Researching Personal Histories of the Ugandan Asian Expulsion: Towards a New Genealogy of the Exodus

Abstract

The Ugandan Asian expulsion of 1972 was a landmark moment in postcolonial politics, but the people at the centre of it have often been a footnote in Idi Amin’s story. This paper explores the strengths, if not essential nature, of bringing a critical family history and life-writing lens to this history of migration, within the boundaries of genealogy, as the family is central to both the experience of exodus and understanding the origins of South Asians in East Africa. Moving to a ‘history from below’ spotlighting underrepresented voices privileging gender, caste and class is a vital step in democratising this history. Through an examination of the methodologies of the author’s testimony and memoir-led history of the exodus, The Exiled: Empire, Immigration and the Ugandan Asian Exodus, this work reflects on personal scholarship, objectivity and positionality, showing the significance of an intimate and marginalised approach. It demonstrates how reclaiming this history among next-generation diaspora requires challenging revisionism, self-serving success narratives, and increasing politicisation in service of anti-immigration narratives, moving beyond the nostalgic view of empire invoked by some retellings towards a more nuanced living history of the expulsion.

1. Introduction

When you mention the expulsion of Ugandan Asians of the 1970s, thoughts often turn to one man—Idi Amin. Variously known as His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Alhaji Dr Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE—with CBE a self-conferred decoration standing for ‘Conqueror of the British empire’ (The Guardian 2003a)—his larger-than-life character has become indelibly tied to the legacy of South Asians in Uganda and the mass deportation he ordered. Brought to new generations and global audiences by the actor Forrest Whittaker’s indomitable and Academy Award-winning Hollywood portrayal in the adaptation of Giles Foden’s book The Last King of Scotland (Foden 1999), the image of Amin as the sole custodian of the Ugandan Asians’ fate was secured.

I too have been guilty of placing Amin in such a role. As a child of the expulsion, even in my early years I had absorbed something simplistic about this man’s oversized impact on my family—that he was in some way behind their unceremonious departure from Uganda, and eventual arrival in Australia. When curious schoolchildren asked where I was from, I would proudly say my mother came from Uganda and India and had to leave one of them because of a man called Idi Amin. Without realising it, I had begun to speak to the complexities of East African identity, and the webs spun by colonialism, the forces of which had moved my family across the globe and led me to that school playground.

Amin is part of my origin story, as with all the Ugandan Asian diaspora, but the forces at work in the expulsion of 1972, which saw 50,000 South Asians being ordered to leave the country in just 90 days, stretch far beyond him (Fulford 2023). This is a history of imperialism, dating back decades in East Africa and centuries across the globe, and an ongoing negotiation around nationhood and belonging. Yet the desire to ascribe individuals to significant moments in our past remains persistent, even after the emergence of ‘history from below’ in the 1960s to counter the focus of ‘history from above’ centred on the men with the power to change the world. Dictators, meanwhile, hold an even greater kind of appeal in the history books.

Indeed, “asking ‘whose history?’ amounts to pondering what sphere of human activity matters,” argues historiographer Maza (2017). It was asking precisely this question which led me to begin work on my book, The Exiled: Empire, Immigration and the Ugandan Asian Exodus. The driving force behind this was to tell the story of the expulsion I, as a descendant, felt hadn’t been told. I wanted, in part, to tell my history. One where regular people mattered, far from the politics, elites, and states that historical records have favoured, with a desire to capture the voices of people who would never have imagined themselves to be important enough to be in a book.

Looking to the Partition of India, the move from top-down history towards oral history-led works like Urvashi Butalia’s reshaped Partition historiography by centring the human dimension, particularly of the marginalised. By writing these voices into the record, including her own family’s, Butalia rebalanced what was once muted in official records, while also acknowledging that Partition did not end in 1947, but lives on in memory, family, and silences (Butalia 2000). Asking whose voices get heard led Pippa Virdee to privilege less dominant narratives, including those of refugees, away from “high politics” (Virdee 2018). Just as scholars with personal ties to the subject have brought balance into Partition, moving beyond mere testimony to offer a critical focus on ‘history from below’ with a personal slant was overdue in the story of the expulsion.

This work would seek to centre personal narratives that brought Amin down to his right size, knowing that a focus on big-man politics alone overlooked the broader post-colonial forces at work in Africa in these years, and the independence movements rightly sweeping the continent. It would encompass oral testimony covering the Uganda years through to today, acknowledging that the exodus is not relegated to the history books, but is a continuum, and note that the lives of Ugandan Asians are increasingly politicised, tied into broader narratives around the legacy of the British empire and present-day rhetoric around borders, immigration and identity politics. Across three sections—Empire, Exodus and Reckoning—The Exiled follows the lives of families from India to Uganda, and their onward global journeys in 1972, weaving together personal accounts with the wider political and archival background. It takes in assimilation and diasporic identity, beyond 1972 through to the present day.

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the strengths, if not essential nature, of bringing a critical family history and life-writing lens to histories of migration like the Ugandan Asian exodus, while exploring the methodologies I confronted through a personal lens in a reflection on the work of The Exiled. I will examine how I sought to bring in new oral testimony to elevate archival sources, along with the frictions inherent within working with such personal subject matter. What does it mean to research personal histories and how do our methodologies vary from the more dispassionate researcher? How did I reimagine the traditional narrative of the Ugandan Asian expulsion by bringing a next-generation perspective to it? And what can all of this tell us about objectivity, rigour and truth?

