The Asian Expulsion and Cultural Intimacy in Contemporary Uganda

When Idi Amin announced the expulsion of all people “of Asian origin, extraction or descent” from Uganda in 1972, he situated it in an anti-imperialist war for control of Uganda’s commerce and urban spaces. By contrast, Amin's critics charged that this economically disastrous expulsion of a helpless minority, like the coarse mannerisms of its implementer, was a stain on Uganda’s image.

Histories of Asian presence in Uganda remain hotly contested, as do explanations of the expulsion’s effects on Africans and Asians alike. However, invocations of the expulsion are often nervous affairs, as they sometimes provide contexts of cultural intimacy, in which participants hone attitudes about aspects of their history and cultural identity that provide “assurance of common sociality” but may be a source of “external embarrassment” and fear of the others’ gaze (Herzfeld 1997). In the intervening decades, many expellees have actively shaped a Ugandan Asian identity marked by an ambivalent nostalgia for a pre-expulsion past. However, efforts to publicly mark the expulsion as a foundational event often provoke uncertainty and conflict over the public display of Ugandan Asians’ engagement with a contested past open to the eyes of outsiders. Likewise, if in recent years some Ugandans have found inspiration in Amin’s economic nationalism, such feelings are often tempered by embarrassment at Amin’s image for others as a primitive buffoon.

This paper examines the complicated politics of invoking the Asian expulsion in contemporary Uganda. It takes two recent episodes – a 2007 anti-Asian protest and the quiet cancellation of a 2012 reunion of Ugandan Asians – in order to unpack the anxieties that public discussions of the expulsion stimulate among particular publics in Uganda. I situate the feelings of cultural intimacy surrounding the expulsion in a changing politics of historical reflection in the National Resistance Movement’s Uganda.