![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
This commentary examines the contemporary relevance of Uganda’s 1972 Asian expulsion. It describes and argues against “expulsion exceptionalism,” or the ways that expulsion is understood as a singular event and through discourses of African-Asian racial estrangement, the racial victimization of Asians, the excesses of military dictator Idi Amin, and illiberal framings of Uganda, Africa and African governance. Rather, the expulsion is a global critical event and a continuous reality that remains unresolved yet is central to new practices of South Asian noncitizen incorporation by the current government. The “insecurities of expulsion” refer to: 1) the effects and affects of expulsion; 2) the imaginaries, memories and meaning-making around expulsion; and 3) the practices and performances of Ugandan Asian/South Asian citizenship that have emerged since expulsion. This research contributes to Afro-Asian futures and to anthropological and other disciplinary engagements with global/transnational “Afro-Asian study.”
Acknowledgement
I thank Professors Gaurav Desai and James Ocita for their invitation to write this commentary. It is based on a paper that I delivered on a panel on Asian Presence in East Africa that they organized at the 2020 virtual African Studies Association Annual Conference.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 “Johnson’s Cabinet: My Indian Family Fled from Uganda to the U.K.: That Still Doesn’t Give Them or Other South Asians the Right to Be Racist.” Shrai Popat, The Juggernaut, February 26, 2020.
2 The work of Vali Jamal in Uganda Asians (unpublished) and Dolar Vasani’s Expulsion @50 Podcast are excellent examples of archiving projects that reveal the complexity of Uganda Asian experience. “Uganda Remembers: If We Don’t Tell Our Stories, No One Will.” Dolar Vasani, Daily Maverick, 10 Jan. 2022. They join many other Uganda Asian writers who have documented their experiences of expulsion.
3 Mamdani, “The Asian Question: On Leaving Uganda.” London Review of Books, 6 Oct. 2022. I am happy to note that some of my concepts and arguments have since been taken up and affirmed by Mamdani who has read my doctoral dissertation published in 2013 and listened to my presentations in Kampala and at the Uganda Asian Expulsion Conference at Oxford University on May 20th, 2022, which is the basis for this piece.
4 The materials and photographs compiled in Lalani, Ugandan Asian Expulsion, showcases the media spectacle of the expulsion crisis and some aspects of expulsion exceptionalism.
5 Jamal “Asians in Uganda”, Mamdani Politics and Class, Mazrui “Casualties”, Tandon “The Expulsions”, among many others.
6 Mamdani Imperialism and Fascism; Leopold Inside West Nile, Mazrui Soldiers and Kinsmen, Kasozi The Social Origins, and others.
7 Decker’s foundational contribution, In Idi Amin’s Shadow, examines the development of militarized masculinities and the experiences of women during this era.
8 See Hamai “Imperial Burden” for a discussion of Ugandan Asian as Jew in the British media during the expulsion crisis.
9 For example, Bhachu Twice-Migrants, Brah Cartographies of Desire, Parmar Reading the Cultural, Muhammedi, Gifts from Amin.
10 Personal communications during research with Prof. Vali Jamal and Hon. Rajni Tailor, Kampala, 2008-2010.
11 See Madhvani and Foden (Tide) and Mehta (Dream).
12 The Indian Association of Uganda was very active and offered community welfare and support to returnees and newcomers, as well as political and public advocacy. Political participation among Uganda Asians has been minimal, although some Uganda Asians have participated in national and local-level politics. Businessmen with close ties to the NRM continue to be critical to securing South Asian presence in Uganda.
13 More research on all these issues is necessary.
14 As in the recent case of prominent real estate tycoon and financier Sudhir Ruparelia and the NRM/Bank of Uganda’s investigations into Crane Bank.
15 See (Hundle, under contract) for more. Savita Nair’s 2018 analysis focuses on anti-Asian sentiments, with less attention to Uganda Asian capitalist and specifically Mehta’s complicities in fomenting anti-Asian violence against more vulnerable South Asian migrants.
16 https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/01/21/uganda-elections-marred-violence, Web. 26 Oct. 2022.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Anneeth Kaur Hundle
Anneeth Kaur Hundle is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Presidential Chair in Social Sciences to Advance Sikh Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to her current position, she was a Visiting Professor at the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Merced, and a Research Associate at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. In addition to her forthcoming manuscript, “Insecurities of Expulsion: Race, Violence, Citizenship and Afro-Asian Entanglements in Transregional Uganda” (under contract with Duke University Press), her writing on Uganda has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Africa is A Country, and Al-Jazeera.