meanwhile, angry at what he saw as the British government’s culpability for what had occurred in Uganda, said that he had refused to become dependent on their welfare through the refugee camps, and discussed his experiences of racism in Leicester. Another prominent theme in their narratives was the extent of harm they and their loved ones had suffered to their mental health: Joshi’s mother suffering severe depression after her illness, Alibhai-Brown’s brother becoming an alcoholic, and Moghal’s description of his withdrawal into himself until the 1980s, which he likened to ‘hibernation’.
The panellists also stressed the aptitude Ugandan Asians had shown for work and education that benefited them. Alibhai-Brown joked about shopkeepers sensing an opportunity in keeping their premises open much later than their British counterparts were willing to. Joshi discussed throwing herself into her schoolwork, which she saw as providing her with route out of poverty and giving her degree of freedom as a woman that she would not have had in Uganda, where she would likely have had to enter an arranged marriage. She also expressed surprise at her White female classmates in Wales who were far less ambitious and merely wanted to ‘marry the boy next door’. Both she and Govindia discussed how they had worked to earn a living alongside their studies, in a L’Oreal factory and as bus conductor respectively.
While Moghal and Alhibai-Brown both identified the issue of racism towards Ugandan Asians in Britain, they and the other panellists were generally positive about the extent to which they had come to feel at home in Britain, with Alhibai-Brown stressing her preference for life in multicultural London than in Kampala. One exception to this came from Joshi, who expressed a sense of lingering insecurity by citing her mother having told her before she died to always be ready to flee and to a buy house in India. While Joshi said she had not done this, when asked by MacGregor whether she thought her mother was right, she replied honestly that while a part of her did not, another part thought: ‘Never say never’.
The programme was organised by interspersing excerpts of archive sound footage from the time of expulsion and more recent interviews around the extended panel discussions, as a means of both lending a sense of historical context and degree of immediacy to the events they were describing, as well as to establish a more chronological structure. Though she generally spoke far more briefly than her guests, MacGregor subtly directed the discussion through prompting questions that both made specific references to the panellists own individual lives, but that also to encourage them to connect their individual experiences with more general narratives about the Ugandan Asian experience. The individual recollections of the guests tended to be somewhat standalone, rather than in general dialogue with each other, albeit while being linked by being in response to MacGregor’s questions. They did though at times take cues from or answer or expand upon questions raised by each other’s contributions. For example, when Govindia expressed his bemusement at the level of nostalgia the Ugandan Asian community had for the county that had expelled them, by contrast with Asian residents of other East African countries, Joshi speculated that it was due to the vary fact of their having been forced to leave rather than making a conscious choice to do so, while Moghal attributed it to the narrative they had themselves been fed about Uganda having been a paradise.
In places, the panellists also subtly or overtly contradicted each other’s narratives in ways that reflected their differing political inclinations. When Alhibai-Brown made her claim about anti-Blackness in the Ugandan Asian community, Joshi gently pushed slightly back against this by saying ‘loathed’ was a ‘charged’ word. Later, when Moghal was extremely critical of both the role Britain had played in not supporting Amin economically and in refusing to take more Ugandan Asian refugees, Govindia asserted that it had rather gotten other Commonwealth countries to take in people who had been rendered stateless, while Alhibai-Brown took a position somewhere between the two by acknowledging the pressure Edward Heath – who she had interviewed on a number of occasions – had been under from the right of her party. Disagreement was fiercer when Moghal sought to partly exonerate Amin of full guilt for the expulsion of Ugandan Asians, noting contrition he had expressed to him in person when they had met in Jeddah in 1984, and arguing the British government was also culpable for not having provided him with the financial aid he had asked for. At that point, Alhibai-Brown interjected frustratedly that ‘this is the problem with these businesspeople’, being easily swayed by individual favourable treatment, adding that it was ‘immoral’ to make excuses for Amin.
Comparing refugee narratives
Comparing these two recordings, we can certainly see certain dominant characteristics in how the Ugandan Asian experience is structured as a narrative. Broadly speaking, it begins with a chronologically ill-defined ‘before’, when people of South Asian descent lived in Uganda; the moment of crisis that came with expulsion in 1972; relocation to Britain, the struggle to acclimatise, and uplift through hard work; and a long present marked by prosperity and a sense of being established. Both adherence to this and deviations from it were rooted in specificities of individual experience and outlook. If one considers the question of age, for example, it is unsurprising that Prakash Samani, Ravi Govindia, and Chandrika Joshi all narrated expulsion as something of a coming-of-age story, given that they were in their mid-to-late teens at that point in time.
By contrast, Idi Amin loomed larger, and was more humanised, in Manzoor Moghal’s narrative because he was old enough to have been a prominent business leader by the early 1970s. The thorny question of Asian privilege in Uganda was also negotiated differently by Tahera Aanchawan because she was herself part-African, and by Prakash Samani because his family were, his interview suggested, lower middle-class. Prakash Samani’s and Ravi Govindia’s accounts of upward mobility within and gratitude to Britain align with their political trajectories; the former becoming integrated into dominant local civic institutions, the latter having been involved in Conservative local politics since the mid-1970s. By contrast, Manzoor Moghal’s greater criticism of the British government and discussion of anti-Asian racism in Britain tallied with his having moved to Leicester, which was more of hotspot for racial tensions around Asian migration from Uganda, his unsuccessful candidacy with the Social Democratic Party for Bradford West in 1987 (which he attributed to a racist campaign by the local Labour Party), and his involvement in the Leicester Muslim Forum.
Yet comparing the two recordings with each other also illustrates how similarities and differences in how the Ugandan Asian experience is articulated were also outcomes of format. Whereas The Listening Project centred Prakash Samani’s narrative, albeit with the broader history existing as a referent, the Reunion episode was specifically titled ‘Ugandan Asians’ and its panellists’ stories sat in conjunction, comparison, and sometimes contestation with each other as a microcosm for that history of expulsion and after. To this end, The Reunion was also far more explicitly edited (with its usage of archival material) and its discussion far more clearly managed to ensure no one panellist monopolised the discussion. The nature of the conversation was also more clearly preordained through the selection of participants, who had varying degrees of existing public profiles, most notably Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.
Yet there was also an invisible hand at work in picking who contributed to The Listening Project. Prakash and Sunil’s dialogue was ostensibly more organic than the more explicitly structured discussion on The Reunion, but it also took place at a BBC studio, with a professional sound recordist, and Sunil played an analogous role to that of Sue MacGregor in ensuring certain aspects were touched upon and in that the wider Ugandan Asian experience was maintained as a referent for the individual life stories being told. There was then a subsequent layer of selection and editing at work in deciding what segment of the interview should be played, as a seemingly representative sample of the conversation, on BBC Stoke. Another commonality at play was the apparently absent but implicitly present listener at home. Though apparently intrafamilial and intracommunal discussions respectively, they were recorded for broadcast to a larger, predominantly White audience; we can only speculate as to how that might have influenced the participants’ decision on what to include or omit and how to present it, to ensure the intelligibility and perhaps acceptability of their accounts to that audience. This in turn draws our attention to how organisations with a public remit – like the BBC, but also the British Library – play a role in turning the individual experiences of members of minority groups into potentially sanitised components of a broader national cultural memory.
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Bit late to reading part 2, but thank you for writing this. As I said on part 1, I like that The Listening Project exists, including as a BL archive. But The Reunion is a different beast, not least for its multiplicity of views and experiences. Glorious heyday nostalgia is a dubious overlord...
Planning to read this tomorrow (probably after a reread of part 1).