First, this paper gives a brief overview of the events of the expulsion, as well as dominant narratives which require challenging, from the conceptualisation of the expulsion as a whim of a dictator, to the focus on South Asians at the expense of the Black Ugandan experience and the politicisation of Ugandan Asians as a model minority. Secondly, I chart the origins of Indians in Uganda, from the migration of my own family to historic trading routes and indenture. The value of family dynamics when studying this period is outlined, including in relation to interrogating colonial life in Uganda and the ongoing relationship with the country of exile.

This reflective piece then moves into a more methodological exploration of the challenges when personal narratives overlap with research practices, as well as exploring collective memory and gaps in the archive. The work within The Exiled is examined, as well as the strengths of positionality and representation. Finally, this work reveals the significance and gravitas of an intimate, personalised and marginalised approach to the study of the Ugandan Asian expulsion, within a framework of a living history, in which the reverberations of empire reach through the generations, at the same time as these histories are used to gain political capital. Historians’ work, Satia (2020) argues, “critically shapes how the past infuses our present,” as well as the future, through informing debate on subjects like race and immigration. This paper seeks to show how historians can be “storytellers, custodians of the past, repositories of collective memory, poetic interpreters of what it is to be human”.

2. The Expulsion: A History and a Politicisation

On 4 August 1972, President Idi Amin stood up in front of troops at a barracks and announced something extraordinary. Citing a now infamous instructional ‘dream’, accusing South Asians of being “bloodsuckers” who were “sabotaging the economy,” he declared that the population numbering some 50,000 would all be leaving the country (The Times 1972b). This was soon followed with a second blow, with the revelation that the would-be deportees had just 90 days to leave. Amin promised that those who did not leave within this timeframe would “find themselves sitting on the fire” (The New York Times 1972).

The dramatic declaration sowed panic, but also, roundly, disbelief. Despite foreshadowing in policy and rhetoric, it seemed so improbable that tens of thousands of people could leave the country in such a short time that many joked about it, before the conversation moved on (Mamdani 1973). Yet Amin doubled down, telling a press conference that South Asians had failed to integrate, and, in an unmistakably clear indictment of imperialism, that they had been brought to Uganda by the British and therefore remained “the responsibility of Great Britain” (Amin 1974). So began Britain’s problem with citizenship, as a long-held fear was realised when the echoes of empire caught up with Whitehall, engulfing it in crisis.

Ugandan Asian history often “verges into stereotypes, telling singular, simplistic stories about victimhood and wealth” (Fulford 2023). In this much vaunted retelling, a cartoonish African dictator threw a helpless population out of their homeland on a whim, whereupon Britain welcomed them with open arms. Penniless but plucky people regained their success twice over in the UK, a high bar to be held over other migrants who comparably fail to make this grade. To truly reckon with the expulsion and its aftermath, it is necessary to unpick these tropes and examine some uncomfortable truths.

Although the expulsion order sent shockwaves through the country, it was not without precedent. After Uganda’s independence in October 1962, tensions simmered about the oversized role South Asians continued to play in the country’s economy, and it was the first president Milton Obote, not Amin, who first spoke about their potential departure (Fulford 2023). During his tenure, his Move to the Left policies included seeking to nationalise major industry and take shares of sixty percent in private companies, many of which were owned by South Asians, along with tightening citizenship laws (Hundle 2018). After he seized power from Obote in a military coup, Amin’s so-called War of Economic Independence against South Asians, later the Economic War, was a campaign in many ways following a trajectory set before him. It was, he said, in favour of Ugandans becoming “economic masters in their own country” (Peterson and Vokes 2021).

Due to the global ramifications of the expulsion and its symbolism within post-colonialism, Amin’s brutality has become synonymous with his treatment of South Asians. But it is vital to write the wider Ugandan population back into this history, because although the spectre of violence was high during the expulsion, it was largely bloodless. This was not universal, with Black Ugandans suffering the most under Amin’s eight-year rule, in which a brutal military state, including the infamous State Research Bureau, stalked the streets and tortured prisoners. Amin’s security forces were soon killing so many people they dumped bodies in rivers, but soon even the waterways could not contain the dead, leading soldiers to throw bodies into forests and marshes (Decker 2014). An estimated 100,000 to 500,000 people died or were forcibly disappeared during these years (which must not be overshadowed by the expulsion.

As well as dominating contemporary popular conceptions of Amin’s rule, Ugandan Asians have been typified as a model minority when it comes to their migration. Ugandan Asians, former UK prime minister David Cameron once wrote, are “one of the most successful groups of immigrants anywhere in the history of the world” (Cameron 2019). During the 50th anniversary of the expulsion, then-prime minister Boris Johnson stated that, “the whole country can be proud of the way the UK welcomed people fleeing Idi Amin’s Uganda” (Brown 2022). By these accounts, Britain, a beacon of multiculturalism, had opened her arms to her former colony and been rewarded with migrants who bettered the nation. It is a comforting story, but one which critically overlooks the complex machinations of the Heath government to halt the arrivals. In the first months of the exodus, the Uganda Resettlement Board set up a successful relocation scheme, with volunteers meeting the exiles on airport runways and leading them to the buses going to their temporary homes in resettlement camps on former RAF bases. These sites would, for varying periods of time, accommodate around 22,000 of the 28,000 exiles who came to the UK in this period (Uganda Resettlement Board 1974). But that was not before enormous efforts to the contrary.

