On July 28th, 1975, when Ugandan President Idi Amin became chairman of the Organisation of African Unity,
only three countries formally boycotted Botswana, Tanzania and Zambia.
Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere they openly accused Idi Amin of committing mass atrocities against Africans,
crimes that he argued were ignored because they lacked the racial basis.
For his part, Amin denied these allegations and claimed that Noriega had been told a lot of lies by Ugandan exiles living in Dar es Salaam.
Unlike the heads of 19 states, including leaders of Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Guinea and Zaire were present in Addis Ababa to cheer it off the record.
Some delegates claimed that attendance was low and their colleagues had engaged
in a fence straddling operation of an act instead of short of an actual boycott.
Amin's coup, the expulsion of tens of thousands of Asians and Israelis before them, atrocities against those trapped within Uganda.
All of these had failed to stir most African leaders to stake a public position of opposition.
While exiled Ugandans had organised against a mean African moral agency did not seem to extend to expelled Asians.
Many who found themselves in resettlement camps in the UK. The pan-African OAU accepted that Asians did not belong in or to Africa.
Although what you do, I mean, seizure of power caused rifts, notably with Tanzania, and coincided with wider African tensions over ties to Israel.
African members of the OIC in 1973 adopted a 10 year plan to resolve their disputes
peacefully and to rid Africa of foreign bases and to seek Black Arab alignment.
To open this event on the 50th anniversary of the Asian expulsion,
I want to explore idiom strategy of making the economically secure Asians in Uganda insecure and vulnerable materially, physically,
territorially as a part of Afro centrism, Afro centrism meant not only an African vantage point on history,
but also the confrontation confrontation with the disposition dispossession of black selfhood, a Sarah Balakrishnan argues.
Throughout the African continent, Afro centrism was an unstable yet very powerful concept,
one discredited even at times of popularity as anti-racist racism,
famously by SAPS with the long history of Afrocentric thought has been well explored.
And my interest today is in examining how it was informed not just by European imperialism and white supremacy,
but also by Asians and their relationship to blackness.
Articulating Afro-Asian Difference based not only on skin colour, as in your Euro-American logic, but on a civilizational past a genealogy religion,
kinship and a condition of oppression, as mama, did you find Jenny, critics have argued,
define the post-colonial condition not only in Africa but also in South Asia.
If we consider just a few decades before the expulsion, Indians had accepted black politics,
Afro centrism and Pan-Africanism that inspired intense collective organisation against Italian aggression in Ethiopia,
for example, apartheid in South Africa and decolonisation in sub-Saharan Africa had included Indians in these struggles.
So how and when did Asians, Indians, South Asians become a target of oppressed interests?
This is the question that I want to explore.
I showed that the period from 1947 after World War Two and with Indian independence partition of the Indian subcontinent to 1970,
that is the period from 1947 to nineteen seventy.
The high point of Afro-Asian Solidarity was ironically the most unstable in the relationship between Africans and South Asians.
It was in this time in which racialisation of Indians in Africa intensified,
while others have argued that this racial ism resulted from black nationalism or ask for a version of Afro centrism.
I suggest that this anti-Asian ism was not inevitable or even intrinsic to black politics.
Rather, both African and Indian identities were constructed through their potential for assimilating others.
In the mid-20th century, black blackness as an identity came to be understood as a possibility for Asians,
whereas Indian this came to signify exclusion.
And that's what I would like to trace today how this opposition was created in focus nations and focussing
on the meaning and the racialisation and constructed ness of these ideas in a particular historical moment.
I have emphasised here how African and Indian identities have been constructed as racial, cultural and social categories.
In other words, that it's very difficult to separate is very into an intimate relationship and that they,
their identities have been made in relation to each other.
So I want to first start by talking.
Tracing how India becomes goes from a sense of from African perception of India as a more fluid concept to a certain kind of closure.
After 1947 in East Africa,
the idea of an Asian power grew from the 1920s as Indians began to settle throughout the mainland in railway towns and rural outposts,
opening shops and bringing wives and children.
The British stoked fears of Indian colonisation, and in South Africa, a similar situation arose with changing settlement patterns.
