Max Russel

Firstly, Mohamed thank you for being here with me and for speaking with me, we’re in 2022 at the moment coming towards the end of the year, it’s the 50th anniversary of the expulsion of Ugandan Asians by Idi Amin in 1972. Would you mind starting by telling me about your personal lived experience of that time, of that year 1972, where you were, what you saw, what you were doing?

Mohamed Keshavjee

Okay 1972 was a very interesting year for me personally you know I am a qualified lawyer I qualified in England at the Inns of Court, I became a barrister primarily with the view of going back to East Africa and practising law in Kenya where my family was based. I myself am not an East African, I’m a South African. My family are South African Indians who came to Kenya just before independence, that was in 1962, so ten years earlier we came to the country as displaced people from South Africa and we had not yet had our papers so we were very much part of that group of Asians who were wondering what would happen to them after the country became independent, would they be able to live in the country, would they be able to survive in the country, were they able to trade in the country, would they be able to send the children to school in the country. We were part of that larger concern of minority Asians in the country, but we were not East Africans, we were South Africans, but we were part lumped into that whole process. Now in 1972 I had just come back from England and I could not practise law but in 1971, and it's too long we won't go into that whole story now, I managed to get my permission to practise law in Kenya even though I was not a citizen. The Kenyan immigration department allowed me to practise law in Kenya as a non-citizen South African and that’s a long story we won't go into now but the Kenyan immigration authorities were very helpful they were very kind they understood where I was coming from and when they saw that there was a sincerity of purpose in my wanting to practise law in Kenya the immigration officer, a man called Mr Bernard Bangua, I can still remember my first meeting with him he said that “With your degree of sincerity to this country you are welcome here, you can you can practise as long as you want, do whatever you want to” because he said “Why do you want to open a private practise, why don't you work for a big firm?” to which my answer was ,what I believed at the time, I said “If I open my own firm at least I can give two or three people a job I’ll give a secretary a job, I’ll give a job to a Clerk” I said my aim was not only to use my education for my own betterment, which I hope I can, but in the process if I could create employment for two or three people train somebody under myself I think that that would appeal more to what I feel I would like to do as a lawyer in Kenya to which his response was he says “It's very noble of you to think beyond yourself” and he says “I can see that that’s your intention” he said “Make this your home, remain here, do what you feel will be good for you” and then I did, I employed three people. I immediately employed two or three people, that means I got the service out of them, but at the same time I had to think not only of myself, but I had think of two or three people, [which] meant two or three families, and I'm happy that I did that. I only feel sad that I wasn't in practise long enough to be able to put down procedures that would have been much more longitudinal for the benefit of those who I wanted to get things done for, but then one has to look at the past for what it was, we can today sit back and say “We ought to have done this, we could have done that, maybe we should have done that” but at that point in time you do not have much choice if those are the political situations in which you find yourself you’ve got to be pragmatic and move forward. So that was 1971 when I got my permission to start my own practise. So, 1972 I had gone for a holiday to Europe I hadn't practised for long, I practised for a few months, and I was doing so well that I thought I needed a little break. So I went to Denmark, and I went to Rome, I went to Italy, and I went to England because I was doing some work for one of the airlines and they were very kind to give me a ticket as part of the work I did, and it was just literally a few days before a Amin’s declaration that I came back and I came back to a country with the hope of developing my practise even further and suddenly I heard this declaration so I thought to myself “What’s this all about?”