Empire: World History - 17. Rishi Sunak's Ancestry: Indians in East Africa

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

In this episode, Anita and William are joined by Mahmood Mamdani to discuss the East African Indian diaspora. How did Indians come to live in East Africa? Why did so many move to Britain? What was the role of Idi Amin in all of this? To get your free two week trial for Find my past, go to www.findmypast.co.uk and sign up.   LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire   Twitter: @Empirepoduk   Goalhangerpodcasts.com   Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Drupal. Now, we have a burgeoning inbox. And thank you so much for all of you who get in touch. We do read everything.

and if we don't get back to you, it's just sheer weight of numbers, but we are reading everything. And William, we've got a massive amount of interest in explaining Rishi Sunak. Well, not him personally, because that's not our job, but, you know, this whole phenomenon of the Asian in East Africa. There's been a lot of interest, isn't there? It is, and it's something which I think has had very little play at all in the national consciousness. We have a little bit of awareness in Britain of partition, but not much. But the whole story of how so many British people prominent in public life, in the case of just the Tory cabinet at the moment, Rishi Soonat, the Prime Minister, Preeti Patel, the ex-home minister, and Suella Braviman, the current Home Minister. All three of them come from this background, along with many other people prominent in public life like Grinda Chada and so on. And this is a major part of modern British history that virtually no one knows anything about outside that community. And when you do, when you have polls of demographic breakdowns in this country, by far the most

successful immigrant group in this country has been East African Asians as they're called, they're groups together that way. Something like 65% upper professional and managerial backgrounds, highly educated, one of the best educated communities in the country. And yet they've only been here, whatever it is, 50 years, this month. Exactly. So it's a really, it's a very good time to be talking about this. I mean, not just because it's the 50th anniversary of Indians being thrown out of Uganda,

but also because there is now a man in Downing Street, number 10 Downing Street, who put deer lamps, the Varley deer lamps on the steps of Downing Street. Now, I mean, just a little personal thing here, I mean, you know when you're a gobby young girl of Asian descent, and people say to you, and I remember this. Thinking of no one in particular. I don't think of anyone. I'm just speaking for a friend. But everyone sort of turns around and goes, oh, you're opinionated and you've got a gob on you.

You could be prime minister one day. When I was growing up, you know, I heard that. But I never thought it was possible. Never thought it would be a possibility. Even when I had my own children, I thought, you know, they can be anything. But I never thought they could be that. And so this is a huge deal. I think, you know, whatever your politics may be, you may agree or disagree with the man and what he stands for.

But the fact that there is a man. of Asian descent as Prime Minister. It hasn't happened elsewhere in Europe. It has happened here in Great Britain. And I wonder in India... It's happened in Ireland already, we should say. Well, Leovaradka, absolutely right to point out. Yes. And he's, he's, he's, Lea Varadca is mixed race, Irish and Indian heritage. But for somebody who's so strongly identifies as being an Indian descent, Hindu lighting candles on the steps of Downing Street, how has that gone across in India, William? What are people saying? Because you're in India and I'm in Britain. Well, he's delighted not one but three countries because the Indians assume that he is Indian because he's Hindu, although in fact his family have only the slightest connection to what is now the geographical boundaries of India.

And I think one of his grandparents spent a few years in Delhi, but most are from Gudramwala over the border in Pakistan. And I've seen some. So let's go through his background, because I think this is actually through the mists of all the fog and smoke. let's talk about actually. And it's sort of our friends from far in my past have provided this rather helpful investigation into his background, which is very useful. Incredibly detailed, which I'm looking through now. Yeah. So anyway, he was born in 1980 in Southampton. He speaks Hindi. He speaks Punjabi and he's one of three children. His father, William, tell us about his dad. His father is Yashvir, born 1949 in Nairobi in the colony protectorate of Kenya. His father arrived in

Liverpool with his family in 1966, went on to study medicine, again, very sort of professional, and became an GP. Yeah, made his mother very happy. He lived the dream. His mother, Usha, Barry, was born in Tanganyika, present-day Tanzania. She, too, is of Punjabi descent. And as he famously has said on numerous occasions, was a pharmacist and worked very hard. And he worked hard as well in her shop. That's what Oates said story that came out many, many times during the leadership campaign. What about his grandparents? Let's start with the paternal side, William. What can you tell us about that? Grandparents, paternal side, Punjabi Katri family from Gudramwala now in Pakistan. The grandfather, paternal grandfather, Ram Dassuna moved to Nairobi in 135, where he was joined by his wife's Hug, Rani Suhak, from Delhi, in 1937. Not partition, interestingly. I'd assumed it was a partition move, but it's actually before partitioned.

