Exceptions to the expulsion: violence, security and community among Ugandan Asians, 1972–79

Abstract

This paper explores the precarious social worlds of Indians, or Ugandan Asians, who continued to live in Uganda after the 1972 expulsion of the Asian population; men and women who were bureaucratic “exceptions” to the larger out flux of the Indian population. They responded to their racialization and ambivalent inclusion in Amin's Uganda with complex forms of collaboration, complicity, and social practices geared towards shoring up security. Significantly, leaders defined the Indian social body away from an already marginalized Indian political domain that was instituted in the colonial period. Men constructed a new cross-ethnic, religious and sectarian social collectivity in response to their visible status as racialized subjects, forging private enclaves of urban Indian space. Finally, their narratives illustrate aspects of the contingent, bureaucratic, and arbitrary nature of violence and governance in the dictatorial regime. The social and cultural practices developed by Indians during the 1970s continue to structure the dynamics of Afro-Asian relations in contemporary East Africa.