Exceptions to the expulsion: violence, security and community among Ugandan Asians, 1972–79

Abstract

This paper explores the precarious social worlds of Indians, or Ugandan Asians, who continued to live in Uganda after the 1972 expulsion of the Asian population; men and women who were bureaucratic “exceptions” to the larger out flux of the Indian population. They responded to their racialization and ambivalent inclusion in Amin's Uganda with complex forms of collaboration, complicity, and social practices geared towards shoring up security. Significantly, leaders defined the Indian social body away from an already marginalized Indian political domain that was instituted in the colonial period. Men constructed a new cross-ethnic, religious and sectarian social collectivity in response to their visible status as racialized subjects, forging private enclaves of urban Indian space. Finally, their narratives illustrate aspects of the contingent, bureaucratic, and arbitrary nature of violence and governance in the dictatorial regime. The social and cultural practices developed by Indians during the 1970s continue to structure the dynamics of Afro-Asian relations in contemporary East Africa.

Keywords:

• Asians
• Idi Amin
• race
• security
• Uganda
• violence

Acknowledgements

This paper was first presented at the “Reframing Knowledge Production on 1970s Uganda” Conference at Michigan on 5 February 2011. I thank Edgar Taylor and Derek Peterson for their efforts in editing this issue. Jean Comaroff, Gillian Feeley-Harnik and Derek Peterson also provided detailed comments on versions of this essay. Finally, I thank one anonymous reviewer and the editorial staff at JEAS.

Notes

1. Kasozi, The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda; Mazrui, Soldiers and Kinsmen in Uganda, and Mamdani, Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda, offer various framings of Idi Amin's state and mode of governance.

2. See Peterson and Taylor, “Rethinking the State in Idi Amin's Uganda: the Politics of Exhortation” for further discussion.

3. Hansen and Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies, p. 3.

4. The Immigration (Amendment) Decree, Decree No. 30, October 5, 1972.

5. The total Asian population in Uganda increased dramatically over the course of the twentieth century (5000 in 1921; 14,150 in 1931; 35,215 in 1948; and 71,933 in 1959). The Asian population was 74,308 in 1969, approximately 0.73% of the total population in Uganda at this time (Read, “Some Legal Aspects of the Expulsion,” p. 193). The Indian population had fallen to 55,000 at the time of Amin's expulsion decree (personal communication with Dr. Vali Jamal, August 2011).

6. For an excellent online bibliography, see http://coombs.anu.edu.au/Biblio/biblio_sasiadiaspora.html

7. Racial formation and processes of racialization are critical to understanding the lives of Indians in East Africa. This discussion is beyond the scope of this essay; however, new works by Brennan, Taifa; Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones; and Hansen, Melancholia of Freedom, suggest fresh perspectives on the history of racial thought and the ethnography of racial practice in Eastern and Southern Africa.

8. Muhindi (Luganda), or Indian. Following their own preferences, I refer to interviewees as “Indian” or “Ugandan Asian”, regardless of their formal citizenship status. Practices of self-referencing, in relation to generational status, racial, ethnic, religious, national, and migration history, is on-going discursive labor among interviewees. “Asian” is another term that is commonly used among East African Asians and South Asian diaspora populations in the UK.

9. I conducted interviews and home stays with Ugandan Asians and their immediate and extended families in Kampala, Mbarara and Jinja between September 2008 and February 2011. Among Indians in Uganda, discussion of the expulsion and the Obote and Amin years is sensitive and it is difficult to access information on this era. Friends introduced me to their networks, and after establishing rapport with interviewees, I received permission to conduct interviews. Unless they are prominent or historical figures, I have changed all real names to pseudonyms in the text in order to protect the identities of interviewees.

10. Translated from interviews in Hindi and Panjabi, the phrase “Indians who remained” (rehen walley) is often used in this essay. Ugandan Asians always described themselves in relation to the absence of the larger population of Indians who left during the East African exodus.

