Mamdani gave a lecture on the Asian Expulsion at Makerere University in 2022.
Mamdani himself had left Uganda in the last week of the Expulsion.
His speech was surprising to me in several respects.
Most African-Ugandans that Mamdani spoke to said agreed that the manner in which it was carried out was regrettable. But says Mamdani, nobody he talked to argued that expulsion itself was bad or wrong. He came to the conclusion that most African-Ugandans did not oppose it.
Many Indian Ugandans also told him that the expulsion itself was not essentially a bad thing.
Mamdani suggests that many Ugandan Asians had been disenfranchised by law long before 1972.
The citizenship clause in the 1962 Constitution defined citizenship by birth. One needed to be born to Ugandan parents and have one grandparent who was also born in Uganda. Mandami states, “my guess is that no more than 10% of people of Asian decent with a permanent residence in Uganda would have qualified for citizenship by birthright under this clause.”
He says that the literature on the Expulsion mostly portrays Ugandan Asians as victims. But he challenges this depiction, saying that post-Expulsion, so many of them went on to lead positive and productive lives wherever they landed.
He says, “for upwards of 12,000 people, the Expulsion liberated them from an impossible situation. According to Uganda intelligence reports, something like 12,000 Asian residents of Uganda were stateless by 1971. They were without a right to work in the country. They had no trading license.”
This is one of the points that surprised me the most. Mamdani continues, “this group celebrated the Expulsion. For them, Amin opened the gates of Britain. Finally, they could look forward to another life.”
Mamdani recounts an anecdote from his time in the UK after the Expulsion. He went to visit a friend in a council flat. His friend’s family had a prayer room replete with gods and goddesses. Curiously, they also had a picture of Amin. Mamdani asked why they had likeness of Amin in the prayer room, to which the mother responded “where would we be without him. He is the one who got us out of a terrible situation in Uganda. We have a council flat, we have a free education, we have free medicine…we have a future. He’s like a god for us.”
Mamdami contends that there was little loss of life for the Asian community during the expulsion. He says that there were no Asian massacres.
He also says that there was hardly any large-scale theft. He suggests that as much of it was destined to become the property of Army officers, there was little incentive to actually destroy the belongings of Asians.
Still, Mamdani says that, “the Expulsion itself was one big, generalised theft.”
Why weren’t there widespread massacres of Asian Ugandans during the Expulsion? Mamdani offers us a clue. “The Asian leaders were an economic elite, not a political elite. They never aspired to political power, unlike other minorities in the region.”
It took decades for a significant change to citizenship to come about. 1995 was a pivotal year. Before than time, there was an ethnic group requirement. One had to belong to a tribe of Uganda.
After 1995, one could be a citizen by birth or through naturalisation.
Today, Uganda citizenship law does not bar any ethnic group from naturalising.
Any individual can become a Ugandan citizen, provided that they have legally resided in Uganda for at least 10 years, are of good character, intend to remain in Uganda and understand a Ugandan language or English.
Since 2009 dual citizenship has been allowed.
Most Asians who returned after Amin have become naturalised.
The most surprising things from Mamdani’s lecture is that many (perhaps the vast majority of Indian Ugandans) were officially not Ugandan at all as they didn’t fit the definition of Ugandan citizenship at the time, and there was no pathway for them to become Ugandan. So they were in a sort of limbo. Many had left their homeland, or had even been born in the country, but they were not fully accepted.
Amin’s harsh expulsion campaign did open the doors of Britain to many of these individuals – an opportunity that would have been otherwise closed to them.
Many of these people have had a better life than they would have had if they had been allowed to stay in Uganda.
That is why some in this cohort don’t see themselves as victims.
This won’t be a universal position however.
The choice to leave was not theirs. It was made for them by other parties – principally Amin.
And as difficult as one’s life may have been in Uganda, the attachments to one’s homeland are strong indeed.
Mamdani does allude to a certain kind of loss amongst Asian Ugandans – a sense of home and of true belonging.
Mamdani’s take on the Expulsion was interesting and surprising.
Leave a Reply