Although the demographic change came more from Africans moving into Durban,
as John Saw describes where Afro Indian intimacies were present but inferior transportation,
housing and employment for Africans heightened tensions over material conditions.
The oft cited remark of Harry Johnston, special commissioner for Yolanda of the Colony as a possible America of the Hindu,
has significance from four African perspectives that I argue many have missed.
Drawing attention to the Hindu face of India was an intentional strategy of othering of a racialisation of
a people by a religion to which one could not convert and to which blood kinship was seen as paramount.
China's economic and religious identities, which also, of course, implied a parallel to choose.
This was not lost on Africans. Indeed, Hinduism was not the primary association with Indians in all of Africa.
In British West Africa, for example, Gold Coast Nigeria and Sierra Leone in starting from the 1920s.
Islam was actually more strongly associated with Asians, particularly Asian men,
as the movements of Punjabi and Pashtun soldiers, railway workers and missionaries of the Hamadeh,
a missionary movement attest to Hinduism existed only in traces and far outside of public culture
and right in images and writings by African intellectuals about Indian civilisation to Africans.
India and Indians were not yet a fixed category.
An African idea of Hindu India began to crystallise, I argue, in the 1940s with Gandhi's brand of activism,
with Muslim league agitation and the Kashmir crisis, and with Indian independence and partition.
There are a range of African reactions to India as a religious problem.
Christian Ethiopian suspicion of Muslim Indian ambitions in Ethiopia and Muslim West Africans, suspicion of India as hostile to religious minorities.
In 1955, India's first, the Indian government's first press attache in West Africa,
Mahesh Jagran, wrote at every party that the British had arranged for me.
I met Nigerians who were suspicious about India, as perhaps a Nigerian nationalist would be about the benefits of the British intentions.
Repeatedly, when I saw men who accused funded Nehru of imperialism in Kashmir, in Goa and in other parts of Southeast Asia.
I could not but conclude that all his receptions and all these parties were a deliberate attempt
to impress upon me that the people of Nigeria were not so blindly the followers of India,
as well as was perhaps believed by some people in the world.
There was a strong desire to know about the plans for Pakistan.
The question of minorities in India, a refugees of violence, religious violence and India's divisions shaping a larger diaspora into Africa,
whether this Diaspora be Hindu or Muslim was not lost on Africans at that time.
Viewed from a continental scale, the African ideas of Indians show that the British racial order whites at the top Asian intermediaries and Africans
at the bottom was not the only fruit frame through which African Asian religious relations were negotiated.
Africans saw ideas of identity tied closely to religious sensibilities and separations.
Making India Hindu had the effect of othering Indians and exacerbating Afro Indian tensions.
And as I will show shortly,
Indian supposed conservatism and segregation ism with the implication of cultural backwardness became a discourse that I mean would cite.
Against this backdrop of African anxieties about Indian independence, of course, African economic grievance against Indian shop owners grew.
This is a topic that is been fairly well studied starting in the 1940s,
especially after World War Two, African boycotts of foreigner shops grew more intense in Gold Coast.
The anti-inflation campaign targeted Indian and Lebanese shops, and in 1949,
riots in Durban in South Africa led to great loss of Indian lives and property.
But this was not simply economic competition and inequality. The cultural and social distance between Africans and Indians had become clear,
especially to African soldiers who served in World War Two in India and whose roles in boycotts
and strikes once they were back in Africa and decolonisation were are well-documented.
African veterans told stories through newspapers published in Africa of their time in India and Burma.
Not just about poor treatment, but they suffered from the hands of the British and Indians.
But they also understood their own societies differently in comparison to India as a place of large what they saw as largely poor,
traditional and superstitious people who stared at them and mocked them on the streets.
These Africans saw themselves as modern Indians as traditional,
and NATO's government struggled to understand how the government of India should position itself in Africa
with against this consideration of India as not better than African societies or or more sophisticated.
The secular senator was Foreign Affairs Ministry argued that India should not promote
our way of living and thinking with special emphasis upon our philosophy of life.
Because what exactly this meant is not clear what was India?
Even Nauru's government was struggling with this idea. This is what the one minister reasoned.
The Indians and eastern central Africa lived like Europeans anyway, not like the Indian masses yet.
