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The Exiled: Empire, Immigration and the Ugandan Asian Exodus
Uganda, August 1972. President Idi Amin makes a shocking pronouncement - the country's South Asian population is being expelled. They have ninety days to leave.
After packing scant possessions and countless memories, 50,000 Ugandan Asians vied for limited space in countries including Canada, India and the United Kingdom. More than 28,000 expellees from Britain's former colony arrived in the UK and began building new lives - but their incredible stories have, until now, remained largely hidden.
Fifty years on from the exodus, The Exiled draws on first-hand interviews and testimonies, including from the author's family, to illuminate a time of painful alienation and incredible courage. As an entire people stepped into the unknown, a global diaspora was born, and the fate of the United Kingdom changed forever.
Journeying across continents and decades, this staggering work of reportage illuminates an essential, and under-explored, chapter in post-colonial history, challenging politically expedient narratives to uncover the true fate of minorities at the end of empire.
"Weaving together tenderly reported personal stories with the grand sweep of imperial history, this is a compelling and impressive account of a time - and population - often overlooked." - Samira Shackle
"A lyrical and penetrating examination of what happened to one family and the Ugandan Asians more broadly" - Giles Foden , author of THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND
After packing scant possessions and countless memories, 50,000 Ugandan Asians vied for limited space in countries including Canada, India and the United Kingdom. More than 28,000 expellees from Britain's former colony arrived in the UK and began building new lives - but their incredible stories have, until now, remained largely hidden.
Fifty years on from the exodus, The Exiled draws on first-hand interviews and testimonies, including from the author's family, to illuminate a time of painful alienation and incredible courage. As an entire people stepped into the unknown, a global diaspora was born, and the fate of the United Kingdom changed forever.
Journeying across continents and decades, this staggering work of reportage illuminates an essential, and under-explored, chapter in post-colonial history, challenging politically expedient narratives to uncover the true fate of minorities at the end of empire.
"Weaving together tenderly reported personal stories with the grand sweep of imperial history, this is a compelling and impressive account of a time - and population - often overlooked." - Samira Shackle
"A lyrical and penetrating examination of what happened to one family and the Ugandan Asians more broadly" - Giles Foden , author of THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND
400 pages, Hardcover
Published May 28, 2024
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November 7, 2023
A very good book to understand the Ugandan Asian community and by extension, the British empire.
September 6, 2025
Tens of thousands of workers migrated from India to Uganda during the British occupation of both countries. Almost a century later, General Idi Amin ordered all Ugandan Asians, irrespective of whether they were citizens of Uganda, to leave the country within ninety days. They were not to take more than one suitcase upon departing. The Asians complied, leaving behind their possessions, pets and other loved ones. Author Lucy Fulford is the granddaughter of one of those Ugandan Asians, but was born in Australia. In this book, she traces the history of the expulsion and subsequent dispersion of the Ugandan Asian diaspora across many continents. Fulford details where she, her parents, grandparents and their friends belonged in this heart-wrenching saga. It is a gripping narrative that includes racism, geopolitics, extraordinary kindness, goodwill, violence and shameful immigration politics.
To comprehend the Ugandan Asian exile, one must investigate how tens of thousands of Indians ended up in Africa, the Caribbean and Australasia in history. Indian merchants had been trading along the East African coast for 3,000 years, sailing into the coastal ports of Mombasa and Zanzibar on the annual monsoon winds on dhows. Indian traders visited the Somali coast in the seventh century BCE and today’s Mozambique in the twelfth century. Many settled in the region and moved inland with their wares. The author begins the book by tracing the origin and development of the indentured labor system planned by British colonialism. Britain abolished slavery in all its colonies in 1834. However, slaves were still bound to plantations in an apprenticeship system. Indentured labour came to fill the gap in the workforce.
