Tales of Uganda Asians at Old Kampala SSS relived in new book

History. The book cover. Dr Vali Jamal says it has taken him 12 years to have the book complete. COURTESY PHOTO.

What you need to know:

  • Dr Vali Jamal is alumnus of Government Indian School (now OKSSS), 1954-57; BA of Cambridge, 1964; PhD of Stanford, 1976; Senior Research Economist at Un-International Labour Organisation, 1976-2001.
  • Book review: A surprise item at at a reunion of Uganda Asians in Toronto, Canada on June 1 was the presentation Dr Vali Jamal made of his book, Uganda Asians. Here, Dr Jamal gives a low-down on the whole proceedings at the reunion and in the writing of the book.

It was an emotional moment for me to be standing on the grounds where we used to practice cricket. The school buildings and the main grounds have even longer-term memories etched in my mind. The cricket pitch we carved out overnight using hoes borrowed from home and a roller from the nearby football ground.

What we did was illegal, but the head teacher turned a blind eye to it. We dug only a quarter pitch to the batting space and two yards more. We did not have a mat to put over the pitch, so the ball came at every angle and height. Some of us were in the School XI, so we got to practice with the likes of Premji, Narendra and Narottam. They all played for Uganda XI. They were one year ahead of me. Harnish, who also played for the School XI, was in my class in Stream B and he and I competed to be the top student in the year’s final exam ever since I joined the school, from the Aga Khan School, at JSL (Junior Secondary Leaving Examination).

At Senior Cambridge, I came out top - in fact with six points, equal to “Excellent” in the six subjects that counted. Somewhere, it was recorded that I had the highest marks in the whole of the Commonwealth that year. When I asked the head teacher during a visit in 2012 or so, he said the results before 1972 had been destroyed. What a pity! I expect the Cambridge board have them stored digitised somewhere. I think of all the school alumni I come within the top three, with Dr Dr Sultan Karim at the top – the two doctorates signifying he is the recipient of a second earned PhD. We played on the dug-up pitch every evening, with worn-out balls gifted by the Aga Khan team playing on the club ground nearby.

After our practice, we would drift to the AK ground and pick up their ball to pitch to our players. That pitch had been dug out on the sloping ground down from Fort Lugard (now Kaddafi Mosque and in fact the ground was all shaven up in constructing the vast mosque). The onside was like a wall and an offside hit just slid down the hill all the way to the Lohana Hostel wall.

The school figures in many people’s stories in my book. They remember the teachers, the rose garden, the boiled mogo (cassava) at recess – and the once-a-year school picnics. The Botanical Garden at Entebbe was the venue for this. We’d travel in trucks, standing all the 21 miles to Entebbe. Girl students were not always allowed by parents to participate as the picnics were notorious for igniting romances. I could name at least four pairs who fell in love at a picnic; in actual fact they would have been eyeing each other at school and finally overcame their shyness to come together at the picnic.

Most stories in my book remember the teachers by name and subject, including their accents. One maths teacher who came into the school in my last year had such an Indian accent that we would laugh in his face. Once he simply ran out of the class, almost choking back tears. The next thing we knew was when we were asked to march to the headmaster’s office, none other than the legendary BD Gupta. He summarily suspended the ring leaders, amongst them I. We, five boys walked up the Museum Hill and stayed out there the rest of the day. The next day, we had to come with our parents and sign a page of apology.

The school is almost the first place alumni from the diaspora want to visit when they come to Uganda. We must remember we were expelled (not from the school!) from Uganda in 1972, and many of the expellees have not been able to make a return trip. I myself had sneaked into Kampala in 1982 from a family wedding in Kisumu. Almost the first full day I came to the area around the Museum Hill and the first stop was the school. An end-of-the term party was going on and I was invited to join. The teachers told me their monthly salary was Sh150,000, which could not buy more than two weeks’ food for a four-member family. All teachers told me they were doing tuitions and consultancies.

I went around the classrooms. Whereas in our time a class comprised just 25-30 student, now there were benches there which at three per bench would sit twice as many. The blackboard was all scratched up. I found many desks with Indian-name initials carved on them. I did not find mine then, but did in 1992! Imagine! That desk had been there since 1957 and when I sat on it in 1957, it was already old, quite likely it had been there since the opening of the school. Even last month when I went around the school, I found desks with those names and even one from the Amin times as the person had written in ink: Be back soon Amigo; Amin the great killer smiles.

So the reunion brought back memories of my time at the school in the mid-1950s. My book has lots of those stories in the context of memories of people’s childhood in Uganda. The book was started to record people’s experiences at the expulsion – how they coped, where they went, how they fared there. I was here during the expulsion deadline and I recorded many stories even then. In starting to research the topic around mid-2007, I found a hundred or so of our people never left. They told stories of coming out of hiding after a week and being greeted at the Nakasero Market as saviours as the demand for Indian vegetables and spices had disappeared with the expulsion. They spoke of watching their own shops being given away to Ugandans, often it seemed haphazardly, but almost unanimously they said they felt safe in Uganda. Amin invited them to a lunch and assured them now they were full Ugandans and they should not fear for their safety. They were not allowed to trade.
I found out that around five thousand or so Asians had tried to stay on in Uganda on their confirmed Ugandan passports but were frightened away by Amin into leaving when he threatened to send them to the villages to dig.

UNHCR under Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan stepped in and took them to refugee centres in five European countries and from there, he dispersed them to more than 20 countries worldwide who came forward to accept the refugees.
The Canadians took around seven thousand Asians of all nationalities – not just stateless people. In fact in the first week of their work, they took the British passport-holders, no questions asked, so as to relieve the UK from accepting their citizens. But the bulk of the British passports, most of them Hindus, were not deviated by the Canadian offer.

