The roots of inequity that divided Africans and Asians

Mengo High School boys are instructed by a colonial official to sow rubber seeds at a government plantation in Kampala in 1910. The colonial policy put Europeans at the top, Asians in the middle and the Africans at the bottom of economic participation. Photo by Cambridge University and Royal Commonwealth Society Library

What you need to know:

Idi Amin is the villain of the piece for his expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972 but racial tensions had been simmering in Uganda long before Independence.

Many people the world over still associate Uganda with Idi Amin, his bloody buffoonery, and his expulsion of Asians, many of them born and raised in Uganda, in 1972.

While the act took place under Amin, it was only the culmination of decades of unease and, some might even argue, a predictable outcome of the colonial policies of playing one class and race against the other.

It is important to note that although there were early forays by enterprising traders like Allidina Visram, the mass influx of Asians into the interior of East Africa and Uganda in particular, was as agents to help in the penetration of colonialism.

This was through the Indian soldiers brought in to help quell a mutiny by Sudanese mercenaries, Indian coolies brought in to work on the Uganda Railway, and Indian traders supported, at least initially, by the colonial administration to set up trade and create a consumer culture and create a market for goods imported from Britain.

British colonial policy was to a large extent informed by racial prejudice, which encouraged stratification of society along racial lines and sometimes the physical separation of the different races.

For instance, Prof. Dr William John Ritchie Simpson urged, in a report in 1914, for separate residential neighbourhoods for Europeans, Asians and Africans in Kampala, recommending “a neutral belt of open unoccupied country of at least 300 yards in width between European residences and those of the Asians and Africans”.

The British thus allocated Old Kampala to the Asians and sought to justify this segregation in a 1919 report by Governor Robert Coryndon to the Colonial Office in London.

“Objection to the proximity of Asiatics to European is taken not on the ground of race but on the grounds of their definitely lower sense of responsibility, in matters of sanitation and public health,” the Governor wrote.

“There is no antipathy against the cultured Indian who has acquired western ways. If and when the Asiatic population as a whole come to accept the European view in regard to public health, and to order its mode of life accordingly, any necessity or desire for segregation will have disappeared.”

Prof. Tarsis Kabwegyere notes that while the Asians complained about being segregated from the Europeans, they did not complain about their segregation from the Africans.

“The settler Indians came to Uganda largely at the invitation of the British,” he notes. “To the British, they owed their loyalty, and since the two groups were near each other in terms of wealth, it is not surprising that the Indians wanted to be like the top rather than to be identified with the bottom.”
Thus colonial policy deliberately put the Europeans at the top, the Asians in the middle and the Africans at the bottom. Salaries offer some insights. As early as 1899, Indian artisans doing carpentry, brick laying or blacksmithing were paid 130 Rupees while Africans with the same skills and doing the same work were paid 50 Rupees.

More than half a century later, the inequalities remained; by 1957 the average wage for an African worker was £5.7, while Asians and Europeans in the same categories received £40 and £100 respectively.

Economics professor Walter Elkan, who conducted a study in the wage inequalities noted: “At every step [the skilled African workers] are aware that their progress is checked by the progress of Indians and Europeans. They tend therefore to express their dissatisfaction by drawing attention to the gap between their wages and those of other races. This antagonism becomes the more acute the more their own jobs conform to that by expatriates.”

These wage inequities had first been raised in the aftermath of World War I over the selective payment of war bonuses but continued throughout the life of the Protectorate Government.

The establishment of a schools system and Makerere Technical College (later to become Makerere University) only added pressure to the matter, as more and more Africans acquired skills and knocked on the door to join the civil service and other technical professions.

Breaking barriers
“The Asians had been regarded as the next highest class until things began to change in the 1930s, when the output of educated Africans from Makerere and those who had studied abroad on private finance, by-passed the Asians in their structural position,” Prof. Kabwegyere notes.

The contest between the races was not only taking place in the workplace but in the wider economy too. This series has already shown the advantages that allowed access to capital and colonial policies to propel Indian and European entrepreneurs to the top of the tree while undermining African enterprise and initiative.

Prof. Kabwegyere notes that as early as 1925, “there was a riot near Kampala involving Africans and Asians”. Although little note was made of the incident, the grievances continued, especially from Africans attempting to break into the lucrative cotton ginning and coffee hulling industries.
He cites a complaint by a cotton grower in Busoga over the system which was in place at the time and which was skewed against the growers and Africans who tried to get a leg in.

“If the government encourages theft, I would like to take that profession,” the man wrote in an anonymous letter. “Government wants taxes and so the ginners want excess weight in cotton and the buyer wants a job. The grower therefore with a bag of his cotton is faced between two crocodiles, i.e. poll tax and ginners.”

Mobilisation
These grievances provided a common interest around which Africans began to mobilise and articulate their demands, through trade unions and other associations but these demands and the efforts by the colonial administration to correct some of the historical mistakes were not enough to realign the structure of the colonial economy.

As the country lurched forward towards the inevitability of independence, there were deep-seated grievances and unresolved tensions and contests between the Africans who were increasingly taking the political reins, and the Asians who continued to control the structural levers of the economy.
Continues Monday