Plantation owners in Mauritius were early adopters, calling over 20,000 Indians to the island in the five years after slavery’s abolition. The first 437 Indian labourers, pejoratively called ‘coolies’, sailed to the Caribbean at the start of 1838, and hundreds of thousands more would follow. By the end of the nineteenth century, Mauritius, South Africa, Seychelles and the East African region had received over 750,000 Indians. Around 1.3 million Indians moved to Indian Ocean islands, such as Réunion, and to Caribbean islands including Trinidad and Jamaica. Others went to Fiji, Australia, Tanzania and Uganda, helping to build the colonial systems in these countries. Through the 1890s, Punjabi Sikh and Muslim immigrant workers laid railway tracks in backbreaking work under the heat of the equator’s sun. The track ran across hundreds of miles from Mombasa in Kenya to Kampala in Uganda, including crossing a 450-metre-high escarpment in the Rift Valley. Up to 2,500 workers died over six years of laying train tracks, i.e., four for each mile of railway track. Indian labor also worked in many professions across economic life beyond the shopkeeper archetype to include farming, hunting and trading.
Race stratified colonial Uganda. The white settlers were at the top, with the South Asians below and the majority Black Ugandans below them. This was by design, not accidental. This class structure would have major consequences in the post-colonial era. However, the British gave South Asians a higher status than Africans at every level in society, making them a dominant minority with a greater proximity to power. The South Asians comprised Hindus, Sunni and Ismaili Muslims, Roman Catholics from Goa or Mangalore, Anglicans from Kerala like the author’s family. Despite the diversity, they lived in harmony amongst themselves, going to the Hindu temples, the mosques and eating at the Sikh gurdwaras together. In 1920, the British allowed South Asians to own land for the first time. Within four years, the enterprising Asians dominated the cotton industry. By 1948 they owned all but twelve of the country’s 195 cotton ginneries and also moved into sugar. The Madhvanis, dubbed the Rockefellers of Africa, had over twenty cotton ginneries, an oil factory, steelworks, a sugar refinery, breweries and many investment properties. The Mehtas had extensive tea plantations, coffee and sugar. People credited them with introducing modern irrigation and mechanised cultivation into Uganda.
By 1900, South Asians represented just one percent of the population, but earned 20% of the national income. But they had few African friends. Their principal contact with Africans was through the servants they employed and their businesses. With the racial and class separation, there emerged an image of South Asian traders as greedy, exploitative and extractive, which would gain momentum as the years passed. Things came to a head when, on 4 August 1972, President General Idi Amin announced the expulsion of the country’s entire South Asian population.
Though Amin banished the South Asian community from Uganda, they remained shielded from deadly violence as they departed. However, the native Ugandan population suffered brutality. Often, people outside the country do not know what tragic things happened to them. Instead, the myths of Amin and the fate of Ugandan Asians have dominated the expulsion story. Amin’s security forces killed so many people that they dumped corpses into the country’s waterways, from Lake Victoria to the River Nile. Amin ruled until 1979. Violent attacks, abductions and murders were the hallmarks of these years. He would gain recognition as a brutal dictator, representative of savagery and ruthlessness and focused on self-interest. Today, historians believe that a minimum of 300,000 Ugandans lost their lives at the hands of the military state during the Amin years. Others put the losses at 800,000 to one million.
Today, Ugandan Asians live across Europe, South Asia, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and many more countries, as well as in East Africa. The resettlement, however, presented difficulties. Though Uganda expelled 80000 Asians in 1972, the UK would accept only British passport holders. That accounted for just 28000. Many thousands were employees of the British colonial administration, though they were citizens of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Goa. There was much opposition in the UK even to accepting the British passport holders. Author Fulford contrasts this with the attitude towards some later arrivals as the double standard towards ‘good migrants’ and ‘bad migrants’. Brexit tagged East Europeans as unwelcome. Russia’s war in Ukraine presented East Europeans differently. The UK welcomed 160,000 Ukrainian refugees but was cold to Afghan and Syrian refugees. In 2020, because Hong Kongers were a legacy of the British empire, the UK allowed 144,000 of them as refugees. But it did not use the same standard for Ugandan Asians.
