Indians
recount painful exile from Uganda
ASIAN VOICE,
18 August 2001
Ajit Jain
Toronto. Aug
11: A history of pain rolled out as people of Asian origin, mostly
Indians, gathered here to recount the days of 1972 when they were expelled from
Uganda by dictator Idi Amin.
'To some
extent, 30 years later, the nostalgia of Uganda has been poisoned by the rude
exile we had to undergo." said Dushyant Yagnik. a resident of the Canadian
province of Quebec.
He was one
of the 240 people - all former students and teachers of Government Secondary
School, Kololo in Kampala. Uganda - present at the conference Alliston, north of
Toronto.
The
participants at the first international reunion came from all parts of Canada.
the U.S., Britain. Latin America and even Uganda, 30 years after Adi Amin
expelled them on August 4, 1972.
The reunion in Alliston was a microcosm of India: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Catholics from a former Ugandan society.
Many of them
recounted their experiences of how families were uprooted, forced out of the
country and how Uganda-born Asian children were declared non-residents, tearing
apart many families.
"It was
a mini partition." said N.K. Wagle, director, Center for South Asian
Studies at the University of Toronto who chaired the conference, referring to
the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent in 1947.
Amin had
issued a decree allocating "shops, factories and properties of
Asians/Indians to political favourites without considering the capacity of the
persons to carry on business," said Mumtaz Kassam, advocate and solicitor
in Kampala, who was the keynote speaker at the reunion.
"Consequently,
factories closed down and business came to a standstill by 1978. The unskilled
Africans did not know how to run these assets," she argued. "Most
properties were placed in the hands of the Departed Asians Properties Custodian
Board and many were rented Out at nominal rents," Kassam added.
Kassam then
quoted Ugandan President Museveni as acknowledging "our ability to attract
new investment from abroad depends on how we handle the return of Asians
properties." Kassam said she herself had handled 60 percent of cases
dealing with repossession of properties of Asians. Of the 8,000 that were
expropriated.
4.012 have
been returned to their rightful owners, 1,300 have been offered for sale in
public auctions and there is a residue of outstanding claims.
But few of
the other speakers seemed inclined to go back to Uganda as they had all settled
down and succeeded in businesses and professions in the West.
Zulema de
Souza, who was a teacher at Kalolo School, said emphatically, "I won't go
back and my reason being I lived in fear in Uganda. I came from India where I
lived in freedom. I went to Africa without knowing what they would do to you and
I never felt attached. I always felt I was in a foreign land."
"I
won't even go back to visit Uganda. Forget about going to live there." this
leader of the Goanese Indian community said.
'After being
uprooted. they worked very hard and almost all of them have succeeded and their
story is an Indian story of success: how they have succeeded against all
odds," added Wagle.