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I met Shabir on a packed 747 jet, flying from Dar e Salaam, Tanzania, to London. A Tanzanian national and Shiite Moslem, the 40-year-old ethnic Indian businessman now calls Houston, Texas, his home. Despite this transglobal lifestyle across two hemispheres, Shabir was every bit the East African Indian that he was born. Family and business formed Shabir’s founding bedrocks, as they did for thousands of East African Indians claiming dual lives in England, Canada, and the US.
Shabir said he still runs a mercantile store in Dar es Salaam with his nephews, even though he makes more money as a laborer in the US, where he has lived for seven years and now holds a green card.
Shabir was one of the many Indians I encountered at every point on my East African trip. The security guard at the Vancouver, Canada, airport who checked my hand luggage claimed Uganda as his familial home. My safari company in Arusha, Tanzania, called Roy Safaris, was run by a Goan Indian family. The woman travel agent for Alliance’s Dar es Salaam office was a Hindu. The owners of my hotel in Zanzibar’s old stone city were Moslem Indian. My money changer in Kigali, Rwanda, still another Indian. Even one of my bus drivers in rural Uganda, a short, bearded man—cocky enough to yell in Swahili at a truck filled with beer-guzzling Ugandan soldiers—was Indian.
Though Indians pervade every facet of East African commercial life, their presence in this region remains far less known in America compared to the much romanticised—and fictionalised—legacy of East Africa’s white settlers who imported the Indians as coolie labourers in the late 1800s to build the Uganda-Kenya railway.
Of the original 32,000 contracted labourers, around 6,700 stayed on to work as “dukawallas”, the artisans, traders, clerks and, finally, small administrators. Excluded from colonial government and farming, they straddled the middle economic ground above the native blacks. Some even became doctors and lawyers.
Despite animosity from native Africans and restrictions by colonial whites, Africa still provided more opportunities than crowded, caste-rigid colonial India. East Africa became America for Indians in the first half of the 20th century, and their resourcefulness cannot be understated or discounted.
It was the dukawalla, not white settlers, who first moved into new colonial areas, laying the groundwork for the colonialist economy based on cash for food and goods. And even before the dukawallas, Indian traders had followed the Arab trading routes inland on the coast of modern-day Kenya and Tanzania. Indians had a virtual lock on Zanzibar’s lucrative trade in the 19th century, working as the Sultan’s exclusive agents.
Between the building of the railways and the end of World War II, the number of Indians in East Africa swelled to 320,000. By the 1940s, some colonial areas had already passed laws restricting the flow of immigrants, as did white-ruled Rhodesia in 1924. But by then, the Indians had firmly established control of commercial trade—some 80 to 90 percent in Kenya and Uganda—plus sections of industrial development. In 1948, all but 12 of Uganda’s 195 cotton ginneries were Indian run.
Family is also at the heart of the 1991 film “Mississippi Masala.” Directed by Indian-born Mira Nair, the story concerns a Ugandan Indian family living in Mississippi whose adult daughter (Sarita Choudhury) becomes romantically involved with a Southern black man (Denzel Washington). The relationship potentially threatens to undo the family’s ethnic solidarity and its economic vitality. The affair also ignites old racial fears of the woman’s father, who experiences flashbacks to his Uganda youth and his family’s sudden and violent exile in August 1972.
At that time, Uganda’s then-infamous dictator, Idi Amin, gave the nearly 75,000 Ugandans of Asian descent 90 days to pack their bags and leave the country. These descendants of the dukawallas and Indian coolies then comprised about 2 per cent of the population. In Uganda I talked with numerous Ugandan-born Indians who said their families left with just “the shirt on their backs.” Their businesses were “Africanised” and given to Amin’s cohorts, only to be plundered and ruined. The country lost a valuable class of professionals, sliding into a chaos that would eventually claim up to 750,000 Ugandan lives.
Some 27,000 Ugandan Indians moved to Britain, another 6,100 to Canada, 1,100 to the US, while the rest scattered to other Asian and European countries.
Today, however, many of these same ethnic Indians have returned. In 1992, under pressure from aid donors and Western governments, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni simplified a then 10-year-old law letting Asians re-acquire lost property.
While many black Ugandans have learned the art of business during their Asian brethren’s absence, Indians today still run many shops, hotels, and factories in Kampala, the capital, as do ethnic Indians in Kenyan and Tanzanian cities. Temples, such as the Sikh and Hindu temples in Kampala, figure prominently in the urban East African urban landscape.
You see that in the large Indian families walking the streets together in Dar es, in Arusha, in Kampala, the woman dressed in elegant saris or salvaar kameez, children in hand. In the event of chaos, they would join existing family operations in the New World, in Canada, and even the U.S. Meanwhile, they would comfortably continue straddling both hemispheres.
—The author is a globe-trotting photo journalist and can be reached at rudy@rudyfoto.com.
This piece has been excerpted from the India Empire archives of May 2007
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