Despite the majority of the exiled being British subjects as a legacy of empire, establishing Britain’s responsibility to take them in, the government sent telegrams around the world asking countries as far flung as Japan and Trinidad and Tobago to assist with resettlement (The Times 1972a; Patel 2021). There was a concerted rebranding of the exodus as a refugee crisis, both as an attempt to apply pressure on foreign governments, and to appease a public back home which was facing fierce anti-immigration rhetoric from the likes of Enoch Powell (Taylor 2018).

Indeed, prospects of immigration had been tightening for Commonwealth and colonial citizens since British legislation to restrict movement was introduced in the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 (Goodfellow 2019). Those in East Africa held increasingly fragile positions through the 1960s too, with rising curbs on work and business (Kapoor 2025). This included Kenyan Africanisation policies which were part of a stimulus for an exodus of around 15,000 Kenyans to Britain, who were able to bypass the terms of the new Act through an inadvertent loophole about who had issued their passports (Hansen 2000). The prospect of unlimited arrivals of colour from not only East Africa, but anywhere from Ceylon to the Caribbean, led to a second bill to be rushed through parliament in just three days. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, issued a month before Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, has been described by Nadine El-Enany as “a white Britain policy in the making” (El-Enany 2020). Questions of citizenship sit at the heart of the Ugandan Asian expulsion, and using broad strokes with the refugee identity confuses the understanding of the paths of the small cohort who had taken up Ugandan passports, who genuinely were left stateless when their citizenship was revoked, making them the true refugees of the expulsion.

The pinnacle of the British government’s scheming was revealed when classified cabinet papers were unlocked 30 years after the expulsion. These showed the government had explored the possibility of finding a permanent island territory to offshore East African Asians, along with paying Ugandan Asians £2000 to go to India and give up their right to live in Britain. The Solomon Islands, Seychelles, Bermuda, Gibraltar, and British Honduras all said no—the only offer came from the Falklands Islands, volunteering to take on doctors, teachers, farm workers and other select professions (BBC 2003; The Guardian 2003b; The Daily Telegraph 2003). But what if the response had been different and the offshoring plan had been deemed viable?

Moving back to Cameron’s praise of the Ugandan Asian collective, there sits another enduring stereotype, that of the so-called ‘good migrant’. In this conceptualisation of the Ugandan Asian, they are a model minority, their individual financial prosperity feeding into the collective success story for which the UK can take credit. Aside from the deeply problematic implication that by comparison, other migrant groups must be a failure, despite their very differing fortunes on entry to the UK—Ugandan Asians, for example, being allowed to work on arrival, unlike asylum seekers today—celebrating Ugandan Asian success homogenises a diversity of people under the ‘businessman’ trope, with echoes of Amin’s own generalisations about Ugandan Asians when justifying their enforced exit, which invariably focuses on higher classes and castes (Fulford 2023).

The success story narrative is often embraced by the community itself, with some telling me it was a welcome reward to be held up as a positive example after the difficulties they experienced. Yet others have used this as an opportunity to engage in one-upmanship over other migrants. I have endeavoured to take a more critical view, removed from the victim diaspora (Cohen 2002) mentality with which this is often twinned. South Asians in Uganda were undoubtedly the victims of the exodus, as minorities caught up in the end of empire, but it has been all too easy over the years to overlook the duality of their agency, including the often-active role taken within a hierarchical racial system and the subjugation of Black Ugandans.

This in many ways echoes the way empire is more broadly remembered, as described by Satia. “The record of British humanitarianism submerges the record of British inhumanity. In public memory, redemptive myths about colonial upliftment persistently mask the empire’s abysmal history”. This is particularly noteworthy as the sun set upon the empire in the heady 90 days in Uganda. Although coming a decade after independence, the expulsion remains indelibly linked to imperialism. She adds, “the end of empire, especially, is extolled as a peaceful, voluntary, and gentlemanly transfer of power” (Satia 2020).

When then-prime minister Johnson made reference to the Ugandan Asian migration, it was not in isolation. He followed his praise of his political predecessors and Britain as a charitable caretaker with something noteworthy, in present tense. “This country is overwhelmingly generous to people fleeing in fear of their lives and will continue to be so” (Brown 2022). In this moment, a five-decade-old history bookmarked as a refugee moment was suddenly being put hard to work in service of current immigration policies, which at the time included the UK’s contentious Rwanda scheme to relocate asylum seekers in the country neighbouring Uganda. Migratory history runs the risk of being weaponised by those seeking to rehabilitate their image, making alternative viewpoints on British imperialism carry even more significant weight.

3. A New Genealogy of the Expulsion

In the southern Indian state of Kerala, on the first of January 1953, my grandparents brought in the year by marrying in a ceremony of splendour and song. Soon after their wedding, they returned to their respective teaching jobs, with my grandfather some 200 miles away as the crow flies, in then-Ceylon. Their early months of marriage were conducted through correspondence by letters while they hoped for a time they could be reunited—but could not have expected where their reunion would take them.

Four months after their wedding day, a visitor arrived in Britain’s now former colony who would change the direction of their lives. An English education officer was scouring Kerala for teachers to work in the then-British Protectorate of Uganda—one of almost 40 colonies and protectorates which remained at the time. My grandmother Rachel went to visit the recruiter, pitching both herself and her husband for jobs. The two highly qualified, English speakers were an attractive prospect, and two months later they boarded a boat bound for Mombasa, filled with promise and trepidation in equal measure. They would go on to spend close to two decades in Uganda before the exodus drove them out (Fulford 2023).