. So, I was caught in the midst of a big problem of do I remain in East Africa or not? I was not in Uganda; I was in Kenya, but my position was very very idiosyncratic to the extent that I am an Indian from South Africa with a South African passport with no diplomatic relations between Kenya and South Africa. South Africa had left the Commonwealth so I couldn't even come to England or Canada, and I had no fallback position, and when this happened in Uganda I said “Oh my god tomorrow if something happens like this in Kenya where do I turn up?”. I know refugees can be scattered all over the world, but I couldn't even go to any particular country to say “Take me back”. I do not know if South Africa would have accepted me back after having left ten years earlier, so I was in the midst that personal circumstances when the Ugandan crisis took place. Now immediately I couldn't sit back and wonder what’s going to happen to me, I belonged to a small community, the Ismaili Muslim community, and there were people in the community or business people who were also very committed to helping in community structures and two or three of them came to my office and said “You know you’re a lawyer you need to help us” I said “What do you mean?” they said “People are coming from Uganda overnight, they have no food, they’re arriving at the airport and we’re giving them sandwiches. We’re taking boxes of sandwiches and potato chips and drinks and everything” but he said “Many of them may stay overnight in Kenya, they’re not allowed to stay here, and immediately they will be hounded by the security police or so. So every morning you may come across people who are in court who are caught for being illegally in the country. Would you be able to help them, would you be able to represent them?” there would be no money they said “Please we want you to do it because you're a lawyer, you're a young lawyer” and to which I responded, I said “Look you don't have to worry about the money, just tell me who they are and I’ll try and fit it into my practise, I'll do it” and then one of them, I still remember his name, a chap called Noorali Ebrahim, they owned the largest sort of supermarket called Ebrahim & Company, they were right in heart of Nairobi, I mean a massive big supermarket, and Noorali said to me, he gave me 20,000 shillings which was £1000, and I know he had them in a beautiful little wad of notes and he put it in my pocket he said “This is 20,000 shillings” he said “Anybody who's in trouble if they need bail, if they need help, if you're going to court you should not be stuck, keep this with you. If you need more come to me” but he said “Help anybody whoever it is, whether it’s a brown, white, black [person], whoever it is, whoever is in difficulty there and they need help you help them, you do the legal work for them and here’s the money you need in case you have to pay a bail for somebody or you have to get somebody released or so”. I don’t think I used that money, I probably didn't need it because we didn't come to that stage, and these were people who were very kind because I did their legal work for them so they said “Don’t worry about your practise don't worry about earning money or so, we’ll look after you, you just look after the people who are going through this difficulty”. So those initial days in August I found myself as a lawyer being pulled into this direction of [a] few people who are doing good to help others, and there was a small group of people in Nairobi, largely from my own community but not exclusively, that’s number one,  number two there were few lawyers in Nairobi and I can remember their names one was called Pheroze Nowrojee. Nowrojee is a very leading human rights lawyer very very respected individual, he’s now in his 80s, he’s not very young but I think he runs one of the heritage Indian organisations of historical nature. There was a chap called Yirinder Sikand, both Mr Sikand and Mr Nowrojee had convened a meeting with lawyers to say what can lawyers do to help those people who are going to be thrown out of the country, so that is the context in which I found myself in 1972 august, [a] lawyer in Nairobi, part of a family that was in the real estate business, we owned the second largest estate agency in Nairobi called Velco properties. My brother was the managing director, I was a legal advisor, so I had that amount of work coming through and then I was quite known in the Nairobi setting with businesspeople because I was a business lawyer as well, so I found myself in that context.