Truth to tell – and this is another fact my book reveals – they were just pleased the British would now have to accept them, something they had wanted since independence and were being thwarted by the British coupon system whereby only a trickle of brown British citizens from all over the Commonwealth were being accepted by the British government. They had money stashed away in UK, and so, so much for the myth put out about “shirt on their back”. Another myth that is shattered is the Canadians took people of several nationalities and their first concern was not the stateless: They were “pick and choose”, accepting people on their points system. His Highness the Aga Khan had played a role in Canada opening up their doors to non-white refugees for the first time in their history, but the Canadian mission was acting sect-blind and the fail rate among Ismailis was higher than for other communities. The Canadians took just a dozen or so people over 60, my father among them.

I had to look at why the expulsion happened. I had studied the Uganda economy for my dissertation at Stanford, The Role of Cotton and Coffee in Uganda’s Economic Development, 1976. That dissertation was, of course, about the tripartite division of labour in the two export industries, with Africans as farmers, Asians as processors and suppliers of farm inputs and consumer goods to farmers, and Europeans as exporters of the two crops.

Immense income inequalities ensued, often abetted by the colonial government through their taxation and trade laws. The inequalities were a grievance throughout Uganda’s history. Trade boycotts were carried out against Indian shops, and the post-independence government of Milton Obote tried to redress the inequalities through nationalisation. Nothing came of it. Asians responded by “Africanizing” their major industries but it was all window-dressing, just giving directorships to Africans. Over ninety per cent of Asians were traders and they never tried to include Africans as partners. Amin said enough was enough.

I had several missions for the UN and for the [International Labour Organisation] ILO to Uganda from 1984 to 2000 and I kept studying the economy, particularly what was happening to wage earners and farmers. During that 1982 sneak visit to Uganda itself, I kept asking the question: how did the wage earners cope when the minimum wage – it still existed until mid-1980s – could not buy a four-member family’s food for even seven days?. I wrote about the “conglomerate” families, whereby members were engaged in all sectors of the economy. In the last four weeks of completing my book, I came across notes I had written in 1972 and 1982 and incorporated them into the text. I came across many pages of notes I had made in writing my dissertation and incorporated many tables from them.

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations of who gained from the miraculous growth unleashed by the NRM administration since 1990. Poverty has been reduced from 50 per cent levels to 20 per cent, so trickle down has happened but the 1 per cent to 99 per cent gap has widened, albeit in the context that Africans are now among the top ten in the country and most corporations are run by them. The President’s heart is very much with the peasants and ordinary workers and he has instituted new measures to help them.

The book ended now, almost 12 years after I commenced on it, with a magazine for the Aga Khan’s Golden Jubilee in July 2007, and then a proposed magazine for Chogm in November of the same year. The Chogm magazine failed to appear owing to “circumstances beyond my control” - like finding a printer to print that 133-pages magazine. I carried on, all the time conscious I had to be representative of all Asian communities in Uganda. The stories kept coming, including stories of Indian pioneers by their descendants.

There is a contribution there, including pages from my own grandfather’s diary. He had come to East Africa in 1903 at the age of only 15 at the behest of his eldest brother, who had come at the behest of the great Indian pioneer trader Allidina Visram. Within just three months of arriving at the family headquarters at Kisumu, my grandfather was already sailing with the great Sheth to Entebbe and then going by foot to Kampala and by foot to Wadelai.
I preserved that family history as did more than 500 other Asian participants in this project.

Was it worth it writing this book? Is the world round? Answer: yes. Was it worth spending so long on it – 12 years? Is the world going to end tomorrow? Answer: How do we know? I mean it’s for the people to say, isn’t it? The book gained in quantity 40 per cent in the last four years but twice that in quality as I brought in lots of things from archives, not just from my publications but also from people’s autobiographies, notably that of Rt Hon Second Deputy Prime Minister al-Hajj Kirunda-Kivejinja. It gives the most balanced view of all the post-Independence regimes in Uganda and finds them all at fault until the coming to power of the NRM administration.
We have to be thankful to President Museveni for the “fundamental revolution” he carried out in 1986 and kept his promises. The book took long and I missed my family’s rites of passage. My daughter passed away half-way through and my two granddaughters almost reached secondary school in Geneva. My sisters missed me.

Yet yes, it was worth doing this “Never done before, never will be done again” book. That such a book has never been done for Uganda Asians is beyond question; whether it will never be done again is something I am convinced about. The creds are just not there: Not many people were here during the expulsion deadline, not many grew up here in the 1950s and not many have returned to live in Uganda again. That’s a “trifecta” you have to have in writing such a book.

Degrees help insofar as my subject of study both at Cambridge and Stanford was economic development and distribution of gains from it. But even then, you have to have a heart to carry on for a dozen years, with power in and out and slow Internet. It’s done now, with the blessings of the UpAbove and of my departed UpAboves. The show and tell at the Reunion was important for me to announce the fact of the book having been completed to people concerned.”

About the author
Dr Vali Jamal is alumnus of Government Indian School (now OKSSS), 1954-57; BA of Cambridge, 1964; PhD of Stanford, 1976; Senior Research Economist at Un-International Labour Organisation, 1976-2001. He was Assistant Secretary, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, 1964-67. He collected data for his dissertation, The Role of Cotton and Coffee in Uganda’s Economic Development, based at Makerere Institute for Social and Economic Research, January-October 1972 – the year of the Asian expulsion.