If genealogy invokes the tracing of family origins and lineages, there is no greater origin story for the families of the Ugandan Asian exodus than the British empire. And yet this has too often been excluded from stories told about 1972, which often present the expulsion order as a bolt-from-the-blue, without reason or foreshadowing in the trajectories of South Asians to East Africa, or in the Africanisation movements enlivening the continent. Following the genealogy of families within the exodus allows us to examine the forces at work during the colonial years, but also to critically appraise the continued relationship those exiled from Uganda and their descendants have with the country. A genealogy of the expulsion provides the framework on which to layer the context of family history and lived experience of testimony.

Tracing the roots of those in Uganda in the transitional years of the 1960s and 1970s shows the long arm of imperialism, in which a well-established migratory route was borne from the Indian subcontinent. Indian merchants had been trading along the East African coast for up to 3000 years, sailing into coastal ports on dhows on the annual monsoon winds. But it was the colonial imperative which accelerated Indian migration to the region, actively encouraged in light of slow European arrivals (Patel 2021) and offering lucrative trading opportunities. Later, this accelerated through the burgeoning unrestricted labour source in a post-slavery empire—indenture. To construct over 1200 miles of railway linking inland Uganda to the Kenyan coast, the British East Africa Company brought over up to 40,000 Indians as indentured labourers (Adam 2016). This South Asian diaspora in East Africa straddled multiple homelands, Sana Aiyar finds, from territorial in East Africa to civilizational with an Indian or South Asian identity (Aiyar 2015 in Kapoor 2025). To understand why Ugandan Asians were thrown out of the country, an understanding of how they or their predecessors had come to be in Uganda is first needed.

This is a genealogy of dispersal and displacement, even before the exodus, leaving many of those who came to the UK in 1972 as what Bhachu (1985) calls “twice migrants”, having migrated through an intermediate country from their own. The convoluted movement of bodies through the British empire leaves a complex legacy for all, and yet the Ugandan Asian experience is at once curiously unique. Beyond transnationalism, it is a genealogy of citizenship and identity, containing within it the fracture of families and the subversion of gender roles. What has often been approached as a political history, or even a military one, is not only richer through a social and family approach, but also arguably gets much closer to the truth. Along with the imperial origins of their presence, the social context in which South Asians lived in Uganda is essential to understanding the genesis of the expulsion, with contested ideas of nationhood, while family life and kinship demonstrably impact the migratory paths which were taken in 1972.

Building a picture of daily life in Kampala, from the hospital wards Ugandan Asians gave birth in, to the shops and markets they frequented, tells us much more than it first may seem. The influences of Britain are hard to miss, from the BBC broadcasts to the British education system, which are important markers for Ugandan Asians’ subsequent interactions with the ‘motherland’. But family life also brings out the lived experience of structures at the heart of the colonial playbook, demonstrating a “geographic ghettoisation and a racial hierarchy,” (Fulford 2023) as a societal stratification is laid bare. This saw white settlers at the top, South Asians as the middle class, and Black Africans below them. Ugandan society in these years exemplified divide-and-rule policies, in which South Asians at once held both privileged and fragile positions (Mamdani 2022), something which had major implications for the 1970s. Rather than simply being victims of British imperialism, subservient to those above them, South Asians were also participants in that system, benefiting from favourable conditions compared with Ugandans and gaining distinct business and trade advantages within a system which positioned them in this intermediary role. Yet theirs was a delicate positioning; across East Africa, South Asians formed the economic and administrative middle class, but were still largely viewed as outsiders, denied the political privileges of Europeans and left balancing a fragility of citizenship (Aiyar 2015).

A granular and family lens allows the emotional impact of these often-abstract forces to be writ large. This is also seen in the moment of splinter upon which histories of the expulsion have tended to focus—the frenzied and fearful journeys to Entebbe Airport, the gold jewellery being ripped from women’s arms, and the sighs of relief tinged with tears when airplane wheels finally lifted off the runway. But it can also be seen in the everyday interactions in colonial and post-independence Uganda, revealing the innate inequalities and varying degrees of conscious and subconscious prejudices on show.

A true engagement with the exodus, however, also encompasses the ongoing relationship the diaspora has with their former home. From the tracing of relatives to next-generation reconnection with a past their parents kept concealed, the Ugandan Asian genealogy is multi-generational, and alive with questions. There is a practical need for some to uncover the journeys of their forefathers—1972 was a fracture which cut through families. When Kausar Chaudary fled to Nairobi on one of the last planes out of Kampala, she left her brothers behind. They were seeking out countries which would accept them, as they had been left stateless once their Ugandan passports were rendered worthless. They scattered across the globe, and it would be 13 years before Kausar saw them again. Some connections were lost forever. In other cases, it comes from a need to redefine ‘home’, a yearning for the past which may not have been gifted through the generations, particularly those whose relatives demonstrated the immigrant imperative to assimilate by boxing up the past. It is easy for “refugee history to become lost history” (Dudman 2017), as traces of people on the move are erased from both local and national history. It is easy too, for migrants to lose their history themselves, relegating it to the back of their minds in an understandable need to survive the present.

The task of a historian, Maza (2017) argues, is twofold—“to explain the unfolding of change in the past, and to make the people and places of the time come alive”. In some languages the words for ‘history’ and ‘story’ are the same, she notes, “as if chroniclers of the past have always been their society’s best spinners of tales.” In taking a genealogical approach to the Ugandan Asian expulsion, the spinning of tales becomes elevated, as ordinary people with extraordinary moments in their lives take centre stage and elucidate the meaning of momentous dates in the historical calendar. A number of scholars, including Aneeth Kaur Hundle, Sara Cosemans, Naluwembe Binaisa and Joanna Herbert, have taken on these challenges, charting Ugandan Asian post-colonial pathways with a human angle.

