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

1970s Uganda: Past, Present, Future

“…Amar complained loudly that the “ Angrez ” (“English man”) had made them wear a “weird, white cotton, Gandhi-style lungi .” “Did we really dress like that back then?” he asked his father. What was most compelling about this moment was that Amar’s family were the original expellees—Amar’s father was expelled in August 1972, but he was able to negotiate his stay in Uganda with Amin after the November 1972 deadline for all South Asians to leave the country (see Hundle, 2013a for further discussion of the “exemption passes” provided to South Asian men employed by Amin’s regime or for traders and merchants who supplied Amin’s army). Amar’s father was a crucial community organizer who helped others to leave during the exodus; he exemplified the complicated subjectivity of men who were able to remain or return to Uganda in the 1970s and 1980s, and he was also an important living repository of memory surrounding the expulsion for his son.…”

“…The NRM combines forms of illiberal and neoliberal governance to propagate an aggressive form of authoritarian developmentalism that tends to be reproduced in the popular consciousness of urban Ugandans. This is particularly the case as global and state governance in urban areas seeks to “avoid tribalism” in the name of development and transform urban dwellers into modern, neoliberal, consumer-oriented citizens (Hundle, 2013b). Reid notes that in the current regime, “history is regarded with, at best, deep suspicion, and at worst as actively inimical and antagonistic to development.…”

“…Returning to the expulsion event, I have noted that the emigration of East African Asians to India, Britain, and other destinations in response to nationalization policies in the 1960s, and the eventual exile and expulsion of South Asians from Uganda in the 1970s, resulted in the dissolution of an already small South Asian political elite class (which had begun to rely more extensively on clientelistic political alliances for community security anyway) (Hundle, 2013b). Indeed, the Amin regime (1971–1979), the short and unstable governments that followed (1979–1980), and Milton Obote’s second regime (1980–1985) were fashioned out of ethnic constituencies and the extermination of ethnic enemies (Branch, 2013; Hansen, 1977).…”

“…The imperatives of these scholars have been to recover social histories of this era through the study of politics and culture that detract attention away from the dictator and personality of Idi Amin, the tropes of African primitive violence that circulate around the Amin regime, and from high politics in Kampala. They have focused, for example, on the media infrastructure of governance in the regime (Peterson and Taylor, 2013), the study of Uganda’s illicit coffee trade and smugglers during the 1970s (Asiimwe, 2013), or on the local experience of governance and violence among subaltern groups such as women and “Asians” (Decker, 2013, 2014; Hundle, 2013a). 3 In doing so, the new wave of Ugandan historiography is beginning to rework the epistemological frames of 1970s African failure that characterized scholarship in political, historical, political-economic, and cultural studies.…”

“…Although there are many ways to assess the 1970s in the ongoing present, in this paper I focus specifically on the climax of post-independence Africanization, expressed most violently in the expulsion of South Asians from Uganda in 1972 and its aftermath (see Hundle, 2013a for more detailed discussion of the expulsion and scholarship on the expulsion). Briefly, on the spectrum of African post-independence nationalist projects, which involved ideologies and practices of Pan-Africanism, African socialism, and other “racial projects” (Pierre, 2012) such as nativism, indigenization, and Africanization, Uganda’s postcolonial governance and state apparatus was exemplary in its attempt to completely “deracialize” the urban population through the racialized exclusion and forced expulsion of the South Asian minority.…”