Max Russel

And in terms of those people that were fleeing to Kenya were they individuals, families, was it a variety of backgrounds, was it mainly Asians or was it a complete mix of?

Mohamed Keshavjee

It was a mix, Max it’s an interesting question that you're asking. Largely they were Asians because what happened is that every family had individuals who were treated differentially by the laws of various countries, that means, let me give an example, in a family you may have the father came from India so he had an Indian passport, children were probably born in Uganda so they have some sort of immigration permission to live in the country, the wife may have been British by virtue of her parents having British citizenship. So in a family you didn't have everybody with the same immigration status, some may have been born in the country, others are born outside, one member of the family may have had a British passport which was now made into a D passport, which means they couldn't come automatically to Britain unless they had rights of patriality. So at that time people didn’t know what to do, they were in a state of confusion, if they had young daughters they’d get the daughters out of Kampala to Nairobi they’d say “Let’s send our daughters to our cousins and uncles they’ll look after them”. In certain cases people were saying “Oh we’ve got relatives in England we’ll just send one kid away” or somebody would say “Well I'm going to Nairobi and probably I'll get to go to England and I have a friend there or so”. So you saw a mixed bag of Asians, and not only one type of Asians, there would be Hindus, there would be Muslims, there would be Punjabis, there would be perhaps Goans, there would be Parsis. So the Asian bag was quite mixed, and within each family there were also different categories of people who could get to any particular point. So one person may be allowed to come into England from a family but not all of them, maybe a mother with one child would be allowed, but the other child wouldn't be allowed. So the Indian situation was very idiosyncratic to the extent that there was no homogenous immigrational status that each family had, within families there was a great degree of heterogeneity, number one, number two Amin in the first at least 20 or 15 days started using his punitive powers not against the Indians, but against the black people. A lot of Ugandans disappeared and very high profile Ugandans were now being disappeared, people like I think Frank Kalimuzo if I'm not mistaken the name rings a bell I think he was [vice] chancellor of Makerere University but I stand to be corrected I'm talking now 60 years or 50 years ago. There was Benedicto Kiwanuka, Kiwanuka was I think the Chief Justice of Uganda, he was a Prime Minister in the earlier government and he was picked up from court while giving a decision on Habeas Corpus. Amin’s goon squad came in they took him away and nobody ever heard of him again. So these were the type of daily disappearances that were taking place, bodies were being found in very very mysterious circumstances. So a fair amount of black Africans who were running away from Amin’s goon squads also came to Kenya and in that context one African family came and stayed at our home, and I don't know if you’ve read about that, but if you look on the Internet you'll see the Press Trust of India carried that story, that a former Ugandan attorney general Joshua Luyimbazi Zake, Dr Zake was a former attorney general of Uganda and a former education minister. He left the country overnight, he walked part of the border and his family came a few days earlier by taxi and his wife, and I think five children, came to our home and we had to hide them away in our house, we put them into a guest house near our home and nobody knew they were in the country, if they knew they were in the country Amin’s squads could have turned [up] and killed them and we would have had no ability to protect them. It's only when Dr. Zake entered our home two or three or four days after his family came into the country that we saw him in the morning. [He] came and knocked at our door and my mother recognised him, opened the door, and he came in. He had breakfast with us, he hadn’t eaten, he had no money, he had a little tin with him in which he brought a toothbrush, and he had one piece of margarine and a piece of bread or something. So we had to look after the family, we had to get them a travel document. We managed to get them out of the country, we managed to hide them away for a few days and that was something that's very clearly in our family’s memory now. Dr. Zake was not the only person, there's another friend of mine called Peter Mulira whose a very leading lawyer today in Uganda I remember Peter my meeting him on the road I said “Hi Peter what you doing here?” he said “Look I've just got away from the country” and I recall Peter and myself went for lunch together. I tried to see if anybody could help him in some way. So it was a period where you didn't look at colour as such, you looked at just the human dimension of people coming in and you try and help them, lots more whites were looked after by their own embassies because they could go back to their countries, they were largely expatriates so they could go to their countries, with British and Americans that was possible, but Indians and Pakistanis, because Indian and Pakistan did not open their doors as it were, because these people did not have the citizenship of those countries we were only Indians or Pakistanis culturally but [in terms of] immigrational the Indians had passports that were given to them by the British or they had Ugandan citizenship which was cancelled by the [Ugandan] Immigration [Office] and said “Look you don't have this citizenship because you did not renounce [British citizenship] in time”. So you found a young kid came along and said “I’ve got a Uganda passport” the immigration people would say “But you don't have this passport because you should have renounced [British citizenship] within that period of time and you didn't renounce” or “If you renounced give us the papers of renunciation” or “Tell us what did they tell you”. So on minor technicalities of a highly complex nature people were totally disenfranchised from any citizenship they had. So I know people who turned up with a torn passport with four pieces cut off and them saying “We don't know where we belong, we’re not in Uganda, we’re not in India, we’re not in Britain, we don't belong to Canada” the only place they belonged was in the street in a queue and whichever office opened up their doors and would accept them is where they would end up. It could be the UNHCR, which came in a little later, it could be the Canadians, it could be the Australians, or it could be Britain, the British people could say “Well look we’re opening the gate for so many people to come in” but that didn't happen till fairly late in October.

Max Russel

Before we progress onto the whole expulsion process, I think what's interesting is often when we talk about the expulsion we have the international reaction, the reaction of Britain and Canada and the UN, but what was the reaction like in other East African countries? So you were in Kenya, what was the thinking there of the government towards Amin, as a person as well as a regime, and also what about the indigenous Kenyans what was their reaction to the expulsion decree?

Mohamed Keshavjee

Yeah that’s very interesting, the reaction was quite, quite varied. I’m trying to picture that period very clearly in my mind. Firstly at the level of the Kenyan government they were quite clear [Daniel Arap] Moi who became the president later on, I think was the vice president at the time, and he made it very clear he said “Kenya is not a dumping ground for people who don't have anywhere else to go”, obviously he meant the Indians, clearly there’s no two ways about it, it’s absolutely clear that the Indians from Uganda should not feel that they can come and settle in Kenya it was very categorically “you are not wanted here don't even stay overnight” and that explains the reason now why Noorali Ebrahim gave me that 20,000 shillings and said “I’ll reimburse every morning because don't let anybody go into prison” because you couldn't be in Kenya even overnight. You could not remain overnight the whole question was “Don't get off at the airport, we’ll bring you sandwiches, eat them, get back go wherever you want to” and there are photographs which are very poignant that if you see my program one of the pictures on that programme was a train with Asians on it and the caption said They are taken on the same trains that their ancestors built back to the railways, back to the sea, to be taken back from where they came from. I mean that was very very stark and very real so number one, at the level of the Kenyan government it was very clear “you don't belong here, we don't have space for you here, don't stop overnight, if you're on your way keep on moving” and the story was very clear, if you don't keep on moving you could end up in court tomorrow morning and you could end up in prison and that was very clear, I know this for a fact. Number two, what was the general sentiment of people in East Africa. At that moment people did not say anything against Idi Amin, neither did they say too much for him, it was very much like leave well alone because Kenya also had a problem, they didn't want the Indians there, the Asians were in small trade. There was constant constant berating and diatribes in the evening when you read parliamentary notes some member of parliament from some upcountry area there was a chap called Martin Shikuku for example, just one name that comes in mind there were others, they would derive the Indians they talk about them as “people who don't know where to go, they are here just to exploit, they have not integrated in the country” if there is a shortage in the country you blame the Indians, if rice is short [it’s] because the Indians are hoarding it “they are people who only want to make money” all these types of bombardments you heard from morning, afternoon, and night every second or third day to the extent that some of us just thought it was a joke. You know when we were in school we’d pick up the newspaper, you’d read this and you’d laugh about it because it became so stupid over a period of time that we didn't even take notice of it. You know if you ask me 1964/65/66 I was not interested in these types of discussions, I was interested in going to become a lawyer. My aim in life was to join the diplomatic service, I thought I may join the United Nations or so. So most Indian families looked at the future rather positively, but at the level of the African discourse both in parliament, both in political rallies, as well as in the media, it was a constant Indian baiting process you were constantly told “You don't belong here, the British brough you here, the British have left, they paid up and gave us our land back what the hell are you guys doing here? that was the subtext. If you talk to some Africans, it depended on how sympathetic they may be, but my feeling is, to be very honest to be very honest, and I hope I’m objective enough that if you did speak to a few black people at that time they would have said “Yes well the British brought you here, they’re gone, what are you still doing here?” and to the credit of two or three African ministers, who were very close friends of ours and I don't like to take their names now, they were very very wonderful Christian souls, they were very close to our family. They used to come to our home and they used to always tell us that “We think that there is no long term future [for you here]” you know they’d say that, “Send your children out”. I mean Dr. Zake told me this personally, I think now 50 years later I can say it, when one night he came and spoke to us, a group of about 12 or 14 of us who were young educated people boys and girls, I asked him “Dr. Zake, you are an African, what do you see [as] our future in this country?” you know what was his absolute clear categoric [response], he said “If you can move out, move out”  he said “I don’t see for you a long term future” but he continued “There isn’t a long term future for us as well” so he says “When you ask me how do I feel, first I’ll tell you how I feel about me and my own family, and I consider you close enough for me to say that to you that there’s no future for me that I can see, I don’t know if I can see a long term future for you”. It was a clear as I’m saying it to you now and he knew that we were all educated, when I spoke to him, I was from the same college as where he qualified as a barrister and he respected me very much, I was his lawyer, I mean he trusted me immensely. I mean if you can trust his family with us at a time when Amin’s goon squads were trying to kill them, then you can imagine how close he was to us, and he told me very honestly, he said “Your younger brothers and sisters, send them out, go away, don’t remain here”. So the general tendency was that. How did people look at Amin? I think Kenyans found Amin very entertaining as did Ugandans. Everybody found him entertaining because Amin could say things that nobody else would say, you know he’d said things that people would say “look it doesn't make sense but it was entertaining”. He got away with it he gave them the idea that he was going to solve all the inflation problems of the country, he said when somebody asked “How will you solve the employment problem?” he said “Well from Monday nobody can be unemployed and I'll send an edict to say nobody should be unemployed”. I mean he had very simplistic ways of dealing with issues, but people though he was fun. He was fun and he was funny. It was only when disappearances started after the 4th of August [1972] reaching to countdown that people said “Can you imagine what’s going to happen at countdown if this is what we’re beginning to see now?” and some of the ruthless ways in which he killed people were unbelievably unbelievably cruel and crude. You know they said crocodiles in the Nile would be disgorging human bodies and all that. People's bodies were found in the sewerage in the streets, you know when we saw that type of behaviour then everybody said “Well look this guy couldn’t be joking if this is what he can do in the past 20 days or 30 days. Can you imagine what he’ll do at the end of 90 days?” I think that was the context. Now there were East African leaders, if I remember correctly at that time, I think two that spoke out were President Nyerere and President Kaunda. I think if I'm not mistaken that they did mention that “this was not correct” but by in far I don’t think the Kenyan government made any statement to say that Amin was wrong, and I think that they also felt that their own people want to know what they're doing for them so this is not a popular movement.