Pre-partition, which is very interesting. And the maternal grandparents as well, Punjabi as well, His grandmother, so this is sort of, you know, he's second generation of people born in Tanganyika. His maternal grandfather, Aguirre Saint-Berry, grew up in Punjab and moved to Tanzania as a railway engineer. And he married the Tanzania-born, Sraksha, when he was just 16 years old, arranged marriage and all of that. Just a quick reflection on that 50 years anniversary that we are in right now of the Ugandan's being thrown out of Uganda by Ediamine. Just told overnight, get out. Leave with whatever you can carry and get out. We are now in a situation where a lot of British families are hosting Ukrainian refugees.

That's a reality here in Britain that we are living in. But 50 years ago, it was Ugandan families who turned up with nothing. And there are a number of surprising people. I just wanted to share one little story with you, who took in Ugandan refugees and had very, very strong relationships that go on to this day. I just heard from one family just last week who still now keep in touch. And they are like the grandparents of this family. Their marriages are all together.

they celebrate birthdays. I remember Peter Bottomley and Virginia Bottomley. You remember them from politics? They took in a Ugandan Asian family as well. So, you know, they're all from sort of all strata of society. Suddenly people had to make room. So that is the story of more recent history. But to go right back, as William absolutely rightly points out, the links with India are faint. The links with East Africa are very, very strong, which raises the question that you've been raising as well on the emails, which is what are Indians doing? in East Africa and how did they get there? So we've talked before in this pod about how a lot of Indians supported the First World War,

including Gandhi, encouraging Indians to sign up and fight for the British Empire, on the understanding that there would be a pro-quid quo, that after the war was over and if Britain won, that Indians would be rewarded by dominion status. But what I didn't know was that there was also talk of giving India and Indians a great chunk of East Africa that had belonged to the Jews. Germans, the German East African colony, having been defeated, was discussed as a possible Indian colony. Pioneering administrators, like Sir Harry Johnston, writes this, East Africa is,

and should be from every point of view, the America of the Hindu. And there's a lot of talk in around 1915 and then more after the First World War is one about reserving Kenya for a white settler colony, and for Tanganyika, German East Africa, to be an Indian colony. This is what the Aga Khan has to say. German East Africa, when acquired from Germany, should be handed over to the government of India and reserved as an Indian colony belonging to the Indian government, just as Samoa should be given to Australia and German Southwest Africa to the Cape. I thought this is extraordinary, because this is certainly a piece of history that I had forgotten. This was discussed apparently at the Imperial War Conference of April 1917,

where one of the Indian representatives was Ganga Singh, the Maharaja of Bikana. And again, the Aga Khan is pushing this, and he has discussions with Gopal Krishna Gokli, who we've talked about in the past too, who is the sponsor both of Jinnah and of Gandhi. And Gokli writes, German, East Africa, when conquered from the Germans,

should be reserved for Indian colonization and handed over to the government of India. Another guy, Lord Sidnam, a former governor of Bombay, talks about India as a colonizing power. So this whole idea that Indians would colonize East Africa is a very popular idea. But it's shot down ultimately by none other than Lord Curzon. And then there's a lot of resistance by the white settlers in Kenya on basically racist grounds. And so you get this idea never actually happens. You get continual Indian colonization by individuals, but you get no institutional colonization by the government of India.

So we've got the person who not only was part of the story, he was thrown out by Idi Amin when he was 18 or 19, but also possibly the first person to actually write the history of this migration. And this is Mahmoud Mamdani, now a professor at Columbia, so a professor in Cape Town and in Uganda. He wrote in 1973, the first book on this called From Citizen to Refugee. Ugandan nations come to Britain when he was barely, I think, 21 or 22 years old. And to this day is a major writer on this. Funny enough, when we started the series and the London Review of Books sponsored our first episode,

the piece in the LRB we read out in the ad was actually Mahmoud Mamd Mahdani's essay on, I haven't in front of me here. The Asian question. Mahmoud Bamdani writes about the expulsion from Uganda, 50 years after it happened. So Mahmoud is absolutely the man to go to in this. No, absolutely a pleasure. And may I just say, you're neither settler nor native, was just a profoundly important book to me.