To African observers and critics of Indians, the refusal of Asians to isolate to the refusal of Indians to merge their cultural identities
and economic activities compared less favourably even to European Christians or Arab Muslims.
Who might have have converted them?
Conversion was possible and knowable in a way that Hinduism, as as an increasingly definitive characteristic of India, did not allow.
So I want to turn next to the two from this period to the 1960s, as these tensions were rising by the 1960s,
which was the decade of independence for the majority of African colonies, Afro centrism increasingly meant Americanisation in a number of realms.
The changing of names, notably to Christian names to indigenous ones.
The transfer of economic interests to African governments, the handover of religious organisations,
notably Western Christian missions, including schools and hospitals, to African church and secular authorities.
Also by this by the early 16 1960s, Asians in East Africa were gripped by fears of African ization, which included us,
which was a set of practises that Asians found impossible to understand outside a purely reactionary politics.
Indian Origin Moscow correspondent to the Spectator, an Indian Express worker,
blamed Indian settlers who sided with the Europeans and quoted an Indian Kenyan from June 1960, saying quote,
We should not be placed in this situation by which we may have to exchange the domination of white
racialism for that of black racialism with the significant difference that while the former is benevolent,
satisfied, contented, civilised, experienced in the art of human justice and fairness,
the latter is narrow minded, greedy, hungry, frustrated, grasping, suffering from a supposed sense of grievance.
Violent in heart and capable of slipping back to tribal observatories.
The racialisation of Africans by Asians in this way was not shaped,
was also shaped in part by the propaganda of whites in apartheid South Africa, who obviously feared black nationalism as well as Americans.
Whereas the British had positioned themselves as a defender of Africans in the face of Asian colonisation in the 1920s and 30s,
Americans positioned themselves as racially conscious in a way that Africans were.
We're not. I'm sorry that Asians were not going to fight for some.
If Afro-Asian Solidarity declared in Bandung in 1965 and the Non-Aligned Movement formalised in 1961 struck
fear amongst Americans who recognised black nationalism as a potential bulwark against Afro-Asian solidarity.
Thus complaints of Indian racism, as you see in this Washington Post article amongst African students, were heavily reported.
Indians such as Malcolm Odyssey. of Nasco and Americans with whom he worked,
recognised the reluctance of African students to accept Indian government scholarships through the 1960s.
American political scientist Vernon Mackay, who worked for the U.S. State Department from 1948 to 1956,
kept tabs on African students studying in India. No, just in the hundreds and represented all regions of the continent, not just East Africa,
the Horn of South Africa, but also Ghana, Nigeria, Togo and the British Cameroons.
So the United States was deeply interested in how Africans were treated in India
as an expression of potential as a possibility of potential race conflict.
The Japanese were also represented as exploitative of Africans, and this is where the broader Asian the idea of Asian is important.
This article by an American journalist published in 1970, highlights the Japanese economic activity burgeoning all over the continent with a including
a proposal to build a railway from Niger from Lagos in Nigeria to Mombasa in Kenya.
Yet this article also contains a warning that the Japanese willingness to trade and do business with the white ruled states of southern Africa,
South Africa and Rhodesia could spell trouble. The American writer, freelance journalist Nicholas Stroh,
wrote The message of African states to Japan is that someday Japan will have to
choose between the white enclaves of the south and black Africa to the north.
Japan and he accorded a West African economist.
Supposedly West Japan must understand our position regarding minority regimes or face the consequences.
Report this this economist reportedly told the journalists, the American writer of this article in a Ugandan newspaper.
Nicholas Straw, incidentally, went missing in 1971 and his body was found burned along with that of another American, Robert Siegel.
The sociologist, who was a lecturer at the university Idi Amin performed, is symbolic gesture of an investigation.
But it was only later that Seidel Son,
who SEATO Son learnt that the two Americans had met with a known CIA officer the night before their disturbance, their disappearance.
It is hard to ignore that a constellation of factors, some internal and some external made Afro Indian relations worse in the very
Arab Afro Asian solidarity before and leading up to Amin coup and afterwards,
the Asian diaspora out of East Africa began in the 1960s as threats to Asians took various
forms of insults and many wondered about their their ability to fit into African communities.