The author has high praise for the enterprise of the exiled Ugandan Asians. Arriving in Britain, many enterprising people soon spotted a gap in the market when they noticed the shuttered shops on Sundays or in the evenings. They opened a newsagent that would cater to weekend essentials and late-night whims. Another niche was that nobody was doing proper Indian food. The South Asian corner shop revolutionised shopping in Britain. The 1950s Shops Act rendered it illegal to open after 8 p.m. and on Sundays. A loophole allowed later trading if you sold perishable goods, which included newspapers, magazines and vegetables. The corner shop mainly sold these items, and the authorities ignored the cigarettes and snacks that were also being sold after hours! They worked every day for the ten, twelve years they had the shop. The work ethic was incredible. Fulford says this generation had no safety net. Migrants faced no recourse; they just had to succeed, given the inherent sacrifices. She finds it fascinating and beautiful that they stepped up and got it done.
Yet, this narrative holds a darker aspect. The UK values Ugandan Asians as a group for their strong work ethic. Fulford objects to the ‘good immigrant’ concept, which expects migrants to behave even better than the majority communities they join, despite their often-traumatic histories. She believes South Asian shopkeepers are ubiquitous because of racial exclusion. Denied opportunities within other fields, they accepted low-paying shift assignments. Migrants got into professions that didn’t threaten the status quo, forcing them to diversify by default. A survey of the first 1,500 Ugandan Asian arrivals found just twelve percent were unskilled workers, despite what their subsequent employment suggested.
Fulford praises the humanity with which Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau accepted thousands of Ugandan Asians after 1972. She gives high praise to John Paddick, Australia’s immigration attaché in Nairobi, who was genuinely concerned, kind-hearted, and made it possible for many Ugandan Asians to go to Australia. This was despite the ‘White Australia’ policy still being in force. In a stark irony, the author notes the attitude of Indian-origin politicians in the UK nowadays. They are Suella Braverman, the former attorney-general, whose father arrived from Kenya in 1968, and Priti Patel, whose parents migrated from Uganda in the 1960s. Both have pursued staunch anti-immigration policies in the UK government!
Though Idi Amin claimed to have uprooted British imperialism from Uganda, he himself had to flee the country after a disastrous war with Tanzania. A former military officer, Yoweri Musaveni assumed power as the president in 1986 and continues to this day in his sixth consecutive term. Fifty years after 1972, Museveni described the forced Asian expulsion as a ‘shameful chapter of Uganda’s past’ and welcomed them back. He admitted that Uganda’s economy and international reputation were in tatters and that bringing the Indian community back is integral to rectifying this. A few months later, he told Indian business leaders that he wanted children of citizens to get Ugandan citizenship automatically. He also promised multiple re-entry visas for Indians and easier access to permanent residency. A half-century makes up a lengthy duration; exiled Indians perished, and their offspring prospered elsewhere in the world. Still, about 35000 Indians returned to Uganda, and today, India is the second-biggest foreign direct investor in Uganda.
The legacy and aftermath of the British empire still wrecks havoc in Palestine today. And the Soviet empire’s legacy does the same in Ukraine and threatens the Baltic states. Author Fulford’s book explores the true fate of minorities at the end of the British empire as part of post-colonial history. It asks us to understand immigration with compassion, points to the broader historical context of this problem, and helps us to see it with empathy.
To comprehend the Ugandan Asian exile, one must investigate how tens of thousands of Indians ended up in Africa, the Caribbean and Australasia in history. Indian merchants had been trading along the East African coast for 3,000 years, sailing into the coastal ports of Mombasa and Zanzibar on the annual monsoon winds on dhows. Indian traders visited the Somali coast in the seventh century BCE and today’s Mozambique in the twelfth century. Many settled in the region and moved inland with their wares. The author begins the book by tracing the origin and development of the indentured labor system planned by British colonialism. Britain abolished slavery in all its colonies in 1834. However, slaves were still bound to plantations in an apprenticeship system. Indentured labour came to fill the gap in the workforce.