And I mentioned I have another job, you know, the other place, as we like to call it. When I told them that you were coming onto our podcast, they went, wow. You've landed the big fish. You've landed the big fish. So thank you very much for deigning to speak to us. The reason why it's really a great time to be speaking to you, it may not have escaped your notice, but we have a prime minister at number 10,

who is Brown and who has an East African background. And it is a really fascinating time for us. I wonder where you were when you had the news and whether you thought, gosh, that's a surprise. It wasn't a big surprise, not after the last, Mary Ground. In East Africa itself, I think there was much jubilation amongst those of Asian origin. And this had basically to do with Rishi's background, not his politics. And given the way East African-Asian politics has changed over the last decade, it's become much more

divided along sectarian lines, religious lines. It's been the overseas. impact of the BJP and the JVP. So given that, it was not all that surprising, given that Rishi was dubbed the first Hindu prime minister, the British media called him the first Hindu prime minister. Very much the line here in India too, very much stressed his Hindu background, with lots of pictures of him and his wife at their wedding,

with all the paraphernalia. And holding the Bhagavit Gita. at his swearing-in ceremony. Anyway, but it's been a time for celebration with not much sense of what kind of challenges he's facing. It started a conversation here in Great Britain where there is really very little knowledge of that East African migration story.

And it's only started to be looked at because of British Sunak's election. And we should point out at this point that you yourself have an East African background. Uganda was your home until your mid-20s. That's right, isn't it, until Ediamin decided it wasn't going to be your home anymore? Yes, Uganda was my home until the mid-20s, and then I returned to Uganda as soon as Ediamine was ousted, which was 1979. And for the last 12 years, I've been in Uganda directing an institute at Makerere University for 12 years.

And I finished that early February. So the sense of Uganda as a home was kind of challenged after 1972. You can't really go back. You have to take into account what's happened since then. That's really interesting. So it's sort of an almost sort of spiritual schism. How can I want someone who didn't want me? Or just a sense of insecurity.

Yeah. But here, you know, when the story is told here, the big comedy villain is Ediamine. who, you know, in many comedy skits, I can't remember the fortune and bird skit where they do an edie, I mean, I mean, a terrible accent thing that you wouldn't be allowed to do today. But also, last king of Scotland

is the portrayal of a man who is a buffoon, you know, someone to be mocked and laughed at. And yet... I'm more sinister than that in many ways. The threat. In the mythological version, a cannibal, a madman. I mean, there's a whole baggage in the mythology of Idi Amin.

So we ought to ask you, Mamid, just tell us who he really was and what he really was. Well, I think Idi Amin's great strength, in a way, was that he encouraged his adversaries to think their own prejudices as truths. He let them continue believing about him what they did. He played the fool. He played the buffoon.

in the mind of the racist. So he was always a step ahead of the competition. And it is remarkable. I mean, Idi Amin carried out three expulsions in one year, 1972. He expelled Israelis, then he expelled the Asians, then he expelled the British. And both the Israelis and the British tried everything they could to remove him. The Israelis tried a coup attempt in 1974. This was in the aftermath of the Entebbe Before the Entebatebe hostage crisis. They linked up with a section of the Army officer corps from Amin's own corner of Uganda, who were pro-Israeli, but it didn't work anyway.

The British made two attempts, first in 1972, linking up with Tanzania, to carry out an invasion, confronted by Obote's forces and Mosevenis. Abote being the previous Prime Minister ousted by... Right. And, you know, it was, the assumption was that the people would rise up and the people didn't rise up because Amin was very popular. Amin had not only had he removed Obote, but then when he did the turnaround and expel deations, he was very popular until he could not come up with an alternative setup. The British tried again and this time

successfully in 1978, 79, again with Tanzania and with Nire. But even then, the reason Amin sort of The term ended as president of Uganda was much more because of internal factors. When you speak of the expulsion of the Asians, I mean, what did Ugandans think of his decision to expel Asians? You know, the Asian question had been simmering for over a decade. Right at independence, there was the question of citizenship and what should be the requirements of citizenship. At the independence constitution, which was basically a British-made constitution, Lancaster House in London, the Brits made a distinction between indigenous and non-indigenous residents in Uganda and had a qualifier that you could only become a citizen by birthright

if both your parents were born in the country and if one of your grandparents were born in the country. Now, this ruled out most Asians. Only 5 to 10% would have qualified. At the same time, then the Brits went on to introduce this same indigenous clause in British immigration laws in 1968, basically making a distinction between white and non-white citizens and removing the right of UK passport holders to migrate to the United Kingdom in contravention of all international laws. Particularly the European Conventional and Human Rights. Yeah. European Convention, UN Conventions, and in return, these African countries passed a series of laws, barring Indians not holding local citizenship, from either holding jobs or from trading.