11. Das, Life and Words, p. 7.

12. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. xi–xxiv.

13. I refer here to Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol.1. Both Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks and Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, discuss relations between the state, its ideological apparatus, and the individual that may be more appropriate to the formation of political subjectivities among men during the regime.

14. Personal communication with Dr Vali Jamal, June 2011.

15. Interview with Rajivbhai, Kampala, February 2011 and Lalbhai, Mbarara, April 2010. See also Lalani, Uganda Asian Expulsion, pp. 125 and 133.

16. Interview with Rajivbhai, Kampala, February 2011. See also Adams and Bristow, “Ugandan Asian Expulsion Experiences: Rumour and Reality.”

17. One of the more prominent Indian figures during Amin's regime was Ram Singh, the Chief Engineer of the Ministry of Defense. Interviews with Tara Singh and Rajivbhai, Jinja and Kampala, February 2010.

18. This process began in the late 1960s and more intensely after the Asian Conference in 1972 when Indian men became acutely aware of Idi Amin's interest in African men's inability to marry or have sexual relations with Indian women. See Moghal, Idi Amin and Tandon [O'Brien], Brown Britons, for further discussion.

19. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, p. 129; also cited in Hansen, Melancholia of Freedom, p. 35.

20. I argue that the Indian community is gendered “male” because it is interpellated by the colonial state via Indian male community representatives. Indian women also form the symbolic “inner essence” of the “Indian community”. In general, the colonial state engendered symbolic relations among European, Indian and African men such that Indian men were emasculated. See Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, for a discussion of imperial processes and gender formation in India.

21. Morris, “Communal Rivalry Among Indians in Uganda,” p. 316.

22. Ram Singh and Sahib, both high-ranking contractors in the Ministry of Defense, received permission to hire labor from Punjab on a number of construction projects throughout the 1970s.

23. These items included whiskey, cigarettes, and other luxury goods. Other Ugandan Asian traders became the sole importers of staple items such as sugar and salt.

24. Magendo (Kiswahili) refers to the informal and untaxed economy that proliferated after the expulsion of the Asian commercial class. Most Ugandan Asian traders and entrepreneurs who remained took part in various forms of smuggling. Some interviewees would describe this group as “opportunists”. Because everyone engaged in enterprise that was considered illegal in the context of the declining infrastructure and economic crisis, conventional African and Indian social norms of morality became ambiguous. Ugandan Asians are embedded within domains of community and social respectability that deal with the moral politics of individual and community wealth accumulation.

25. The expulsion resulted in the emergence of new African traders and entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, Indians continued to engage in the trade of commodities that African traders did not have access to.

26. Tandon, Technical Assistance Administration in East Africa.

27. Interview with Sukh Singh, Kampala, October 2009. This is undoubtedly after the first coup attempt against Amin in 1976, and the period when Amin's Uganda has entered serious economic crisis. Amin may have allowed Punjabi Sikhs to emigrate at this time in order to help revive certain sectors of the economy.

28. Mamdani, From Citizen to Refugee.

29. In 1969, Uganda's total Asian population was 74,308. Uganda citizens formed more than a third (26,657), British Asians almost a half (36,593), Indian citizens were 8890, and Kenyan citizens were 1768. Read, “Some Legal Aspects of the Expulsion,” p. 193. Before independence, most Indians were considered to be British Protected Persons (BPP), without British citizenship but often with access to British passports. The post-independence naturalization of BPP to Ugandan citizenship was a complex affair, with several rule changes occurring over the decade. Immigration restriction policies passed by the Powell government in the UK also affected the numbers of BPP who became Ugandan or British citizens.

30. See Das, “The Signature of the State” and Hansen and Stepputat, States of Imagination.

31. Interview with Rajivbhai, Kampala, February 2011.

32. The emphasis on one's formal citizenship status as a Ugandan may also reflect the current desire of Ugandan Asians to position themselves as citizens in relation to new migration streams of South Asians to Uganda.

