Ugandan Asians: The Reckoning

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BBC Radio 4 - Ugandan Asians: The Reckoning

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown takes a fresh look at the story of the Ugandan Asian expulsion.

Asians built the Ugandan economy and the country. Then a brutish African leader abruptly exiled them. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown traces the little-known roots of this notorious act.

General Idi Amin seized power in in Uganda in 1971. His brutal dictatorship is synonymous with the deportation of the country's 80,000-strong Asian population fifty years ago this year. As the popular story goes, Asians built the economy and the country. Then a brutish African leader exiled them from their adopted homeland. Some 28,000  arrived in the UK in the summer of 1972. The story of industrious, virtuous Asian families being thrown out for no reason and succeeding against all odds, has been endlessly recycled according to Ugandan-born journalist and broadcaster. But, she argues, though powerful and moving,  it is incomplete and simplistic.  

Their story in East Africa has much more humble beginnings and goes as far back as the Victorian era. The colonial rulers had set Asians up to be the buffer between them and and the lowly black Africans. At the time native Ugandans had little or no education, little or no knowledge of how to do business, to access loans, trade etc. Asian middlemen ran everything and were seen as the oppressors.

Among the reasons Amin gave for their expulsion were that they were exploiters who made no attempt to integrate with black African Ugandans and that they invested their profits abroad rather than in Uganda. Even though black Ugandans suffered most under Amin - the so-called "Butcher of Uganda" tortured his own people and killed an estimated million of them during his eight-year rule - yet there was still a sense of liberation when the Asians left. These, according to Yasmin, are inescapable truths - truths that Asians wished to forget but black Ugandans never have.  Some still maintain that for all the terrible things Amin did, they finally got their country back.

Yasmin delivers a sharp reappraisal of this secret history and delves into the forgotten, concealed past from which the Ugandan Asians do not escape without blame. 

Producer: Mohini Patel

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