So you had, beginning 1968, 69, you had a growing pool of people of Indian origin who were gradually being impoverished. unable to afford a living their customary lifestyle of some privilege, a little bit of privilege, and moving into places of worship, Gurduaras or temples or mosques, and then spilling over from those into one-room tenements in slums. Desperate situation. I mean, so politically stateless as well, in effect. Nobody wants them. Nobody will have And this is under Harold Wilson. So we're talking about sort of 68, that the British have made it difficult for them to come here.

It comes to 71. And the thing is that these people had applied for Uganda citizenship, but their applications were not being processed. The numbers is no certainty about numbers, but the lowest figures I've seen is 12,000. The highest figures is 30,000. Bob Astell, who was an intelligence officer for Robote and then for Amin, wrote in his memoirs that he went looking for these applications and finally found them in

closed cupboards in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. And he says there were 30,000 and he went looking at these tenements where they lived, and he described them as concentration camp-like conditions. And you were a young man at this time. So, you know, I've read the political theory and the political history, and those numbers are, you know, astonishing and And each one is a tale of human misery. But as somebody who had friends and family, this idea of suddenly being made stateless, that your neighbours and friends may not want you anymore and there's nowhere for you to go. What did it feel like at the time, being in the middle of all that?

Well, there are two aspects to this. One is that everybody who was expelled lost a sense of home. No matter how rich or poor, no matter what passport you had, you lost your sense of home. And home cannot be built in a few years, even in a decade. It's built over generations. I mean, that's what I've realized as one of the people in that group. So that was one side of it. The other side of it was that, of course, there was not one single Asian experience,

apart from this. These 12 to 30,000 people celebrated the expulsion, okay? Because they finally, who had not received Uganda citizenship, whose British passport or UK protected person passport was useless. Now the gates of Britain were open. I remember going to the house of a friend of mine in London, a council home, and he took me around the house. And he took me to the prayer room, the Pooja room.

And I saw there amongst gods and goddesses a photograph of Amin. And I said, what is this going here? My mother. And so I turned to the mother and the mother said, Where would we be without him? We have a council home. We have public transport. We have public education in Uganda.

We had no job. We couldn't do anything. It was rotting. But the reason that, I mean, was in this temple. I just want to understand it because to me, it's just such a mental breakdown I'm having with the thought of this. But it is because, Amin, had made people so impoverished and without hope and without future in Uganda, this was the only way that they had a future. Is that right? What Amin did is he valorized the British passport.

He forced the British to admit this group in Britain. Everything else followed. You had to work for it. But the one thing Amin did, Amin did not give them a social welfare state. But he opened the gates of Britain for them. And that was major, right? It's something that this group would not forget. For those that don't know the history, just go back to the beginning of the story of how Indians got to live in Africa.

From the beginning. So ancestrally trading links between Gujarat and the East African Coast? Well, look, we don't know when the beginning is exactly. The first mention that I have seen of Indian communities on the East African coast, is at the time of Christ, the Greek ripolis of the Eritrean Sea has a mention about this. The peripolis. Yeah. So at the same time, this is one side of the story, Indians coming into Arabia along the East African coast, Indian merchants.

The other side of the story is Africans going in the reverse direction. I've seen in the Amaravati Stupa remains in Madras, pictures of Ethiopia. traders arriving and offering gifts to Buddhist dignitaries and this huge trade. We have evidence of coins from India in Ethiopia and vice versa. And the Red Sea was a major motorway of trade. Well, basically, the trade is much larger before Vasco DiGama and the Portuguese take control of the Indian Ocean and try to turn it into a monopoly and try to destroy any dhous they find. They make people have a carter, don't they? Like a passport. And unless you have your Portuguese passport, you get blown out of the water. It's like a protection racket. But the Indian migration

to Africa, so this is a two-way street, which has a deep and long history. But the Indian migration to Africa, you've described it as coming. in three threads, haven't you? That there are three different streams. Just tell me what they were. So first, before British colonisation, the migration is limited to the coastline to cities like Mombasa,

Kilwa, Malindi, Lamu, places like that. And these are merchant, traders, financiers. They finance now really slave plantations after the late 18th century. Because in late 18th century, the French bring the plantation slavery model from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean

and then begins a completely different kind of bondage. Anyway, that's the opening. That's the opening phase. And what kind of period of history are we talking about? Have we put years on this? We're talking about the beginning, as I said, at the outset, is difficult to trace from when it could be from Greek times when they wrote about it. and the Greeks wrote about it.

