From Citizen to Refugee

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Mamdani argues that the expulsions were attributable to a colonial policy in which minorities had been privileged and set apart from – and against – disenfranchised indigenous populations. In this light, Amin’s economic war was an attempt to right the imbalances created by colonialism. In doing so, Amin inadvertently challenged global capital. As expelled Asians discovered, any sympathy from the British press
was a cover for concern over British investments. Re-read today, it is clear that this drama never went away.

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Less discussed on a global platform – and even with Indian filmmaker, Mira Nair's 1990s take on it in Mississippi Masala – was the act that brought Amin to world attention, namely his decree in 1971 to expel Uganda's Asian population.

Current opinion in Uganda, however, continues to weigh on Amin's side.  To the uninformed, this seeming approval for xenophobia may appear more than a little disturbing.  However, in his 1973 book From Citizen to Refugee, recently re-issued, Mahmood Mamdani goes beyond easy explanations to understand why Amin's action resonated so strongly.

Written when Mamdani, himself a Ugandan Asian, was in a refugee transit camp in Kensington Church Street, London, the book is a refugee's story.

Urgent, intimate and personal, the tales of loss and departure from Uganda, and racism in Enoch Powell's England, are only offset by the liveliness of the prose.  But it is more than a victim's lament. As a young Marxist intellectual at Makerere University, then East Africa's intellectual bastion, Mamdani dismisses the hysterical parodying of Amin that typified his portrayal in the Western press.

Instead, he argues that the Asian expulsions were really the culmination of colonial policy in which racial minorities had been privileged and set apart – and against – disenfranchised indigenous populations.

In this light, then, Idi Amin's economic war – really the implementation of earlier policies designed by the left-nationalist Uganda People's Congress, rather than the insane impulses of a populist tyrant – was an attempt to right the imbalances created by colonialism.

In doing so, Mamdani argues however, Amin inadvertently challenges global capital. This is his real crime. As the expelled Asians discover – manhandled by the British High Commission in Kampala, left to the rough welcome of skinheads in the refugee camps in England – whatever sympathy had been elicited from the British press was mere cover for concern over the fate of British overseas investments.

"The overwhelming majority of Asian businessmen...were heavily indebted to the banks...approximately 80 percent of the...commercial bank assets in Uganda were controlled by three banks, Barclays Bank DCO, the National and Grindlays Bank, and the Standard Bank – all British," he notes.

When Asian businesses are wound up, it is the banks that put up notices.

"It seemed clear that unless Amin moved against it, the primary beneficiary of Asian expulsion would be British capital, not African...with the departure of the Asians, Amin would quickly realize this," Mamdani writes.

Re-read in the present day, with global capitalism's current anxieties playing out in ever more bizarre ways, it is easy to see why this drama never really went away.


Title:From Citizen to refugee: Uganda Asians come to Britain

Author: Mahmood Mamdani

Publisher: Frances Pinter, 1973; reissued by Pambazuka Press, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-906387-57-0