Tarsus Become would get, a Ugandan scholar and political activist,
presented a paper titled The Asian Question in Uganda at the meeting of the Historical Association of
Kenya in Nineteen Seventy Three and quoted the chairman of the Uganda People's Congress and MP for Torum,
Mr Bagehot, as telling his constituents, quote, These Asians just stop behaving in an unbecoming manner and should fit in with the African community.
Propagate, an activist against Amin in the Ugandan movement, certainly had no love for the autocrat,
but XSplit explained Amin's political expectation for Indians to fit in as arising from an
African view of citizenship as a kind of affective kinship into which Indians could assimilate.
He and Ali Mazrui proposed that Amin's view was shaped by his peasant rural life and his upbringing
in which intermarriage and labour arrangements were mechanisms for incorporating strangers.
It was from this thinking that Amin wanted Asians to experience Uganda or have the experience
of leaving cities to live in villages rather than a couple of very noted Indians look to Asia.
Asians look to India and the necessary psychological reorientation from being favoured British subjects to Ugandan citizens was not complete,
according to his figures.
By 1968, less than one third of more than 90000 thousand Asians had applied for citizenship, and only about 15000 had received it.
And almost all were doing business but without any political citizenship.
This in spite of the fact that middle and Asian members of the Ugandan parliament argued that Asians should become Africans.
Complicated also argued that Asians who did not immediately embrace Ugandan
citizenship were showing themselves to be non participants in African independence.
The analysis of Credible Get a sociologist and politician shows logics of Afro centrism
that were understandable to Africans when it came to the expulsion of Asians.
For his part, Ali Mazrui in a paper titled Nation Building and Race Building Israel and Amin's Uganda as racially purist.
Presented at the December 1973 meeting of the International Congress of Africa in Addis Ababa, contrasted Amin's notion of blackness with Zionism,
arguing that Amin initially hoped that Africans and Asians would integrate into an
independent Uganda by mingling blood and creating kinship through physical closeness.
But Indians rejected this, and which is what led him to declare in 1971.
I mean, I'm aware that one of the causes of the continuing distance in social relations between
the Asians and the Africans in this country was the policy of the colonial government,
which ensured that Africans, Asians and Europeans had entirely separate schools, hospitals, residential quarters,
social and sports clubs and even public toilets, with facilities reserved for Africans being of the poorest quality.
We have, of course, changed all of this, but there are Asians who still live in the past and consider,
like the former colonialist government, that the Africans are below them.
This living in the past cannot help Asians in any way, nor can it foster the desired harmony and unity amongst racism in Gondar.
For a mean, Indians had not accepted blackness as a political practise.
Mazrui concluded that Amin grew into a black nationalist, grew into one, was not naturally one,
which is demonstrated by his relations and his his navigation of relations with North Africans, Israelis and Asians.
Another and other sub-Saharan Africans. In the end, we found greater bonds with Black Americans than with Ugandan Asians.
The Asian diaspora unwittingly catalysed African diaspora consciousness and its expressions in Afro centrism and Pan-Africanism of the North.
North Africans, Libyans and Egyptians pictured here took the place of the Asians in Uganda,
signalling the reunification of the continent and constructing North African acceptance of Black Power, which itself is contradicted by history.
After centrism required a reckoning with the rewriting of history, what part Asians took in this writing was rewriting was ambivalent.
To conclude, I returned to the idea that Africans took no position or sat on the fence on the Asian expulsion,
as they said Asians wholesale rejection of Afro centrism. That is because of a conflict of interest.
Africans also understood that independence in the Indian subcontinent had exposed divisions and weaknesses,
and the Indian diaspora a sense of and claim to homeland was fractured and damaged.
Seeing India broken in this way,
some Africans could not understand the Indians refusal to embrace Africa as a homeland and to recognise blackness in the way Africans did.
Idiom means version of opera centrism would not have existed about agents,
the expulsion violently birthed a new sense of racial oppression Asians had been accused of lacking,
as Mahmood Mamdani wrote just after the expulsion.
Gradually, a primitive racial solidarity emerged out of a common racial predicament the colour the colour of one's skin.
Thank you.