Max Russel

You touched on there about the fact that the Asian baiting in Kenya became almost a joke because it was so over the top and exuberant all the time and that's a common thing that I've heard especially Uganda Asians when they heard the expulsion they thought it was a joke “There's no way Amin is going to follow through and actually expel the entire Ugandan Asian population” but obviously there was a lot of animosity from the indigenous population, and looking back where do you think the roots of that are, and why where maybe Asians also not aware of that animosity?

Mohamed Keshavjee

You are right. I’ve done about 75 interviews myself and all my interviews, if there's one common theme that emerges universally from every interview I mean every interview, nobody believed that Amin would pull this through. When they heard the news it was either laughter or neutrality, people didn't care, people were quite normal, but nobody thought that this was a serious declaration. So you are right people were incredulous, nobody bothered, nobody thought it was serious and there were earlier moves of one kind or another against Indians which blew over. It would be in the form of withholding of trade licences or bringing in new regulations in banking or business, and each one of those were those that came up which had sufficient ability for people to navigate around. So people said look “This is not a serious thing, the government has to do this, it will blow over” that is true. Now why were people not aware of this is a question, because in 1959 there was the Bugandan boycott against Indian businesses which the government of Obote did not appropriate, they didn’t embrace that as a major issue. It became a very minor black African tribe, the Bugandans, against the Indian businesspeople and it sort of got relegated to that local type of an issue, but I think it was a deeper issue that was festering and that deeper issue that was festering was not only Uganda, it was Kenya, it was Tanzania, and to an extent it was also Zanzibar. The whole issue was that in a colonial structured society the whites were on top they were keeping the British colonial empire alive. The blacks were right the bottom, they were the ones who got the worst deal, the Indians were in the middle and some of the only opportunities the Indians had, they could not participate in agriculture, particularly in Kenya, Indians were barred from agriculture, they could not own agricultural land. There were laws, you couldn't do that, so the only openings Indians had were being shopkeepers, Number one. Number two, there were certain professions in which Indians couldn't go but most Indians got into medicine, accountancy, and law, that's another story why they went into those three. That's another story, it's the same story of why do Jewish minorities go into these types of professions, because those were professions were Indians could get in quite easily, they could come back and they could leverage their family organisation. If you're a lawyer and you come back then you know your father has a neighbour, or you have a friend, or you have two three business people, they'll set you up, they'll help you and all that and then you can send the younger brother and the younger sister through. Every person who came back, I came back and I had six other siblings to send to study. I couldn't come back and tell my parents “Oh I’m a Barrister now I can’t help you” I came back and I used to full tins of soap, my brother used to produce liquid soap, and on a Saturday afternoon I would be filling these tins with soap after I qualified as a Barrister at one of the oldest legal colleges in the world. So this is the responsibility that we had to shoulder. Now were we aware of this antipathy at the different levels of society? Yes we were, we were, but our relations with the Africans was not a negative relationship. People came, they came to the shops, Indians gave them terms to pay. The Africans did like the Indians because an Indian shop was open to till 2/3 in the morning you can get your candles, you can get your bread, you would get your mielie meal, you’d get your safety pins, matches and all that. So Indian shops were littered right through the East African subsistence areas. Indians were responsible for monetising the subsistence economy in East Africa, that is not unknown, so the Indians are playing a very important role in bringing the daily needs of the Africans on the table in all the areas of East Africa. So they were aware of the antipathy at a certain level, but if you ask me the antipathy was not at the level of the ordinary person, I want to be honest about it, if you ask me as an Indian how did I look at that situation at the time the average African in the street did not have hatred for us, we have to be honest, we did work with them. They worked as domestic workers in our homes, their women would look after our children, they would eat with us, obviously they wouldn't eat in the same table with us but they would eat the same food with us. The question is that were the Indian community sufficiently in a position to change the situation is the question. With the case of Britain, Britain told the owners of the land that “Give the land to the blacks and we will finance you to pay the blacks” in Kenya the land was a big issue, and the whites gave up the land to the blacks