“Deep, pervasive change is an integral part of history,” and the role of the family during these periods, and how the family itself impacts periods of change, “is a question well worth asking” (Reher 2024). An unwitting genealogist, I did not set out to track lineages, or to write family history, or even include my family’s own story at all. I simply wanted to focus on the everyday, on the regular people caught up in history. In tracing migrations, gathering oral testimony and mapping these to the archive, a narrative developed woven around several core families, as it became increasingly clear that their journeys through time, geographies, and generations were what really captured the depth of this episode. From speaking to multiple members of families to understand the differing experiences of the expulsion by age, to exploring the returnees, who went back to Uganda when a subsequent president called the exiles home, and diving into next-generation identity and interactions with this piece of the past, it gets at something simple—what makes us human, amid the most testing of times as a forced migration.

4. Memory, Silence and Participation

Embarking on retelling the journeys of The Exiled involved something new for me. Instead of exclusively telling other people’s stories, this time I would also be telling my own (Fulford 2024). While gathering testimony from those expelled from Uganda in 1972, their children and grandchildren, I was also interviewing my relatives to reveal the reverberations of empire across three generations of women. Along with archival sources from London to Kampala, and rolls of microfilm in libraries, I was diving into a more intimate archive—family photo albums, postcards, and my grandmother’s diary. By blending bigger-picture politics with personal details, I sought to richly sculpt the lives of the 1972 generation, but such a methodology raised a series of challenges from both family and personal perspectives.

One of the first considerations for history of a personal nature is when it begins to feel like history, rather than simply your past. Having never seen Ugandan Asian history on a curriculum growing up, it took the then-upcoming 50th anniversary of the expulsion for this to coalesce as such for me—it had become “past enough that we have some perspective on it” (Maza 2017). This particular juncture post-expulsion presented a unique paradigm—far enough ago to yield perspective on empire and to take advantage of declassified sources, but still remaining within living memory. This presented a singular opportunity to capture oral accounts while incorporating a more critical lens of colonialism to inform new historical narratives. Personalising this history is not only possible and being done with great care by increasing numbers of scholars, but an imperative in the time that remains.

I heard remarkable accounts from the Uganda years but was mindful memories could become “muted or magnified” over the years, leaning into convenient, collective, or comforting narratives (Fulford 2024). Balancing potentially flawed evidence gets to the core of historical inquiry, with researchers having to “allow for human variability”. The subjective nature of many documentary sources therefore may not be “an insurmountable problem” but something “to be handled with real thought and care” (Corfield and Hitchcock 2022). In order to do so, I viewed my life interviews in the context of secondary literature, cross-referencing details across family members and weighing up the typicality of the evidence. Seeking the kinds of practice that “interrogates such sources for the subjectivities with which they are imbued and contextualises them within the society and culture that shaped them,” which “can fire our imaginations and open up new ways of understanding the past” (Summerfield 2018).

One expression of the passage of time is a reliance on strands of collective remembrance (Green 2010) rather than individualistic memories. This is apparent in the propensity people have to speak to the perfection of the early years in Uganda, with memories often containing familiar themes of perfect weather, fertile ground, and lush fruits. A picture-perfect tropical lifestyle and idyllic childhood are innocuous in themselves but are an example of what at times can feel like a layer to break through to get to memories outside of a collective imagining. Encouraging people to step away from “all-consuming cultural narratives” (Coupland 2015) can be a chief concern in a history where dominant narratives have arisen, and repetition of particular threads common to Ugandan Asian stories became a consistent theme of initial interviews, with deeper insights often coming as trust built in further conversations. Collective remembrance also appears within the many rich oral history archives collating recollections of the expulsion from Uganda, where certain vignettes around the rushed departure from home and journey by road to Entebbe Airport recur. As an interviewer, care must also be taken not to feed into collective narratives through the line of questioning, the temptation to validate shared experience risking reinforcing dominant narratives in group events.

Historians, Trouillot (2015) argues, are also confronted with a “cycle of silences”, and these further arise during the making of archives. In attempting to verify points of note raised in original testimony in official sources, I confronted some such silences. Not only are many contemporaneous sources layered with colonial rhetoric, invariably overlooking the personal for the political, but there are also notable gaps in the archive. This is not surprising, based on our knowledge of the final years of the empire. As countries celebrated independence days, vast numbers of pages of potentially incriminating documents were purged by the outgoing authorities—burnt in bonfires or buried at sea (Shohei 2017; The Guardian 2013). With vital historical records literally going up in flames in what was codenamed Operation Legacy, it is “completely impossible to write a truly accurate history of the British empire” (Akala 2019).

While the UK has a long history of immigration, this appears to have been “overlooked and under-documented in favour of more dominant notions of national history,” (Dudman 2019) meaning refugees and migrants risk being silenced from the historical record. This is exemplified by migration records being “scattered” across archives both in the UK and internationally, as there is no dedicated archive for immigration within the UK (Kershaw and Pearsall 2009). If archives “wield power over the shape and direction of historical scholarship, collective memory, and national identity, over how we know ourselves as individuals, groups, and societies” (Schwatz and Cook 2002), it seems clear who does and does not hold the power.

