August 24, 2003
The Observer
When Idi Amin expelled 50,000 Asians from Uganda
he took away their sense of belonging as well as all
their worldly goods. Now, says Farah Damji, with his
death they have the chance to reaffirm their roots
My birthday falls on Uganda's Independence Day and
childhood memories of my early anniversaries are full
of marching brass bands and buttoned-down generals.
I'd watch the procession pass below the veranda of
my grandparents' flat in downtown Kampala and feel
like a princess, lost in the fantasy that this was
all mine.
But even as a tiny child I knew something was wrong.
The mildly garish turned into the gruesome as daily
reports of cannibalism, rape and murder were dissected
by adults in hushed voices. The problems didn't happen
overnight. The great shame is that the Asian community
didn't address it. We didn't see the injustice in
having a battalion of African servants on call, like
maharajahs, as we lived it up in a land that wasn't
really ours.
I was four in 1972 when Idi Amin expelled the Ugandan
Asians, up to 50,000 Indians and Pakistanis. I was
scooped up from the lilac shade of my jacaranda tree
and the shoelessness of being a mini-Mowgli, and plopped
down in the drizzle of an English winter, like many
of my young friends. I was quietly removed from my
African childhood whose boundary was marked with a
razor wire fence and an armed askari at the gate and
placed in a rented terraced house in Ealing. I didn't
feel I belonged.
My family were among the first settlers in Uganda
and in Kenya more than a century ago. They had roads
in downtown Nairobi named after them. My ancestor
of four generations ago, Hadji Rashid, was the first
Indian MBE. Quietly proud of their heritage, my parents
set about rebuilding their lives here. We had new
Catholic neighbours, with a convoy of children, after
we moved to Harrow. The cherry tree in the back garden
soon took the place of my jacaranda, and its stunted
form and gnarled branches fitted into the psyche of
this new place called 'home'. But it didn't have the
same upward embrace with the sky and I still didn't
feel I belonged.
I wonder how my parents coped with the trauma. Today,
when I ask my father about Uganda, he gets cross and
dismisses my questions. 'I don't want to live in the
1970s, I want to live in the future,' he says. But
what about facing up to the past? 'It's over.' He
has lived the way he wanted to, reinventing himself
and cutting off cancerous memories so they can't infect
his new life. In the 1990s, after amassing a property
fortune, he moved from Britain to South Africa.
In my youth, I also didn't feel any need to build
spiritual ties or form physical bonds with 'here'.
I left as soon as I could. Deep in hormonally charged
teenage rebellion, I didn't want to belong in Britain
and so I jetted off to New York at 18, pretending
it was for a gap year but leaving without a single
thought of ever returning. America was good for me.
Uganda was a world away.
Thirteen years spent in the heady Eighties and Nineties
of Wall Street excess, of druggy downtown SoHo clubs
and art openings, cured me of any nostalgia for Africa
and I came back to Britain tougher and thicker-skinned.
I didn't care if I belonged. In America everyone and
no one belongs. It was as indiscernible and unimportant
as my newly inflected mid-Atlantic accent.
These days I am proud of being Indian. Being Asian
is hip though the Uganda bit is still quite sore.
If you say Uganda, the next question is always, did
you leave because of Idi Amin? I am still guilty of
the same materialism - this time a Mercedes, country
house, designer-clad kids and a fetish for Choos,
but these don't define me. No more than being a Ugandan
Asian does. My children, both pale white Anglo-Indians,
are with my parents this summer. My son returns from
these trips telling me to pray and asking to go to
our mosque in South Kensington. This comes from my
parents. In their grandchildren, they have reclaimed
a large part of their own identity. I see them proudly
pass it on to my woefully white little ones and it
is as if the buried box of shame at the expulsion
is being slowly opened.
Under the scrutiny of honest examination, 30-odd
years later, the black and white memories become pixilated
and the bland greyness which emerges is a place to
which we can consign all this old stuff. I spoke to
my six-year-old son on the phone and told him that
an evil man who had forced all the Asians out of East
Africa - can't get too precise, geography is a bit
vague - had died. When I heard him recount this to
a playmate thousands of miles away, the mixture of
disbelief and innocence offered me resolution.
We'll never go back; the scars are too deep but perhaps
the lacerated sense of self-pride can be restored
now that Idi Amin is dead. I'm secretly glad his body
was not flown back to Uganda. Perhaps in his death
we can re-affirm who we, the dispossessed, want to
be. Can we become part of the face of multicultural
Britain in the no-man's-land of the twenty-first century?
We can now we can put away the martyr's badge of being
Ugandan Asians and step into the responsibilities
of becoming British Asians.