Plantation owners in Mauritius were early adopters, calling over 20,000 Indians to the island in the five years after slavery’s abolition. The first 437 Indian labourers, pejoratively called ‘coolies’, sailed to the Caribbean at the start of 1838, and hundreds of thousands more would follow. By the end of the nineteenth century, Mauritius, South Africa, Seychelles and the East African region had received over 750,000 Indians. Around 1.3 million Indians moved to Indian Ocean islands, such as Réunion, and to Caribbean islands including Trinidad and Jamaica. Others went to Fiji, Australia, Tanzania and Uganda, helping to build the colonial systems in these countries. Through the 1890s, Punjabi Sikh and Muslim immigrant workers laid railway tracks in backbreaking work under the heat of the equator’s sun. The track ran across hundreds of miles from Mombasa in Kenya to Kampala in Uganda, including crossing a 450-metre-high escarpment in the Rift Valley. Up to 2,500 workers died over six years of laying train tracks, i.e., four for each mile of railway track. Indian labor also worked in many professions across economic life beyond the shopkeeper archetype to include farming, hunting and trading.
Race stratified colonial Uganda. The white settlers were at the top, with the South Asians below and the majority Black Ugandans below them. This was by design, not accidental. This class structure would have major consequences in the post-colonial era. However, the British gave South Asians a higher status than Africans at every level in society, making them a dominant minority with a greater proximity to power. The South Asians comprised Hindus, Sunni and Ismaili Muslims, Roman Catholics from Goa or Mangalore, Anglicans from Kerala like the author’s family. Despite the diversity, they lived in harmony amongst themselves, going to the Hindu temples, the mosques and eating at the Sikh gurdwaras together. In 1920, the British allowed South Asians to own land for the first time. Within four years, the enterprising Asians dominated the cotton industry. By 1948 they owned all but twelve of the country’s 195 cotton ginneries and also moved into sugar. The Madhvanis, dubbed the Rockefellers of Africa, had over twenty cotton ginneries, an oil factory, steelworks, a sugar refinery, breweries and many investment properties. The Mehtas had extensive tea plantations, coffee and sugar. People credited them with introducing modern irrigation and mechanised cultivation into Uganda.
By 1900, South Asians represented just one percent of the population, but earned 20% of the national income. But they had few African friends. Their principal contact with Africans was through the servants they employed and their businesses. With the racial and class separation, there emerged an image of South Asian traders as greedy, exploitative and extractive, which would gain momentum as the years passed. Things came to a head when, on 4 August 1972, President General Idi Amin announced the expulsion of the country’s entire South Asian population.
Though Amin banished the South Asian community from Uganda, they remained shielded from deadly violence as they departed. However, the native Ugandan population suffered brutality. Often, people outside the country do not know what tragic things happened to them. Instead, the myths of Amin and the fate of Ugandan Asians have dominated the expulsion story. Amin’s security forces killed so many people that they dumped corpses into the country’s waterways, from Lake Victoria to the River Nile. Amin ruled until 1979. Violent attacks, abductions and murders were the hallmarks of these years. He would gain recognition as a brutal dictator, representative of savagery and ruthlessness and focused on self-interest. Today, historians believe that a minimum of 300,000 Ugandans lost their lives at the hands of the military state during the Amin years. Others put the losses at 800,000 to one million.
Today, Ugandan Asians live across Europe, South Asia, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and many more countries, as well as in East Africa. The resettlement, however, presented difficulties. Though Uganda expelled 80000 Asians in 1972, the UK would accept only British passport holders. That accounted for just 28000. Many thousands were employees of the British colonial administration, though they were citizens of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Goa. There was much opposition in the UK even to accepting the British passport holders. Author Fulford contrasts this with the attitude towards some later arrivals as the double standard towards ‘good migrants’ and ‘bad migrants’. Brexit tagged East Europeans as unwelcome. Russia’s war in Ukraine presented East Europeans differently. The UK welcomed 160,000 Ukrainian refugees but was cold to Afghan and Syrian refugees. In 2020, because Hong Kongers were a legacy of the British empire, the UK allowed 144,000 of them as refugees. But it did not use the same standard for Ugandan Asians.
