Indians of East Africa

By Rudy Brueggemann

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. And some extended families—the backbone of the Indian ethnic group—are prospering under Uganda’s new openness. Two extended Indian families, the Mehtas and Madhvanis, have built multimillion dollar empires in Uganda since the 1980s.

The average visitor to Uganda will likely meet prosperous Indians just about anywhere. Like Ravish, an elderly man with glasses, a large facial wart, and a cigarette forever dangling from his lips. The retired Canadian civil servant from Toronto, however, is prosperous, as a tour of his modest hotel apartment showed. He took pride pointing to his new appliances: refrigerator, stove, television, stereo. His youthful days long gone, Ravish was entering his twilight years as a comfortable African businessman, firmly straddling his Canadian and Ugandan worlds.

Looking out from the third-story terrace of his hotel over the 40,000-person city of Mbale, in eastern Uganda, Ravish describes the town of his birth. “Mbale used to be the cleanest city in East Africa,” said Ravish, who returned in 1996 to reclaim his downtown properties seized during the Amin years. “Now look at it.”

A commercial centre at the base of the 4,300-metre dormant volcano Mt Elgon, Mbale is filled with concrete buildings dating from the 1930s. They wear an Asian architectural style common throughout East African cities. Ravish said every building in Uganda, Kenya, and what is now Tanzania used to be owned by Indian families, Ravish said he has restored his building, which houses his hotel, shops, and a Moslem restaurant, to its former state. He was negotiating for the return of his other downtown building in order to open a nightclub. But difficulties had arisen, as in other cities, because the Ugandans who had seized property from their Indian neighbours had since sold their old property and now would lose everything if they left the confiscated holdings.
Like Ravish, Salim had prospered under Uganda’s new openness. I met Salim, a Canadian businessman, on the same Alliance flight that had originated in Dar es Salaam and had picked up passengers in Entebbe before heading to London. He, and primarily other ethnic Indians, had boarded in Entebbe.

A young, mustached man in his 30s, Salim said Indian families in Uganda believed the country’s current calm could change overnight. “All it would take is one bullet in Museveni’s head,” he said. Ugandan Indian families he knows all have emergency plans ready. They have provisions and currency hidden for such a disaster. Those with dual citizenship are registered with the Canadian embassy, he said. “All they need is a plane ticket,” he said. And, if necessary, they would leave the country overnight by vehicle.

Salim described this unease matter-of-factly. He made it sound like an entire business class, a pillar in the East African economy, is prepared for economic and political chaos.

Continued fighting in western Uganda between hundreds of rebels and troops in June and politically motivated ethnic violence in Mombasa, Kenya, that claimed more than 40 lives in August gave credence to these concerns But the Indians I met would survive. They had learned their lessons under Amin. They would prevail through proven institutions: strong families and marriage alliances kept within the Indian circle.

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.

I believed him, that the ethnic Indians from Africa could not mix with native Indians. I believed him that Indian caste traditions led tens of thousands of Indians to originally leave their homeland and settle in East Africa be reborn as a business class. I was less sure African Indians had shed their “Indian-ness” during their diaspora in Africa.

When I returned to Seattle, I called a retired minister friend who had lived a quarter century in Tamil Nadu, India. He had never spent time in Africa, though his long ship voyages from India that passed by Africa were filled with Indian businessmen owning African investments. When I described the number of Indians I had met on my recent journey, he laughed outright. “Indians, ohhh,” he said, “they’re the best businessmen in the world.”

— The author is a globe-trotting photo journalist and can be reached at rudy@rudyfoto.com

May 2007