33. Interview, Lalbhai, Mbarara, April 2010. Translation from Hindi.

34. Interview with Rajivbhai, Kampala, February 2011.

35. Interview with Rajivbhai, Kampala, February 2011.

36. Interview with Hari Singh, Kampala, November 2010.

37. Interview with Rajivbhai, Kampala, February 2011.

38. Interview with Mini, Kampala, February 2010.

39. Interview with Hari Singh, Kampala, November 2010.

40. Interview with Hari Singh, Kampala, November 2010.

41. Interview with Hari Singh, Kampala, November 2010.

42. Kondos practiced kondoism, or violent robberies and looting. See Kasozi, The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda, pp. 112–16.

43. Interview with Virdee, Kampala, February 2011.

44. Interview with K. Sahota, Kampala, November 2009.

45. Interview, Hari Singh, Kampala, November 2010.

46. Interview with Virdee, Kampala, February 2011. Translation from Panjabi.

47. Professor Syed Abidi, personal communication, Kampala, February 2011. Meeting with Ali Jafar, personal communication, Kampala, January 2010.

48. Interviews with Rajivbhai, Mini, and Tara Singh, Kampala and Jinja, 2009–11.

49. Ugandan Asians often described “politics” as being openly critical about Amin's policies, especially the expulsion. It is interesting that even civil servants imagined themselves as outside the realm of “politics”, viewing their labor as an extension of the economic role with which the Indian community was conflated.

50. Interview with Ali Jafar, Kampala, February 2011.

51. Interview with Tara Singh, Jinja, February 2011.

52. Interview with Gulzar Amin, Kampala, February 2010.

53. I was not able to track down and interview Ram Singh, and unfortunately he passed away in early 2011.

54. Ugandan Asians continued to attend and live in two major gurudware in Kampala: the Ramgharia Sikh Society and Singh Sabha gurudwara in Old Kampala and on Sikh Street. They also maintained the Singh Sabha gurudwara in Jinja, Shikhar Bandi Mandhir and Sanatan Dharma Mandhir, or SDM, in Kampala, and the Ramgariah gurudwara and mandhir in Entebbe. In Kampala, the large Sri Swami Narayan Mandhir was expropriated and converted into a school; the Ismailia jamatkhana was allocated to the Uganda Supreme Muslim Council. These are key religious institutions in Buganda and Busoga, but they are only part of a vast religious landscape that once flourished in the country.

55. Interview with Sukh Singh, Kampala, October 2009.

56. Interview with Virdee and Tara Singh, Kampala and Jinja, February 2011.

57. According to personal communication with Pradip Karia, July 2011.

58. The ramifications of property expropriation, allocation, and re-appropriation by returnee Ugandan Asians is a set of complex issues that unfortunately is discussed in rather limiting terms in scholarship. See Oloka-Onyango, “Race, Class and Imperialism in Uganda” for a preliminary discussion. It is important to consider the symbolic dimensions of Indian spaces (homes, businesses, places of devotional worship), once viewed as “inaccessible” by Africans who distrusted a “closed community” of Indians. In the 1970s, Indian men's manipulation of Indian space was a mode of forging relations of inclusivity and trust with Ugandans.

59. Kirtan, or Sikh musical recitation of scriptures. Puja, or Hindu devotional ceremonies. Langar, or shared meals among congregants.

60. Interview with Virdee, Kampala, February 2011. Translation from Panjabi.

61. Ugandan Asians could disappear, and this was always a bad situation. During the 90-day expulsion period, Indian men were frequently kidnapped, beaten, robbed, and often asked to bring soldiers back to their homes for more looting.

62. Interview with Mini, Kampala, November 2010.

63. Gulzar Amin states that many of these cases went unreported (Interview, Kampala, February 2011). Mini noted that Indian women were violated in the period of instability following the invasion of Tanzanian troops in 1979 (Interview, Kampala, February 2011).

64. Unataka sukari, or “Do you want sugar?” (Kiswahili). Interview with Miraben, July 2011.