Ugandan-Asian Jamila Siddiqui's rare viewpoint on the Asian Expulsion, 1972.
"When the British formally left Uganda [upon it's independence in 1962] and the Blacks took over, hundreds of Asians swore they would be going back to India. But they didn't. A few sent their wives and daughters to India, (fearing as ever, forced marriages or Black gang rapes) but soon the women were back as no such ludicrous thing had happened. Little could anyone have guessed that in exactly ten years from that date, they would be leaving in thousands, not voluntarily but forcibly. What's more, they wouldn't be going to the idealised Mother India which had loomed large in their psyche from Day One, but straight into the open arms of Mother Britain, which we had until then considered totally uninhabitable on grounds of its climate and its secular culture of shamelessness. As a student at Makerere University in 1972, judging by the reaction of my peers to the Expulsion order, it seemed to me that the vast majority of educated, and reasonable-minded Black Ugandans were actually very supportive of Amin's decision. Every night, in the undergraduates' Common Room, when the countdown for Asians to get out was updated at the end of the evening news, cheers went up from the Black girls. These girls asserted that Blacks needed more of a chance to do their own thing. That such a "chance" would most certainly materialise once the exploitative Asians had been booted out. Domestic servants were a vital link in the whole scheme of things. Their hard work and total dedication had contributed to the idyllic lifestyles of their Asian 'mem-sahibs' [female bosses]. But more importantly, Black African servants were often the only link that Asians had to African culture. There have been numerous books on Uganda. But few attempt to shed any meaningful light on just what this multiracial hotpot actually amounted to on a day-to-day basis. General Idi Amin was actually the catalyst who finally caused the time-bomb to explode, a time-bomb that was initially planted by the British and then, in many ways nurtured by the Asians themselves. All the time that bomb was ticking away, Asians never thought of Uganda as home. But once ousted, many cried bitter tears of fury for the so-called "homeland". It took an expulsion for them to start claiming Uganda as home."
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