The remarkable success of the East African Asians

When Idi Amin’s voice crackled through the radio on 4 August 1972 with his fateful ultimatum, my family paid little notice, save for wondering briefly why a government announcement had interrupted the blaring Bollywood tunes. My father’s two sisters were getting married the next day (both tying the knot at the same time meant half the wedding cost) and preparations were in full flow. In any case my family – like many of Uganda’s 76,000-odd Asians who were subject to Amin’s expulsion, giving them 90 days to leave the country – thought the President could hardly be serious. Despite being a small minority of the country’s population, the Asians were responsible for 90 per cent of Uganda’s tax revenues. To expel them would be madness.

But madness came easily to Amin. This, after all, was the man who claimed to be the uncrowned king of Scotland (hence the 2006 film in which the dictator is played by Forest Whitaker). And this was the man who styled himself, in full: ‘His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.’ So expulsion it was, to hell with the consequences.

Reality soon dawned that Amin meant every word of his decree. He claimed the instruction had come to him in a dream from God. Asians – whom he denounced as economic ‘bloodsuckers’ – were to leave the country with a maximum of £55 and two suitcases, a stipulation enforced at gunpoint by troops at army checkpoints where deportees were stripped of valuables. Women were sometimes raped or left for dead. My grandfather endured overnight torture before being able to prove himself innocent of anti-Amin sentiment. He ended up stateless and forced to go to India while the rest of the family headed to the UK, but he was at least thankful to live to tell the tale.

Some 29,000 Ugandan Asians were granted entry to the UK by Ted Heath’s government. Crucially, the vast majority were British passport holders. Smaller numbers ended up in Canada, the US, Europe, India or Pakistan. My father’s family landed at Stansted airport before being given food and water and taken by coach to Heathfield Army Camp in Honiton, one of the 16 temporary centres run by the Uganda Resettlement Board. My father, an aspiring civil engineer, put his education on hold to take up work as a security guard at Heathrow to help pay the family bills.

Today, 2 November, is the 50th anniversary of the expiry of Amin’s 90-day deadline. His Majesty the King will mark the occasion with a reception for British Ugandan Asians at the Palace. Uganda has put the past firmly behind it: the Ugandan High Commissioner to the UK is also a Ugandan Asian – Her Excellency Nimisha Madhvani – and President Yoweri Museveni has gone out of his way to welcome back the Asian community. But it is a good moment to pause to consider the remarkable success that this group of immigrants has made of itself.

The expulsion from Uganda is the most vivid example, but Asians from all over East Africa have made the UK home, largely since the ‘Africanisation’ policies of the 1950s and 1960s where Asians’ businesses were expropriated. Significant numbers came to the UK from Kenya and Tanzania. My mother’s family came to the UK from Malawi. Most emigrated from British India to East Africa in the late 19th century. In the 1890s, some 30,000 from British India were brought to East Africa under indentured labour contracts to build the Uganda Railway. Others came of their own volition, to open shops and start businesses. The largest number came from the Indian state of Gujarat.

The success and wealth they achieved in their former African homes may have often been confiscated, but they have managed to replicate it here in the UK. As David Goodhart has said, the East African Asians have proved to be perhaps the ‘most successful non-European minority group in post-war Britain’, a result he attributes to a flair for entrepreneurialism and a willingness to engage in the civic institutions of modern Britain. As a boy, my father was a member of the 5th Busoga Scouts Troop in Jinja, Uganda. Years later, when the 6th Northwood Scouts group where he and my mother had settled in north-west London was short of volunteers to run things, he donned the khakis once more.

Many opened corner shops – as my aunt and uncle did in Southend-on-Sea – which have since grown into large, successful enterprises. But while the business success of the East African Asians has long been evident, it has been their growing prominence in British public life in the past few years that has been most striking. Nowhere is this more evident than in politics: Shailesh Vara (Uganda), Priti Patel (Uganda), Suella Braverman (Kenya) and of course Rishi Sunak (Kenya / Tanzania) are examples of the group’s political success.

They are joined in the Lords by the likes of Baroness Vadera, and Lords Verjee, Gadhia and Popat. The latter, who is now the PM’s trade envoy to Uganda, Rwanda and DRC, has pointed out that had the Asians become more involved in Ugandan politics the expulsion might never have been allowed to happen. Since moving to the UK, he and others have made up for lost time.

As Lord Popat said in a debate in the Lords last week to mark the 50th anniversary: ‘In the 1970s, there was a common joke – “What is an Indian without a shop?” The answer is a doctor. Now, we might say the answer is the Prime Minister.’ It’s been quite the journey.