We're talking until late 19th century. Then in late 19th century, the British come in, and they begin with nobby soldiers. Newby soldiers who come from the north, basically, are drawn from different tribes. They are themselves ethnically African. They've come from different communities. and they sort of sold as soldiers. Their services are sold. They're not sold.

Their services are sold to the Brits. They come in. And they are forced march, a number of times. They're forced march in the battle against the French. They are forced march in several other battles, and the result is a mutiny. There are two mutinies within the space of a few years. To quell the mutiny, the Brits bring the first Indians who are soldiers from Punjab. First soldiers they bring are roughly 400.

Idi Amin is a newbie. Remember that. And that's the first Indian-African encounter is as soldiers. But it's also, they live in the same sort of barracks after the mutinies are quelled and everything. They live in the same barracks. They eat the same food. Many of them marry one another. So Idi Amin's great-grandmother, who is married.

to an English guy in southern Sudan divorces or is asked to leave, whatever comes home, marries a Sikh guy. And her, this great-grandmother is somebody who adopted his great-grandfather. And this first Punjab troops coming 1895, is that the right date? Right. Somewhere in the 1890s. And they leave 1913. All the Indian troops go back 1913. They have been replaced by railway workers. So this, we should talk about this is the loop, well, it was sort of dubbed the lunatic line, wasn't it, which sort of stretched from Uganda all the way to what is now Kenya. And it was, it cost coin, sure, but so much blood of Indian workers as well who are brought to work on this line.

Yeah, well, you know, there are novels written about it, lions eating railway workers. And, you know, the lines of Tsavo is. That's, I guess. 35,000 Indians, that sort of number, isn't it? But most of them go back. Well, let's say about 80% go back. The rest are not allowed to buy land. And those are the ones who become the Dukawa's.

Shopkeepers. Shopkeepers. Also a number, a larger number, come from India, and they are brought in by the financier merchants of the late 19th century, who established now dukas shops all along East Africa right into eastern Congo. They bring in, they encourage poor relatives or poor caste members to come in. And those are the people who come in. Then the third immigration is basically administrative, technical cadre who the Brits bring in.

I mean, they are again Sikh Punjabi content. contractors, technical people, Goan clerks, Bengali teachers. Now, for Amin, the good Indian was the Indian soldier, the Indian who lived amongst African communities, some of whom might marry. The bad Indian is the first Indian he encounters when he works in the sugar plantation, the Maitasu sugar plantation, at the age of about 10, 11. And the bad Indian is the foreman, who is specialized in terms of squeezing the last ounce of labor. From some poor laborer, many of them, sort of young kids like Amin was 10-11. So Amin grows up with two possibilities.

One, his father's legacy, which is the King's African Rifles, possibility of becoming a soldier. And the other is his mother's legacy. His mother is a healer who comes from a long line of healers that have taken part in series of battles to get Africa rid of non-Africans. Non-Africans being Brits and Indians or just Indians? I mean, what does non-African mean at this point? Non-African at this point in particular terms is the outside invader, the Brits. Right.

Or if there are Indian soldiers with them, it includes the Indian. but non-African then... The definition extends. Who is not African? So the question of who is an African will become a question later on. But right now, an African is somebody indigenous to Africa. It's a good point to take a break.

We're going to be back right after this short break. Welcome back to the Empire Pod. We have the wonderful Mehud Mandani telling us the extraordinary story of the East African Asian community. and we now, of course, have an East African Asian Prime Minister in Rishi Sunak. And this is a part of history that has been very little studied by anyone other than Mehud. Mammud is the go-to writer on this, and we are very, very lucky to have him here.

So give us, Mahmood, just an idea of the size of the Indian community in, well, the different countries, not just Uganda, but Kenya, Tanzania, along the whole coast. How many people are the, as British rule begins to recede? 1947, the Brits leave India. Then by the 50s and 60s, there are beginning to be independent nations in Africa. Is it 1962, Independence in Uganda? It is 1962. So look, the largest Indian community is in Kenya and Tanzania, in those two places.

