‘Ugandan Asians: Then and Now’

The ‘forthcoming’ bit gave me lots of problems as it changed several times. It was going to be a magazine for the Commonwealth Conference in Uganda in November 2007. Prior to that I had done one for the Aga Khan’s Golden Jubilee in August (2007) in ‘three weeks of writing and three days of designing and printing’. So I thought three months should be ample for this effort. Power went off for hours at a time, the designer ran away with the flash one night, the printer took advance money for buying paper and disappeared. I ran around all the print shops on Nkrumah Road. All said sure they could do it, just give us the advance.

The no-show of the magazine spawned a succession of rumours - it was a hoax, I was educationally-challenged, etc. I showed my 66-page manuscript to all and sundry in defence. Then I decided what the heck, I'll do a book and a year should be enough. It was something I had always wanted to do ever since we were expelled in1972. I came back to live in Uganda in 2005 - and that completed the trifecta you have to have to write a book like this: presence in Uganda in1972; return to live there; and…oh, I forgot to say it before, childhood in the 1950s (after that everything changed).

It’s now a 666-page book - and therein lies the story of madness or courage, I think both. The need to be comprehensive of all communities and classes is where the time went. People simply came forth to contribute their stories and I accepted them as that’s what my book was about. It emerged that around a hundred people never left for even a day. All their names are recorded in an honour roll-call and I wrote their stories of hide-and-seek from Amin’s soldiers. I got stories of people who were picked up last-minute by the UNHCR and how their lives were in the refugee camps. Some people trickled in as soon as Amin fell, among them Mehta and Madhvani. From the diaspora countries people sent in accounts of the expulsion. I got accounts of our pioneers from 1860 onwards, how the railway was actually built and how life was in the villages for the dukan-waras - the heroes of the story. There are over a dozen stories of that very special Ugandan childhood and of a dozen or so families that pioneered Canada before 1972. What was the cost of living for one family in Vancouver in 1967 is there.

Is there padding? Well, you’ll judge for yourself! There is archival material on who influenced Amin to drive out the Asians; what did Nixon and Kissinger know about our expulsion; what was said in the British Houses of Parliament; how did the Australians respond (business as usual); how did the Canadians select their intake (done for the first time from the diary of the chief of the Canadian mission). Towards the end is a ‘socio-economic history’ of the Asian saga, including education profiles at different epochs; family size and incomes. There is also information on poverty and income distribution in Uganda at various times. So it’s a researched book.

‘No-one’s gonna read it.’ Well, you just leave it on the coffee table and look at it now and again. It’ll be a lavish production, full colour, with1500 images. If it’s reviewed in scholarly journals and serious newspapers that should be reward enough.

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* Vali Jamal, BA Cambridge, PhD Stanford, senior economist, ILO, 1976-2001, [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.