The Indian Family in Uganda

Abstract

UGANDA was declared a Protectorate of the British Government in 1893, and at that date virtually no foreigners, except for a small number of Arab traders, were resident in the country. As the territory was developed, Indian settlers moved in from Kenya and Tanganyika to open up trade and to assist, as clerks and skilled artisans, in the administration of the country. There were then too few Africans able to fill these roles. It is important to note that Indians did not come as agriculturalists and that the law in Uganda today does not, with a few unimportant exceptions, allow non-Africans to own freehold land. In a population of almost five million in 1948, Indians numbered approximately 35,000, Europeans 6,000, and Arabs 1,200. Of the Indians, about 20,000 were Hindus of various castes, and some 11,000 were Muslims, divided among Shia and Sunni sects. Just over half the gainfully employed Indian men were engaged in commerce and 44 per cent of the whole Indian population lived in five towns, one-quarter of the whole in Kampala. Gujerati was the most widely spoken language, but Punjabi, Urdu, and Hindi were also used. (Annual Report 1952; Census Report 1953a.) The majority of Indian settlers in East Africa derive from the north-western coast of India, in particular from Gujerat, Kathiawad, and Cutch, whose inhabitants for the most part speak varieties of the Gujerati language and whose traditional social arrangements, in spite of regional differences, are generally similar. The Indians who came to East Africa were in a sense a selected group. They were selected by geographical proximity to convenient ports in India and by their positions in society at home. Representatives of different Muslim sects and Hindu castes came to Africa, but the educated, the rich, and the poor did not usually leave India. In coming to Africa the immigrants had necessarily to alter many of the distinguishing marks and much of the behavior which had characterized them as sects and castes at home. One of the more prominent features of society in India, particularly the Hindu section of it, is that the component groups, the castes, are arranged in a hierarchy, with the Brahmins at the top and the Untouchables at the bottom. In Gujerat, as in other parts of India, the Muslim sects also had a defined position in relation to one another and to the Hindu section of society. In East Africa the immigrants did not find it possible to reproduce these traditional arrangements, and no representative cross-section of society from Gujerat was transplanted to Africa. The principal reason was that though most of the immigrants came from Gujerati-speaking districts, their homes were in fact widely separated, and each district in India tended to have a local hierarchy which did not apply elsewhere. For this reason, when two well-represented