Okay. That is about 120,000, 130,000 in each. the smallest Indian community is in Uganda. That's about 70,000, we're talking by the time of the expulsion. And the Indian community in Kenya, because Kenya was a settler colony, the Indian community found itself significantly displeached

in the urban areas. When you say settler colony, I mean, those are terms that in academia are, are understood, but to somebody who's just listening to this, what is a settler colony? I think first we need to distinguish a settler from a migrant. So a migrant comes in a place and is seeking, looking for economic advantage, but has no ambition to create an entirely new political community, a state, has no intention to displace the existing political community. But the settler comes with that intention.

So the settler is not a migrant. There were whites in Tanzania. There were whites in Uganda. Those would be more akin to migrants, even plantation owners, whatever. But they did not have this political ambition. The Kenyan whites had a political ambition, like the Rhodesian whites, like the South African whites.

They create their own, like the American whites, Canadian whites, Australian, New Zealand. So that's the settler. And this is the world we know from fiction and from film Happy Valley, privileged white people, white clubs, white only clubs, swimming pools, tennis courts, safaris. Yeah, but this is not just privilege because privilege is class privilege. Okay, this is rule. This is demanding the right to rule.

And that's what distinguished, the settler colony from other kinds of colonies. which were also reeking with privilege. So India was not a settler colony. It was a colony. So in Kenya, you have, because of this yoke of settler colonialism, you have a remarkable Indian involvement in anti-colonial politics. You have an urban wing of the Mau Mau, which is led by Pio Pinto Gama

and you have an Indian trade union organizer Makhan Singh who organizes the first East African trade union now Makhan Singh is not born in Kenya Macan Singh is born in India but he's sent to Kenya by the Gadr party in Punjab we've had a lot of the Gaddas in earlier episodes

so he comes to Kenya as a political organization And I mean, if you go back to look at the footage of when Markhan Singh died, when Pio Pintogaman died, hundreds of thousands of people and with just few people of Indian descent. So it's a very, Kenya is a very different scene in that sense. And it's an interesting question to ask is how come there's no expulsion in Kenya, in Tanzania, but only in Uganda. And I think the reason there is an expulsion in Uganda and not Kenya and Tanzania is because it's only in Uganda that you have a native elite which is competing with the Indian. You don't have one in Kenya.

Right. And just on, I mean, I think just on that point of Uganda, the mythology of Eid Amin is so huge. Now, I've grown up around Uganda nations. Tell me, is this true? So you've already given me such a brilliant insight into this newbie. background of Amin, which I had no idea about. So, you know, there is, there is obviously some historical bad blood, you know, that the Indians came to crush my forebears, right? There is some personal family mythology there. They told me that also he was in love with an Indian woman

who spurned him. Now, look at you, look at your face. I knew it. I knew it was rubbish. You are wincing with demonstrable pain. So for those who don't know, I grew up being told that The reason, one of the reasons that, I mean, came to hate the Indians so much and booted them out was because he was in love and history turns on personal stories with a beautiful Sikh woman who spurned him or the family spurned him and therefore he never forgot it. Now, explain your wintzing. She was not Sikh. Oh, but she existed. Oh, okay, I'm sitting up now. I thought it was nonsense.

Okay. She was the wife of one of the richest Indian families, the Madwanis. And so she was a loana. She was a Gujarati Loana. Gujarati Lahana, okay. Gerti Loana. In her 50s or something, she used to be beautiful when she was young. All right. But he liked her. Okay. It's nothing to do with this. I mean, Amin decides to kick out the Asians. Let me give you a little background to this.

So this lady in question, Mrs. Madbani, is from the richest Asian family, Mujigai Madhmani, who in the 1920s, immediately after the First World War, when rubber plantations owned by British planters go into crises because of the commodity crash after the First World War, these plantations are auctioned, and two Indian families buy off. most of these plantations. Metas and Madwanis. Madwanis are the richer one. From plantations, they expand into manufacturing

and they become very rich. But their period of the greatest enrichment is the first decade after independence under Robote. And they move into a whole series of industries. And they established themselves as a multinational

registered in Bermuda or Barbados, one of the two places. So that's one dynamic. The other dynamic is that the Asian question has been on the agenda since independence, not even since independence, since 1958, the first trade boycott of Asians, Asian shops. And from 1958, the Brits respond to the trade boycott by an affirmative action program, an Africanization program, which removes Indians from certain localities. Okay. This is the first expulsion, in a sense.

It removes Indians from trading in certain localities. The idea is with the Brits set up, the Indians against the Africans. Then comes Obote. His first encounter with the Baganda elite is in 1966. It's an encounter with the king of Uganda, the Kabaka of Buganda, and the army commander is Idi Amin. Idi Amin bombards, destroys the palace, lots of killing, and there's bad blood between Idi Amin and the baghanda. The king runs away to Britain, the Kabaka.

There is no alliances yet, but comes the coup. After the coup, two things, the minute is the possibility of overture returning to power. And the minute Amin puts the Asian question on the agenda, I've read all the cabinet report from the first meeting of the cabinet after the coup. And I can tell you the Indian question was on the agenda from day one. The very first meeting of cabinet, Amin told cabinet, nobody will meet an Indian outside of office hours. If you have an appointment with an Indian, you will inform my office.

Who the appointing is with and the reason for the appointment. from day one. How much is legitimate lack of trust because these are people who supported Abote before and how much is actually scapegoating because it's politically expedient to have a visual enemy

if you're trying to build your own fiefdom? Well, there's a lack of trust certainly in the sense that, I mean, used to call them the Obote's Mafia, the rich Indian businessman. He's called them Oboteas Mafia. But there is also his own sense

of going back to his mother, Africa for Africans. Amin so himself. You know, when he, when he comes into power, he is basically a British puppet in a sense. He's talking of normalizing relations with South Africa. He does everything the Brits ask him to do. Just read the British press, 1971, 1972, and you will see a very different depiction of Amin from after 1972. to all this stuff of bloodthirsty, none of that is there. Whereas most of the blood is spilled in 1971 when Amin comes to power. So now we have just this, you know, incredibly, and I'm very grateful, incredibly detailed picture of how Amin came to say, get out.

The other end of that is those who had to get out, and you were one of them. Going back to that time in 1972, I'm trying to imagine this sort of fresh-faced young you in your mid-20s, you wash up in London. I'm probably the same age as Mrs. Madvani. Stop picking on that poor woman. Stop it. In my head, she was beautiful, she broke his heart in pieces. Okay, that's what I was brought up on. Okay, so there you are.

And you're sent to Kensington Church Street. And just what did you think was going to become of you and what England would be to you when you came? Kensington Church Street is presumably not a bad refugee camp if you had to choose one. No, no, it wasn't bad, except that you were surrounded by very wealthy people and you were penniless. So it was like looking at somebody from the bottom up.

It was a bad world in that sense because, you know, there were big shops everywhere, everybody was buying, and you were just looking through the window. So you were not in... The Beatles have just broken up. What's happening in London? You can't blame that on Mahmood.

I mean, honestly. Already I mean. I mean, there are certain things that man does not have to answer for. That is one of them. So as, I mean, we've asked on this podcast before when we're speaking to other people, you know, how is it that on that slipstream of coming into this country, penniless, with nothing in your pockets, with your nose pressed up against the sweet shop in effect. So many East Africans have made such an enormous success of being in Britain because, you know, actually. The single most successful immigrant community in this country. So how and why?

And just to summarize all this, because we're trying to understand the political elite that we have today, particularly in the Conservative Party, explain that slipstream if you can to us. You know, when I came, I was 27. I was writing my doctoral thesis at Harvard. I just come to Kampala to do the research, join the university, and the very next month, Amin declared the expulsion. during the expulsion, as I said, there was an air of celebration in half the Asian community. These were the homeless people who had no future, suddenly had a future now. And I remember, I mean, there was no theft. There was no killing because Amin's army was determined that nothing would be stolen since that's what would be distributed to them. This was their property now. It wasn't Indian property anymore.

So there was not going to be any theft. There were going to be no killings because Amin was clear, he told his soldiers, I want no excuse for a foreign intervention. You are going to treat the Indians humanely. Those are his speeches, okay? Humane treatment. So did you have suitcases? I mean, how much baggage is everyone coming out with when they're being expelled?

Well, two suitcases? Everything else left behind. Well, you could left behind or sent. So, for example, I mean, everybody had to figure out Indian families from the lower mantelphous up have family jewel, okay, which they pass down the generations. And every family had to decide, what are you going to do with these jewels? Some of them dug holes in the ground and put the jewels in there. Okay. But others, like my family, my father said he had a friend in the customs, and this guy had said that he will clear five boxes.

We can send them to England. So the family decided, my father decided, okay, first box would be a trial box. And if it gets through, we will send the remaining four boxes. So in the first box, there was just, you know, cooking utensils, clothing, stuff like that. It got through. When it got through, we sent the other four boxes, which included my mother's jewelry, the family jewelry. None of them got through. Right.