Such power is also evidenced by which voices appear in contemporary archives. Oral history projects charting the expulsion include The Ugandan Asian Oral History Project at Carleton University, which gave my work valuable insights into the migratory experience to the first country to volunteer to take people from Uganda, archives at the University of Leicester, a city known for its large East African Asian diaspora, and several projects developed for the 50th anniversary of the expulsion. In researching these oral histories, some became valuable sources, while other recollections offered inspiration to shape questions for my own interviews and other investigations.

It was also clear how testimony gathered here tends to favour particular voices, predominantly upper caste or upper class, with an additional dominance of Hindu perspectives. These were elements I was mindful of as a researcher with a desire to spotlight underrepresented voices in this history, as well as coming from a family of a non-majority group. Virdee has spoken of the issue of caste being unexplored in relation to Partition, while finding it to be of primary relevance to one’s experience of Partition. Her interview responses “resonated across borders, regardless of their religion or country,” she found, while “the differences were more at the class, caste and gender.” (Virdee 2018). Moving beyond the archive to capture these perspectives is therefore essential in sculpting authenticity and nuance around a history like the expulsion, including capturing the multinational, global impact of the exodus. This, for me, involved a delicate dance between personal accounts and traditional resources.

In entering work on the Ugandan Asian experience, I found myself as both bystander and participant. I was endeavouring to take a critical eye to the period, yet at once being part of it and feeling its impact, as well as literally acting at times as a first-person narrator. From my 304 steps up to the tip of the Uganda National Mosque’s minaret, through to being on the road to trace an interviewee’s shop in Iganga, passing a notable Ugandan Asian sugar factory, the investigatory travelogue moved the narrative on, but added another element of myself into it. Being close to a story felt at times like I had to work harder to prove my academic credentials to myself, self-auditing my own practices to ensure rigour, while at other times I doubted whether my multicultural identity even placed me close enough to the collective experience of this story. I felt some of what Reuters’ research shows in the challenges journalists face when reporting on conflict in which they have an association with one ‘side’, causing them to navigate a “complex landscape of personal risk, professional challenges, and ethical dilemmas” (Shezaf 2024).

Such dilemmas included questions around selectivity, and the series of choices made as a researcher. What was driving a decision to use one source or another, to platform one person’s quote over someone else’s? Was personal interest, or even bias, leading me in a certain direction, or was I in fact serving the narrative? Or was my personal tie to the subjects of my story causing self-censorship? (Fulford 2024) It raised inherent questions around objectivity, even if the consensus today is that no scholar can be truly objective (Maza 2017), each bringing their own life experiences to their work, as indeed the predominately white, male, middle- to upper-class historians of the 1970s first did to this history. I looked to leaders in the field, like Professor Mahmood Mamdani, who has shown that a personal tie has only strengthened his ability to critically engage with post-colonial studies of East Africa, and whose latest work interrogates his own experience amid his scholarship, resting on archival and historical sources, alongside “first-hand ethnographic knowledge”. Mamdani invites his readers to “see through” academic claims to objectivity and neutrality, and to “share these changing vantage points, both social and political, that have shaped my own point of view”. He began writing “as a witness” and realised he had been “a participant and not just an observer” in many of the events he retold. In this he saw an “opportunity for self-reflection”, and it led him to “formulate a set of fresh questions” (Mamdani 2025). If good historians, “like good detectives,” should both “follow and challenge the evidence,” this includes revising ideas as the case develops. Such refinement is the “essence of historical scholarship” (Corfield and Hitchcock 2022).

5. Representation and Reclamation

When the expulsion order hit, before Kausar was able to flee to Nairobi, she found herself stranded in Kampala, unable to return to the northern city of Gulu where she worked as a teacher. In the chaos of the capital, where long lines wound out of banks as people desperately tried to access their life savings, she recalled a more unusual form of panic-buying. “Within hours, the shelves were empty,” she said. “There were no suitcases”. (Fulford 2023). Amid the imperatives of seeking safe passage, the domestic task of packing was more likely left to the women, overlooked by newspaper reports, but revealing so much about that moment in time.

“Life histories have become ever more popular with historians,” Summerfield (2018) notes. “They ground the general in the particular, and they juxtapose the public with the personal.” Suitcases came to be emblematic of the expulsion, the limited possessions sanctioned by Amin captured in black-and-white photographs of the departees clutching their bags. Through this small detail from someone who was trying to pack one of these bags, they take on another life too within the first days of the announcement, grounding us in that reality.

The British empire is a vast concept—stretching across such huge global territories that it earned the moniker of ‘the empire on which the sun never sets’, and through the decades in a way that makes it hard to acquire a meaningful perspective on it. Finding the individual experience and moments within this contextualises more zoomed-out histories of empire with meaning, while at the same time having a “provocative capacity,” says Summerfield (2018), “to draw attention to experiences that are ignored or marginalised in mainstream historiography, and to require us to reconsider what we mean by ‘history.’”

Where it was easy to foresee the potential pitfalls of a closeness to the material, what soon emerged were the distinct strengths of my positionality. Coming from a Keralan Christian background, my family sat outside the more dominant Gujarati and Punjabi migrations to East Africa and the regions and religions which are often heavily represented in oral archives. This made me acutely aware of the limitations of the conceptualisation of Ugandan Asians as a singular collective. I had lived experience demonstrating the nuance of this diverse group of migrants, coming from the length and breadth of India and what would later become Pakistan, with different cultures, classes, religions, and languages, which I sought to represent in the pages of The Exiled.

Kampala is famously a city of seven hills, many of which were dotted with different houses of religion, including the country’s oldest cathedral, and I wanted to reflect this diversity with interviews across Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Christianity and beyond. Ugandan Asian narratives have often naturally centred race, but this can be at the expense of class, especially pertinent due to the extremely divergent experiences of upper- and lower-class families during the expulsion—as I explored through the swell in the South Asian workforce in many of Britain’s factories during the 1970s and the saving of condemned housing in cities like Leicester by many such migrants. In seeking out interviewees through diverse methods and connections, ranging from walking into people’s shops to connecting through historical groups, there was a thoughtfulness which accessed previously overlooked perspectives, beyond those confident to volunteer for their stories to be recorded, at times baking in societal biases.

Meanwhile, just as Amin and the larger-than-life character he cultivated continues to eclipse retellings of this history, so male figures also dominate the presentation of the exodus—from those pictured in the queues snaking through embassies and immigration departments in Kampala in the wake of the announcement, to the stereotype of the Ugandan Asian businessman. But this is a history of women too, and while the domestic is perhaps less present in the initial post-colonial writings, it is enormously telling about this forced migration and its place within British society to this day. Herbert (2009) has challenged oversized images of the “heroic male pioneer” versus the South Asian housewife “bereft of her jewellery”, finding these to be important moments in the expression of Ugandan Asian collective history, the former conveying the transcendence of difficulties and the latter a profound sense of loss, and yet naturally not representative of the multitudes of experiences found in personal stories of the expulsion.

By working hard to create a gender balance in my source material, I sought out previously overlooked female voices to understand the women in saris on the tarmac of Stansted Airport as the first planes landed in September 1972, through to the young girls starting afresh, and independently, in the city of Leicester, which notoriously advertised in a Ugandan paper to discourage arrivals, but became synonymous with the thriving Ugandan Asian community in the UK (BBC 2013). In this case, being a female scholar created a real strength for the work, as I sought to address the gender disparity of these stories and write women back into them.

When Hamida Majothi, daughter of an entrepreneur running shops in eastern Iganga, discovered their imminent journey to England, she showed an enthusiasm incongruous with the shock of the expulsion, seen differently through a child’s eyes. Rather than fear the unknown, her mind filled with idyllic images she’d seen in films. Over the moon to be on a plane for the first time, and excited even to receive a hand-me-down coat from volunteers on arrival into Britain, her voice reveals so much about how parents shelter their children during times of trouble. Her family ended up in Doniford Camp in Minefield, and one day their future turned on a dime when Hamida and her brothers took a day trip to Bristol and saw an ice rink for the first time. They’d planned to move to Leicester, but remarkably her parents acquiesced to the children’s request to stay in Bristol, launching a shop which the family continue to run as one of the city’s most popular food spots (Fulford 2023).

A family lens is a particularly powerful way to explore the Ugandan Asian expulsion. As Hamida’s story demonstrates, not only do family stories expand our understanding of resilience and agency within post-colonialism, but the expulsion also upended traditional migratory patterns. The shock of the 90-day order fractured the typical migratory route favoured by South Asians, which had been seen in movements from the Indian continent to East Africa, and beyond. This typically saw the male head of the house traveling first to scout, assess and even establish a base before moving the rest of the family. Instead, whole families were forced to leave together, and the ramifications of this played out as breadwinners faced pressure to establish themselves to meet the immediate needs of their families.

For others, the question of citizenship—such as when men had taken on Ugandan citizenship for business purposes, while their families retained British passports—led to the issue of split families in the winter of 1972 and 1973, a hot political issue in these times (Cosemans 2018). After conceding on the Ugandan Asians who had a form of British citizenship, the government picked a battle over the stateless, leaving it until perilously close to Amin’s deadline, when the UNHCR was able to confirm around 5000 people remained and required emergency evacuation. The stateless Ugandan Asians cut out of the UK became the first significant group of refugees from the Global South to be resettled in the Western world, housed in camps across Europe from Germany to Italy (Cosemans 2021).

It was the stories I had heard snatches of in my childhood which eventually led me to pursuing serious study into these lesser-told histories and generational ties, inherently personal things, because they came from my own questioning. With this too came an informed eye, a sense of where to look for the quieter voices, and a sensitive approach towards interviewees to whom I felt a very personal responsibility towards. While writing the personal may mean having a harder job in being dispassionate, when it comes to speaking with people about something they have not discussed for decades, this can be a distinct strength. The common ground I held was enough to engender trust, with people opening their homes and hearts to me, generously sharing their intimate memories of trauma, racism and loneliness.

This placed me in many ways in opposition to the historians of much of the modern period, who Satia finds to have been “not critics, but abettors of those in power,” in which “the rule of historians coincided with the era of British imperialism” (Satia 2020). If US historians of the nineteenth century were preoccupied with the quantitative over the subjective, baking in their own “privileged realities”, it was the arrival of women and people of colour in the field which disrupted the status quo, says Nick DeLuca, which in turn “upset power dynamics, gave voice to the silenced, and offered space to the marginalised.” Bearing witness that their stories mattered too, “this could not have been possible without drawing upon their own experiences, backgrounds, and contexts” (DeLuca 2025).

It was my own experience as a descendant of the exodus which led my belief in the importance of bringing narratives from 1972 up to the present, not only witnessing, but personally experiencing how people continue to unpick pieces of their past and how empire remains alive within those whose global migrations it forged. It was also increasingly clear to me as I spoke with people of different ages that later generations also bear a responsibility to critically respond to imperial history, because they do not carry the lived experience of colonialism, or the direct trauma of displacement. This also enabled this scholarship to add a different dimension to much of the previously gathered oral testimony, which has primarily focused on the moment of expulsion or the initial weeks and months of arrival into new countries, without taking in the longer horizon of finding home and the next-generation reckoning with identity.

The 50th anniversary of the expulsion proved to be a point of connection, providing an opportunity for exiles to reflect on the many years that had passed, and for younger people to investigate their past. Reclaiming this outside of archives, people created their own collective histories and memoirs in Facebook groups, YouTube series, theatre performances and moving exhibitions leaning on personal objects and testimony (Leicester Museums 2022). Beyond the many excellent oral history projects that emerged (British Ugandan Asians 2022; Faith Matters 2022), there was a burst of reflective material, from podcasts and first-person accounts of returns to Uganda, as well as a series of popular fiction published around this period (Oza 2023; Shah 2021; Zayyan 2021). Documenting this personalised memory work by Ugandan Asians, from anniversary visits to tracing where relatives once lived, and understanding the returnees who have since moved back to the country, is just as important as understanding the moment of expulsion.

6. Conclusions: Who Gets to Tell History

The turn to the personal in history has produced work that shows “it is not only possible for historians to study the self, but absolutely essential for our historical understanding,” with even the most ordinary life retold opening up other worlds, “through the prism of another person’s memories, feelings and perceptions” (Summerfield 2018). For those exiled from Uganda, and those who follow in their footsteps, the growth of personal writings, reflections and media ensures that such memories, feelings and perceptions are documented in time, and act as a counterweight to many of the colonial conceptualisations on the official record. Returning to the question of whose history gets told, five decades on, it seems it is beginning to be told by the subjects themselves.

This includes the more analytic approach towards Ugandan Asian collective identity and reimagining, because it is evident that people telling their own stories does not guarantee that they do so with a critical eye, especially when it conjures up some degree of discomfort. “Changing the story of a collective entity such as a nation can be liberating,” says Maza (2017), “but is almost inevitably fraught and usually meets with enormous resistance”. In challenging some of the comfortable narratives around the exodus and the image of the Ugandan Asian in Britain, this resistance is not just from those corners who want to continue to utilise this history to rehabilitate the image of empire, but also from those who wish to maintain their own stories of success, superiority and safety.

From my personal lens, bridging academic research with strands of memoir and family accounts has at times felt like being pulled in different directions, despite weaving concurrent threads. Yet as a Brown woman telling histories of marginalised people, there are enough people seeking to quiet you without you silencing yourself. Who will people trust more to handle their story with care than someone who is also telling their own? There is great value too in reaching beyond the confines of academia, because challenging contemporary viewpoints around migration and refugee movements necessitates speaking to broader audiences. “Many of the people whose lives have shaped history have a legacy of crossing boundaries,” Dudman (2017) has said. “For us, today, crossing conceptual boundaries should be core to our work in addressing how we approach engaging with the refugee experience and the historical record.”

When looking at the rise in self-identified diaspora, Cohen (1996) argued that “minorities no longer desire to abandon their pasts.” That certainly seems to be the case with the Ugandan Asian collective. Anecdotally, it has been apparent to me in interviews where second or third generations take an active role in engaging with their East African Asian heritage, whether through travel, or through exploring cultural and historical ties, at times developing a stronger affinity to India or East Africa than their own parents. When the pressure to assimilate to survive is removed, and when multicultural identity and appearance is regularly questioned, it leads many seek out answers which lead them to East Africa. Indeed, studies have shown that people seek a sense of belonging to place and community, and that knowledge of family history “deepens their sense of personal identity” (Kramer 2011).

Reclaiming this history among the diaspora must include challenging revisionism and the nostalgic view of empire invoked by many retellings of imperial history, in which the Ugandan Asian case serves as a microcosm. If much of the first draft of history was written by imperialists, apologists, or those in some way part of the establishment, testimony takes it to the grassroots. Moreover, how we remember the British empire matters, as Satia (2020) has argued. “It shapes how we assess the seeming ‘failures’ of post-colonial countries to ‘move on’ from their colonial past, how we make sense of Britain’s efforts to reinvent its place in the world… and how we think about imperial activity today.”

History changes all the time “because it is driven by the concerns of the present.” If history in this sense is about ‘what the present needs to know about the past’ (Maza 2017), then this must centre Sri Lankan British novelist and director of the Institute of Race Relations Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s well-known saying; ‘We are here because you were there’. The way post-war migrants were conjoined to the empire that came before them was starkly apparent in those initial years, but can be much less clear several decades on. As migrants and asylum seekers are vilified and made into scapegoats (Goodfellow 2019), with terms like ‘waves of migration’ making headlines without context, as if people simply wash up on shores without any origin, histories like the expulsion add a vital grounding force, inserting the tidal force of colonialism into the narrative. Moving beyond top-down, political approaches or self-serving success narratives towards a critical social history of the exodus emphasising personal narratives which privilege previously overlooked castes, classes and genders, is vital to democratise 1972 and beyond.

History can be used to reinforce the status quo, and for too long the Ugandan Asian expulsion has been put to work for such purposes. If “all history is dyed in the colour of the present moment” (DeLuca 2025), today’s rainbow must include the global Ugandan Asian diaspora. Social history has a value beyond the words we scribe into the archives. There is a magic to the interactions in which people realise their lives, ordinary or extraordinary, speak to things beyond their experiences. Studying the individuals and families at move within, and beyond, the Ugandan Asian expulsion has allowed me to understand this history—and my own—more than I could have hoped. It is my belief that for this history, truly, “no more elegant tool exists to describe the human condition than the personal narrative” (Shostak 1989).