Happy endings for expelled ‘Uganda Asians’
Last week I wrote of some of the perils facing India as the world’s largest democracy marked 75 years of independence. This week a hopeful tale of a relatively small group of Indians who faced maximum peril 50 years ago, but whose story is a promising one for Canada’s present and future.
Fifty years ago this month tens of thousands of “Uganda Asians” were desperately trying to figure out where in the world they would go, how they would get there, and what little they might be able to take with them when they left.
They were expelled from their country because of their race.
The expulsion of the “Uganda Asians” in August 1972 remains one of the great racist outrages of our time. It is a story of ruthless injustice, perpetrated by a dictator, Idi Amin, both unusually wicked and unspeakably cruel. He was a true madman, deranged and delusional.
At the same time, the story had, for many, a happy ending. The very Asians who were thrown out of their own homes and despoiled of their property went on to exceptional success in the countries that generously received them. Racism and brutality did not have the final word.
But they did have their day. On Aug. 4, 1972, Amin announced that all Asians in Uganda who held British passports had to leave the country. They had 90 days to get out. (“Asians” in the parlance of the time generally meant those from the subcontinent.) Later those who held passports from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh also were added to the expulsion.
Uganda had gained independence from Britain only 10 years previous, so many people born in Uganda held British nationality and passports.
The British colonial policy had brought many Indians to East Africa as labourers and educated managers in the colonial administration. Many of them prospered — and earned the resentment of the African majority, which was denied the same opportunities.
Some 60,000 people were expelled by Amin in a straightforward example of ethnic cleansing. He wanted Uganda for “ethnic Ugandans,” freed from the presence of Asians who were “sabotaging Uganda’s economy and encouraging corruption.” No one did more on those fronts than Amin himself and his henchmen.
The world reaction was strong on words, less so on action. The blatant racism — Ugandans by birth rendered stateless because of their race — was roundly condemned. Punishment for Amin was less forthcoming. His bloodthirsty plundering would continue to ravage Uganda until 1979, when Julius Nyerere of neighbouring Tanzania drove him into exile, first to Libya and then onward to Saudi Arabia.
Those expelled had just months to abandon lives they had built over generations. My own grandmother and uncle were among the expelled, with their property confiscated. She had been born in Uganda, lived her entire life there and practised the urgently-needed profession of midwifery. At the age of 61, despite having contributed enormously to the heath and well-being of many women, especially in rural areas, she had to go because her parents were from India.
My parents had already emigrated to Canada a few years beforehand, so her landing here was easier than others who became true refugees, driven out with only the clothes on their backs and nowhere to go.
The Uganda expulsion created an immediate political crisis. Who would take in the 60,000?
Most would end up in Britain, but some 6,000 would be resettled in Canada, many of whom were Ismaili Muslims. The head of their community, the Aga Khan, had personally appealed to his friend, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who was amenable. It was the largest settlement of non-european refugees until that point in Canadian history, and took place a few years before Canada had an official refugee policy.
The expelled Uganda Asians worked hard and made the most of the generous spirit of Canadians and their government. Having escaped the racism of Amin’s Uganda, they prospered as racial minorities in Canada.
In 2020, the appointment of Salma Lakhani as the 19th lieutenant-governor of Alberta, manifested their success. Her Honour and her husband, Dr. Zaheer Lakhani, arrived in Edmonton in July 1977. After the expulsion they were first given protection and passage by the British Crown.
In Britain, where most of the Uganda Asians settled, former prime minister David Cameron (2010-2016) described them as “one of the most successful groups of immigrants to any country anywhere in history.”
Indeed, many Uganda Asians speak of the expulsion as a blessing very well disguised. The alternative to being an expelled Asian in London or Toronto in, say, 1975, was to be an “ethnic Ugandan” in Uganda, still suffering under the depredations of Amin. Much better to be thrown out of Amin’s Uganda into agreeable and tolerant lands where opportunity is not determined by race or colour.
In 1997, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni travelled to London to face thousands of Uganda Asians directly. On the 25th anniversary of the expulsion he apologized for Amin’s expulsion, acknowledged that it set back Uganda’s economy for a generation and invited them to return. Few did. They had made good lives in the peaceable and prosperous Commonwealth, for which they remained immensely grateful.
The Uganda expulsion was a small part of one the great Canadian immigration success stories. Not without difficulties of course, but the enormous number of Indian immigrants have been a boon, contributing mightily to the fields of education, science, entrepreneurship, civic engagement and religion.
Across the Atlantic, the frontrunner to be the next prime minister of the U.K. is Rishi Sunak, whose grandparents left India for East Africa (not Uganda, but Kenya and Tanzania). They then moved to Britain in the 1960s where Sunak’s father was a family doctor and his mother a pharmacist.
He is not a Uganda Asian, but one of millions of families that trod the path from India to East Africa to Canada and the U.K. (Now Indian immigrants prefer to go first to the Gulf rather than Africa.)
The unlamented Amin is now dead. Uganda is four decades removed from the destruction he wrought. And part of his legacy, in the mysterious designs of providence, lives on happily in Canada.
ONE OF THE GREAT RACIST OUTRAGES OF OUR TIME.