Customs guy was smart. He realized he must let the first box through. the good stuff comes. Yeah. So there you are. But we went with, we went with two suitcases. So I think, first of all, I think age is a big factor. So for my father, it was a huge crisis, okay, the expulsion.

It was a loss of confidence for the men, for the men of a certain age. My father was in his 50s. Okay. For the women of a certain age, it was a transformation because they became supporters of the family. They went out and worked in factories. They cooked food at home and sold it to restaurants. They did whatever, but the women had their wits about them and they, the men had to deal with crushing of confidence. Yeah. Yeah. Confidence. Loss of face, everything. Mahmoud, this is the experience in Uganda. Our prime minister's family were at the same time in Tanzania.

was there a feeling among Tanzanian Indians that there was no future in Africa, that they had to find their way to Britain? Was there a lock-on event? And did you have many other families from Kenya and Tanzania making their way to Britain at the same time in the mid-70s? Oh, very much. Very much because in Tanzania, Julius Niretti was in power. 1972 was buildings acquisition. Landlords, who were mainly Asian landlords, lost their buildings. At the same time, the expulsion was going on in Uganda.

There was a demand of some sort in Kenya and Tanzania that the Ugandan example should be followed. So everyone thought they weren't safe, which explains. Now, can you just, we really are running out of time, unfortunately, we could talk to you for, for for such a long time. But that explanation, that trajectory of East African nations into British politics at a very high level, particularly in the Conservative Party, do you, having traveled on that same journey with the forebears of Prithi Patel and Suehara Braviman and Rishi Sunak, do you understand why? And even, you know, Williams mentioned this before, the most successful economic migrants are the East African Indians. Why is that? Do you understand, do you

have an explanation for that? I don't have an explanation, but I have a couple of observations. So, East African Asians have come to Africa over generations. The majority have come since after the Second World War. Okay. It's not the first time to leave home. It's not the first time to make a new life. Okay. I mean, we, when, when we, when we, we, we, we, we, we, we, when we were living in Kampala, my grandparents and uncles were living in Dharaslam. And once a year, we would go to Dharaslam, the family. My father would drive. And wherever we reached in the evening, we would wait until we got to a small town or something

or a large village. And he would ask somebody, is there an Indian family here? And they would say they would point, yes, over there. We would go over there. We don't know them. know us and it doesn't matter who they are, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, whatever. And we just announced that we are there and they think it's completely natural. They spread out mats and whatever. And my mother goes in with the women and they go into the kitchen and they cook and we eat and we sleep

and the next morning we leave. Okay. So it's that kind of a past you're coming from. You're not coming from this tradition which has gelled and which... Yeah. So you have experience of starting from nothing and building and being a cohesive community together, which, yeah, I guess that goes in some way of explaining the accelerated establishment of this community in Great Britain. But also quite a well-educated community with an emphasis on education and secondary education, you yourself doing a PhD at Harvard? Well, I mean, I don't want to say I was an exception.

Well, there aren't many Mahmoud. I mean, I don't know what you're suggesting. I mean, he's pretty unique. That was not the rule. Look, I went to senior secondary school, old company, right? Senior secondary school old compiler, the kids were not supposed to be as smart as in senior secondary school, Kalolo, right? because the Kalolo kids were kids of professionals and, you know, administrative people.

We, most of us, were kids of merchants. And I have seen the kind of raw material. Okay, they were quick in terms of thinking of schemes and this and that and everything, but they were not the smartest guys when it came to books and stuff like that. So I don't think that people were educated, they had secondary school education. Not many people went to college. You've been so generous with your time and also just opening a door into your own personal history

as well as this big history. And for that, we are incredibly grateful. Thank you so much, really. So we're now drawing to a close on our first series about the British and India and that whole aspect of India. And we're thinking now of moving on and doing a new series

on the whole story of the Ottoman Empire from the fall of Byzantium to Atter Turk and the Turkish Republic. But before that, I think we're going to have a sort of buffer episode where we look back over this entire first series, answer some of your questions which have been accumulating now in our inboxes and on Twitter. And so if you have any fresh thoughts on where we've been with this whole first series or indeed where we're going in the future with the Middle East and after, please get in touch either tweet us at EmpirePod or send us an email to EmpirePod UK at gmail.com.

That's all from us. Thank you very much for listening. I've been Anita Arnan. And I am wonderful.