and the British financed that movement of the land from the whites to the blacks with the result that the whites took the money, sent it out of the country, and many of them decided to remain in Kenya for life, which was doable and there's nothing wrong with that. Could India do that for the Indians? I think the question is was India ready. We then were not sure what the situation was but the general impression in Kenya particularly was that no such plan was in place. We're not sure whether any discussions were taking place behind the scenes. Prem Bhatia, the Indian High Commissioner at that time, who subsequently wrote a book Indian Ordeal in Africa describes the difficulty that the Indian High Commission was facing even in trying to get meetings organised with government bureaucrats in Nairobi. This was not easy and his book describes some of the bigger difficulties that were taking place at the time. In the eyes of the public, for example, all the media showed was daily discussions, either in parliament or in different political contexts, or at the level of bureaucracy, and these were characterised largely by diatribes. Occasionally there would be an insurrection and here all one saw in the media was a pile of dead bodies, and perhaps an official from the High Commission of either India or Pakistan trying to comfort grieving families. This is graphically captured in one film a docudrama called Africa Addio by Gualtiero Jacopetti, a controversial film, but it shows scenes that were actually those that took place. This was Africa in transition, and this was the background against which all these developments were taking place at the time. Amin only made the nightmare become an immediate problem, until then it was a nightmare that could have taken place. Amin showed them what it can look like. The Indians bided their time they must have said “Look we’ve got two children studying, in another two years we’ll have two more kids studying. One kid is already in India, another one is going to America.” So the Indians had a plan, which is much more phased, but it was not as sophisticated as we would like to think it was, it wasn't a sophisticated plan if anybody tells you they had a sophisticated plan they are not talking the truth. There was no Dubai in those days. There was no question of Canada in those days, nobody even knew where Canada was, I couldn't even spell the word Saskatchewan then and I can't even spell it today. Yet many people turned up in Montreal, and Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. Nobody even knew these places even existed, so our plan was not sophisticated, but the average Indian family is by nature, by DNA, sufficiently clued to say “Can we diversify over a period of time? So if we’re thrown out at least we have some place to go to”. Some of them were thinking of going to India, very few, but most people were hoping to go to Britain, because Britain was more attractive than India at that time. I don't know how many people had Pakistani passports and thought of going to Pakistan, not too many, but nobody knew where Canada was. If anybody tells you they knew were Canada they’re talking a whole lot of nonsense, they didn't even know how to spell Canada. Canada only came on the scene in 1971 when Canada changed its own policy of taking in non-whites from non-traditional areas of catchment. Canada was in the cusp of changing its immigration thinking and it wasn't [ready] for it, if Canada says they were [ready] for it they are not talking the truth. Canada learnt on the curve from Uganda, Mike Molloy will tell you that, Roger St Vincent told me that personally when I met him. Canada was not ready for it, Trudeau had a vision, Canada didn't have the capacity, they had to develop that whole vision into reality. So back to your question what was the attitude on the ground? Laissez-faire, people said “Well if Indians are going to go through that, that's going to happen, that's part of life” some may have said “They deserve it” others will say “You'll be able to handle it” others will say “It will happen, whatever will happen will happen”. Indians in East Africa said “Until they throw us out we’ll stay here” I remember old people saying “Why go to England and die in the cold there?” forget Canada, they didn’t even know where Canada was, but they knew England, [they] said “Why go to England and die in the cold? When they push us out we’ll go”. They would say in Gujarati that “If tomorrow they chase us out we’ll go, we’ll go to India. If they ask us and push us out, India is there”. I don’t think they really realised what that meant, but for them India was there, others would say “If they send us to England, if they push us out we’ll go, if they don’t push us out we’ll stay here, our children are outside [of Uganda] they’re okay”. So there was in their mind a sort of inchoate diversification process, it wasn't a plan, there was a process in their mind. Amin precipitated this whole thing he made everybody start thinking now, either in a planned way or if not in a planned way, at least they had to start thinking methodically because they were thrown out already and they were in the camps what Amin made them say is “Where do you go from here?” and many of them said “We can't go to India it’s not our home, we’ve got to make our home in the West” and that's what you see today shaping up 50 years later.

