Indian diaspora in East Africa

Indian diaspora in East Africa

Navin Ramgoolam Vivek Kundra Manu Chandaria Freddie Mercury Ben Kingsley Pravind Jugnauth Naheed Nenshi Irshad Manji Ali Velshi Shekhar Mehta Vikash Dhorasoo Farah Damji
Regions with significant populations
Mauritius 855,000 Réunion 250,000 Kenya 100,000 Tanzania 90,000 Mozambique 40,870 Madagascar 25,000 Zambia 13,000 Uganda 12,000 Malawi 4,000 Seychelles 2,000
Languages
Colonial Languages: English · French · Portuguese Indian Languages: Bhojpuri · Hindi · Marathi · Tamil · Telugu · Urdu · Other Languages of India Local Languages: Mauritian Creole · Réunion Creole · Seychellois Creole · Malagasy · Sena · Swahili
Religion
Predominantly: Hinduism · Islam · Christianity Minority: Sikhism · Zoroastrianism · Buddhism · Jainism · Atheism · Agnosticism · Others
Related ethnic groups
People of Indian Origin

The Indian diaspora in Africa consists of approximately 1.5 million people of Indian origin living in Africa. Most of this diaspora arrived in the 19th century as British indentured labourers, many of them to work on the Kenya-Uganda railway, while others had arrived earlier by sea as traders.

Sub-groups

Indian Ocean Islands

• Indians in Madagascar
• Indo-Mauritian (Bihari)
• Réunionnais of Indian origin (Malbars)
• Indo-Seychellois

Mainland East Africa

• Indians in Kenya
• Indians in Mozambique
• Indians in Tanzania
• Indians in Uganda
• Indians in Zambia

History

Indian trader's family in Bagamoyo, German East Africa, around 1906/18.

In the British Empire, the labourers, originally referred to as "coolies", were indentured labourers who lived under conditions often resembling slavery. The system, inaugurated in 1834 in Mauritius, involved the use of licensed agents after slavery had been abolished in the British Empire. The agents imported indentured labour to replace the slaves. The labourers were however only slightly better off than the slaves had been. They were supposed to receive either minimal wages or some small form of payout (such as a small parcel of land, or the money for their return passage) upon completion of their indentures. Employers did not have the right to buy or sell indentured labourers as they did slaves.

Of the original 32,000 contracted laborers, after the end of indentured service about 6,700 stayed on to work as dukawallas, artisans, traders, clerks, and, finally, lower-level administrators. Colonial personnel practices excluded them from the middle and senior ranks of the colonial government and from farming; instead they became a commercial middleman and professionals, including doctors and lawyers.

It was the dukawalla, not European settlers, who first moved into new colonial areas. Even before the dukawallas, Indian traders had followed the Arab trading routes inland on the coast of modern-day Kenya and Tanzania. Indians had a virtual lock on Zanzibar's lucrative trade in the 19th century, working as the Sultan's exclusive agents.

Between the building of the railways and the end of World War II, the number of Indians in East Africa swelled to 320,000. By the 1940s, some colonial areas had already passed laws restricting the flow of immigrants, as did white-ruled Rhodesia in 1924. But by then, the Indians had firmly established control of commercial trade — some 80 to 90 percent in Kenya and Uganda was in the hands of Indians — plus some industrial activities. In 1948, all but 12 of Uganda's 195 cotton ginneries were Indian run.

Many Parsis settled on Zanzibar to work as merchants and civil servants for the colonial government. They formed one of the largest Parsi communities outside of India, a community that survived until the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964. Indians in Zanzibar founded the one locally-owned bank in all of East Africa, Jetha Lila, which closed after the Revolution when its customer base left.

Expulsion from Uganda

Main article: Expulsion of Asians from Uganda

In 1972, Idi Amin, gave the nearly 75,000 Ugandans of Asian descent 90 days to pack their bags and leave the country. These descendants of the dukanwallas and Indian coolies then comprised about 2 percent of the population. Their businesses were "Africanized" and given to Amin's cohorts, who plundered and ruined them. The country lost a valuable class of professionals, sliding into a chaos that would eventually claim up to 750,000 Ugandan lives.

Some 27,000 Ugandan Indians moved to Britain, another 6,100 to Canada, 1,100 to the United States, while the rest scattered to other Asian and European countries.

Today, however, many of these same ethnic Indians have returned. In 1992, under pressure from aid donors and Western governments, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni simplified a then 10-year-old law letting Asians reacquire lost property.

While many black Ugandans have learned the art of business during the Indians' absence, Indians today still run many shops, hotels, and factories in Kampala, the capital, as they do in Kenya and Tanzania. Sikh and Hindu temples figure prominently in the urban East African urban landscape, as do Mosques, particularly those built by the large Ismaili Muslim community, which immigrated from Gujarat. Some extended families — the backbone of the Indian ethnic group — are prospering under Uganda's new openness. Two families, the Mehtas and Madhvanis, have built multimillion dollar empires in Uganda since the 1980s.

Still, the Indian communities remain concerned about their position in East Africa. Continued fighting in western Uganda between hundreds of rebels and troops in June, 2000, and politically motivated ethnic violence in Mombasa that claimed more than 40 lives in August, gave credence to these concerns.

Cultural depictions

The lives of the Mhindi (Swahili for Indian) were first fictionalized for a Western mass audience in V. S. Naipaul's "A Bend in the River." The Trinidadian West Indies author's 1979 book remains the best-known literary work in English addressing the Indian experience in East and Central Africa. Though recently "A Bend" enjoyed a resurgence of critical acclaim for its dead-on portrayal of post-colonial African life in the former Zaire (renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo), the novel also lifted the curtain on an ethnic group who had become central to East Africa's life in the later half of the 20th century.

The experience is touched upon in the films Mississippi Masala, Touch of Pink and The Last King of Scotland.

See also

• Asians in Africa
• Coolies
• Non-resident Indian and Person of Indian Origin

External links

• Asians in Africa

Further reading

• Dharam P. Ghai and Yash P. Ghai, "Asians in East Africa: Problems and Prospects", Journal of Modern African Studies, 3 (1965), pp. 35-51