The author has high praise for the enterprise of the exiled Ugandan Asians. Arriving in Britain, many enterprising people soon spotted a gap in the market when they noticed the shuttered shops on Sundays or in the evenings. They opened a newsagent that would cater to weekend essentials and late-night whims. Another niche was that nobody was doing proper Indian food. The South Asian corner shop revolutionised shopping in Britain. The 1950s Shops Act rendered it illegal to open after 8 p.m. and on Sundays. A loophole allowed later trading if you sold perishable goods, which included newspapers, magazines and vegetables. The corner shop mainly sold these items, and the authorities ignored the cigarettes and snacks that were also being sold after hours! They worked every day for the ten, twelve years they had the shop. The work ethic was incredible. Fulford says this generation had no safety net. Migrants faced no recourse; they just had to succeed, given the inherent sacrifices. She finds it fascinating and beautiful that they stepped up and got it done.
Yet, this narrative holds a darker aspect. The UK values Ugandan Asians as a group for their strong work ethic. Fulford objects to the ‘good immigrant’ concept, which expects migrants to behave even better than the majority communities they join, despite their often-traumatic histories. She believes South Asian shopkeepers are ubiquitous because of racial exclusion. Denied opportunities within other fields, they accepted low-paying shift assignments. Migrants got into professions that didn’t threaten the status quo, forcing them to diversify by default. A survey of the first 1,500 Ugandan Asian arrivals found just twelve percent were unskilled workers, despite what their subsequent employment suggested.
Fulford praises the humanity with which Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau accepted thousands of Ugandan Asians after 1972. She gives high praise to John Paddick, Australia’s immigration attaché in Nairobi, who was genuinely concerned, kind-hearted, and made it possible for many Ugandan Asians to go to Australia. This was despite the ‘White Australia’ policy still being in force. In a stark irony, the author notes the attitude of Indian-origin politicians in the UK nowadays. They are Suella Braverman, the former attorney-general, whose father arrived from Kenya in 1968, and Priti Patel, whose parents migrated from Uganda in the 1960s. Both have pursued staunch anti-immigration policies in the UK government!
Though Idi Amin claimed to have uprooted British imperialism from Uganda, he himself had to flee the country after a disastrous war with Tanzania. A former military officer, Yoweri Musaveni assumed power as the president in 1986 and continues to this day in his sixth consecutive term. Fifty years after 1972, Museveni described the forced Asian expulsion as a ‘shameful chapter of Uganda’s past’ and welcomed them back. He admitted that Uganda’s economy and international reputation were in tatters and that bringing the Indian community back is integral to rectifying this. A few months later, he told Indian business leaders that he wanted children of citizens to get Ugandan citizenship automatically. He also promised multiple re-entry visas for Indians and easier access to permanent residency. A half-century makes up a lengthy duration; exiled Indians perished, and their offspring prospered elsewhere in the world. Still, about 35000 Indians returned to Uganda, and today, India is the second-biggest foreign direct investor in Uganda.
The legacy and aftermath of the British empire still wrecks havoc in Palestine today. And the Soviet empire’s legacy does the same in Ukraine and threatens the Baltic states. Author Fulford’s book explores the true fate of minorities at the end of the British empire as part of post-colonial history. It asks us to understand immigration with compassion, points to the broader historical context of this problem, and helps us to see it with empathy.
March 23, 2024
I am of Indian origin (Gujarati), born in Uganda but came to the UK at a very young age just before the 1972 forced exodus. Therefore, this part of history is of particular importance to me, especially so now that many of those that were adults during the forced exodus have or are passing away.
I really enjoyed the book.
The writing style is very fluid and easy to read, yet clearly explains and covers the material. The book is extremely well researched and much of this is through direct conversations with those that were first-hand part of this history.
I particularly enjoyed first two sections (the book is in three sections), which cover the events leading up the expulsion and the immediate consequences of those impacted. I learned much that I didn't know, particularly around both the events in post independent Uganda and the UK leading up the expulsion. Much of the material covering life in the 1970s and onwards in the UK resonated with me and were very well written. I am more familiar with the events/commentary in the third section, which is essentially post expulsion reflections including the current views of Ugandan Asians in the UK.
Why not 5 stars? I think the author becomes too editorial in the third section, expousing their own views rather than focusing on the actual historical events. While this is difficult, because the author comes right up the the present time (2023) - which I think is excellent - I think the editorial bias could have been moderated.
I really enjoyed the book.
The writing style is very fluid and easy to read, yet clearly explains and covers the material. The book is extremely well researched and much of this is through direct conversations with those that were first-hand part of this history.
I particularly enjoyed first two sections (the book is in three sections), which cover the events leading up the expulsion and the immediate consequences of those impacted. I learned much that I didn't know, particularly around both the events in post independent Uganda and the UK leading up the expulsion. Much of the material covering life in the 1970s and onwards in the UK resonated with me and were very well written. I am more familiar with the events/commentary in the third section, which is essentially post expulsion reflections including the current views of Ugandan Asians in the UK.
Why not 5 stars? I think the author becomes too editorial in the third section, expousing their own views rather than focusing on the actual historical events. While this is difficult, because the author comes right up the the present time (2023) - which I think is excellent - I think the editorial bias could have been moderated.
July 23, 2025
The book shines a light on Amin’s often overlooked violence towards native Ugandans, e.g. tribes belonging to the ex president’s background were targeted. It is estimated that between 300,000 to 1 million Ugandans would lose their lives at the hands of Amin’s military state, with uncertainty on numbers due to the sheer amount of disappearances. Amin wanted to decolonise Uganda, with South Asians viewed as agents of empire. South Asians represented 1% of the Ugandan population, yet earned a fifth of the national Ugandan income in the 1950s. The book highlights the racism that Ugandan South Asians also were complicit in towards natives. When Ugandan South Asians were exiled from Uganda, the British camps which housed these migrants were run by over 60 voluntary organisations (although the Home Office bore ultimate responsibility), which was for PR reasons, creating an impression that Ugandan Asians had been taken in on humanitarian grounds, not due to any post Colonial responsibilities. Museveni became president in 1986 and called the Ugandan South Asians in the 1990s to return and contribute to the economy. However today, Ugandan South Asians can’t become citizens by birth, leading to a lingering sense of instability. Interesting fact: It is estimated that 85% of the wealth used to found Bristol University depended on slave labour.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 14, 2023
I’ve always been drawn to narratives about migration and post-colonialism, so it was fascinating to learn more about South Asian Ugandans. Tying together the legacy of Empire in India and Africa, the subject of this book is a great example for looking at post-colonial migration as a whole and the disservice done to former colonial subjects.
I preferred the sections with first-person narratives and interviews because, let’s face it, I’m a fiction girlie at heart. However, I’d highly recommend this book if you want a deeper analysis of events that you may have seen portrayed in novels, such as ‘Kololo Hill’ and ‘We Are All Birds of Uganda.’
For more reviews, check out my blog aminasbookshelf.com and find me on Instagram@aminasbookshelf and TikTok @aminas_bookshelf
I preferred the sections with first-person narratives and interviews because, let’s face it, I’m a fiction girlie at heart. However, I’d highly recommend this book if you want a deeper analysis of events that you may have seen portrayed in novels, such as ‘Kololo Hill’ and ‘We Are All Birds of Uganda.’
For more reviews, check out my blog aminasbookshelf.com and find me on Instagram@aminasbookshelf and TikTok @aminas_bookshelf
February 26, 2024
Definitely worth a read. There is so little written on the East African Asian diaspora and I couldn’t wait to read this. The first 2/3 of the book provide a really comprehensive history of how East African Asians came to be, the expulsion from Uganda and the lives of East African Asians arriving in the UK. The final portion of the book was more focused on themes of race and identity and the discussion in these chapters at times felt removed from the overall topic of the book. The book does handle these topics well and I look forward to reading some of the other books cited in these chapters.
September 15, 2024
Fascinating book telling the story of the Ugandan Asians who were exiled by Idi Amin. Really interesting to read about what happened. This is the history we should be taught in schools
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews