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[Mulindwa Edward]

Shedding the shame of Uganda 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 Sunday August 24, 2003 The Observer 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. · Farah Damji is editor of the British-Asian lifestyle magazine, Indobrit             The Mulindwas Communication Group "With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy"             Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie"