Indian diaspora in East Africa

Though Indians pervade every facet of East African commercial life, their presence in this region remains far less known compared to East Africa's white settlers who imported the Indians as coolie laborers in the late 1800s to build the Uganda-Kenya Railway.

Of the original 32,000 contracted laborers, about 6,700 stayed on to work as "dukawallas," the artisans, traders, clerks, and, finally, small administrators. Excluded from colonial government and farming, they straddled the middle economic ground above the native blacks. Some even became doctors and lawyers.

Despite animosity from native Africans and restrictions by colonial whites, Africa still provided more opportunities than crowded, caste-rigid colonial India. East Africa became America for Indians in the first half of the 20th century, and their resourcefulness cannot be understated or discounted.

It was the dukawalla, not white settlers, who first moved into new colonial areas, laying the groundwork for the colonialist economy based on cash for food and goods. And 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. Many Parsis settled on the island to work as merchants and civil servants for the colonial government, forming one of the largest Parsi colonies outside of India that lasted until the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964.

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 — plus sections of industrial development. In 1948, all but 12 of Uganda's 195 cotton ginneries were Indian run.

The lives of the Mhindi (Swahili for Indian) were first fictionalized for a Western mass audience in V.S. Naipul's "A Bend in the River." The 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.

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 dukawallas and Indian coolies then comprised about 2 percent of the population. Their businesses were "Africanized" and given to Amin's cohorts, only to be plundered and ruined. 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 their Asian brethren's absence, Indians today still run many shops, hotels, and factories in Kampala, the capital, as do ethnic Indians in Kenyan and Tanzanian cities. Temples, such as the Sikh and Hindu temples in Kampala, figure prominently in the urban East African urban landscape, as well as Mosques, particularly those built by the large Ismaili Muslim community immigrating from Gujarat. And some extended families — the backbone of the Indian ethnic group — are prospering under Uganda's new openness. Two extended Indian families, the Mehtas and Madhvanis, have built multimillion dollar empires in Uganda since the 1980s.

Continued fighting in western Uganda between hundreds of rebels and troops in June, 2000 and politically motivated ethnic violence in Mombasa, Kenya, that claimed more than 40 lives in August gave credence to these concerns.