Uganda Asians

Then and Now, Here and There, We Contributed, We Contribute: An Autobiography of a People and a Place

Dr. vali jamal arrived in the main lounge of the Serena Hotel in Kampala, Uganda, where I was staying in the summer of 2016, carrying what looked like an old-fashioned doctor's bag in both hands. He put it down with a sigh of relief and pulled out his three volume, self-published tome on Uganda Asians. Disarmingly, he said "I wish I hadn't written so much—10.4 kilograms! Guaranteed to make an impact, even if one part falls on people's toes!" I laughed, then confessed that meeting him was one of my main reasons for travelling to Kampala. For years, Jamal has been hard at work on this monster of a passion project, titled Uganda Asians: Then and Now, Here and There, We Contributed, We Contribute. At two thousand one hundred pages of text, two million words, and roughly ten thousand images, the book is almost twice the length of the King James Bible.

And it still isn't finished.

Jamal is a prominent member of the Uganda Asian community, one of approximately seven thousand exiled members of that community who have returned to Uganda at the invitation of President Yoweri Museveni, who welcomed them back and restored their confiscated property when he came to power in 1986. Twelve years had passed since General Idi Amin expelled them on August 4, 1972. First to go were those Asians who did not hold Ugandan citizenship. But eventually, Uganda revoked the citizenship of the rest, with very few exceptions. He gave them three months to clear out of the country.

Jamal is a Kenyan citizen, but he moved to Uganda in 1946. He has a B.A. from Cambridge University, a Ph.D. from Stanford University, and was a senior economist with the U.N. International Labour Organization from 1976 until 2001. He is the author of six books on African economies. Therefore, this book, a book which collects the stories of Uganda's Asian community, is a new sort of venture—and adventure—for him.

Though the book has the appearance of an encyclopaedia, its layout is anything but uniform. The inlays, columns, fonts, and photo presentations vary from page to page. There is no index because Jamal lacks the software necessary to make one. I commented that the book has the feel of a scrapbook, and I asked Jamal if he finds that description insulting.

"Not at all," he replied, noting with pride the book's eclecticism, and its variety of subjects from food, to films, and fashion. It even contains excerpts from screenplays. "Was that padding?" he mused, as he went on to answer his own question: "I think all of it was in the context of our life in Uganda then. So that's my book."

Simryn Gill, Windows, 2011, 2017.

C-Type Photograph, hand printed, 152.4 x 127 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary.

People ask him, "Who's going to read all that?" His reply is funny and honest: "Well, it's actually for people with short attention spans—you read it in small doses and come back." And, indeed, this is the best approach to this massive collage of anecdotes, biographical and autobiographical accounts, reminiscences and artefacts. Each piece is separate and distinct, but an obvious thread connects them. Here are the lives and times of Asians in Uganda and in exile, in all their complexity and nuance.

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My friendship with Jamal has grown at a distance of at least thirteen thousand kilometres via email and Facebook. Aside from his personal page, Jamal is active on many group sites. A couple of these pages he started himself, such as "Viva!Uganda," the subject of which parallels that of his book. Jamal posts items from the book when they are relevant, as happened when Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister of Canada. Trudeau's father, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, resettled seven thousand Ugandan Asians in Canada...