From Citizen to Refugee: Uganda Asians Come to Britain by Mahmood Mamdani

From Citizen to Refugee: Uganda Asians Come to Britain Reviews

• 
  Don

  Mamdani wrote this short account of his experiences as a member of the Asian community expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972 shortly after arriving in the UK as, as he puts it, a refugee. He combines analysis of the history of colonialism and the structure of the classes which emerged with reminiscence of incidents that sketch out his personal predicament.
  
  His family arrived in East Africa as part of the British empire project which aimed at establishing markets on a terrain which had not developed generalised commodity production as the basis of its economic life. The native kingdoms, with Buganda at their heart, were rearranged in accordance with a hierarchy that placed Protestant Christians at the top, and Catholics and Muslims further down the pecking order. The Asians were brought in the push forward trade and commerce and provide the system’s administrators.
  
  Amin’s ascent to the position of president was a reaction on the part of the local commercial classes who were being hampered and restrained by the post-colonial socialism of Milton Obote. The British army soldier raised to the rank of general wanted the space for a Ugandan bourgeoisie to emerge, and this meant both championing the private sector and also pushing back against the Asians who had the dominant position in the parts of it not controlled by British interests. For the African capitalists to advance their first need was to push the Asians out.
  
  Mamdami considers the complications that had arisen from the legacy of the citizenship structure of Uganda at this time, with the population being segmented into Ugandans and British subjects depending on what had been claimed at the time when the post-colonial constitution came into effect. He writes of how the Asian community had worked to keep their options open with families deciding collectively which of their members was to opt for Ugandan status and who remained British. When Amin issued his order for the expulsion of non-Ugandan Asians over a ninety period in 1972 the community found itself divided into a patchwork of different status, giving Amin’s henchmen the opportunity to revoke the credentials even of those who had claimed citizenship of the new countries.
  
  But many of the author’s harshest words are reserved for the response of the British. There initial response at a time when the Asian community which held British documents was thrown into a state of great alarm was business as usual. The High Commission, responsible for issuing the vouchers which every overseas British citizen needed to come to the ‘mother country’, maintained its lackadaisical business hours, limiting the processing of applications to a mere handful a day. Queues of desperate people extended all around the High Commission, with people waiting from dawn to dusk in harsh tropical temperatures.
  
  Amin moved things along by kidnapping a group of white British residents and holding them until the British government agreed to make additional resources available to its citizens to help them leave the country. Mamdani joined them, leaving behind his teaching position at Makerere University, and the circles of leftist activist – African, European and Asian – he had associated with.
  The final chapters deal with his experiences in arriving in the UK and finding himself in a resettlement ‘camp’ Kensington. In truth these camps were more like large shabby hostels to which residents were confined by their lack of resources and depression rather than direct coercion. Colonial attitudes reinvented themselves amongst the administrators of the camp as they exercised a petty authority over canteen menus, the allocation of jobs to inmates, and the use of recreational time.
  
  The experience of the Ugandan at this time became a formative moment for people working hard to consider the legacies of subjecthood, citizenship, colonialism and racism which had extended across the lands of the British empire and were coming into new forms in nationality and immigration laws. Nothing that has happened in subsequent decades challenges the urgent message that Mamdani set out in the pages of this book in 1973: that citizenship is another form of privilege that marks out the possibility of access to the benefits of living in a market society, and that the ethos of imperialism was quite capable, and indeed seemed to require that the tropes of race and ethnicity be marked at all its gateways and frontier crossings.
  
• 
  Marsha

  Rec by Moses Isegawa -- Uganda Asians come to Britain