Max Russel

The expulsion was ordered on the 4th of August 1972 and looking back, we know that there was a sort of initial reluctance of countries, like Britain, to accept their passport holders. Why do you think that was and reflecting back on that, and also the international reaction, how was that shaped by attitudes at the time and what do you think it tells us about the governance of the time?

Mohamed Keshavjee

Yeah let’s take Britain first. I think Britain was going through its own changes, you had Enoch Powell at that time, his Rivers of Blood speech. Britain was seeing immigrants coming in and I don't know if at any particular time did they ever reflect on what will happen if everybody who had a British passport came back home, came to Britain. So I think that that type of fearmongering was part of the culture in this country and I think Enoch Powell played it to the hilt, and then you had the National Front. The National Front was quite active at that time, the unions were also part of that feeling, you'd find that punks would get up and go to areas and beat people up, that was the culture at that time. So to look at the British government's ability at that time to accept a non-white group of people, and don't forget 1968 when they started the first Commonwealth Immigrants Act, [it] created this scared feeling among the Indians of Kenya, among the governments of East Africa, and also in Britain. So that 1968/69/70 was a period were people said “Well what's going to happen if Britain closes the door the Asians can’t come out, so by closing the door they’re going to precipitate the Indians leaving” which is exactly what happened. In Kenya they left in 1968, Rishi Sunak and all their family came in 1968, they are part of that process, ironically enough he should be the Prime Minister today, but at that time Rishi’s parents came in that group. I do not know about Suella Braverman, I'm not sure if they came at that time, so that is the context at that time. Now Britain probably took the point of view that if push comes to shove, we’ll address the issue when it arises on our table. It is a classic British way of looking at things, they’re not going to say “Here is a plan and if those people turn up we’ll make space for them”. I think talking from just my own understanding they must have “Well if it’s not a problem you don't need to solve it now when the problem arises, we’ll look at it” and from 1968 onwards those Asian men were not allowed to come into the country, the case was taken to the European Court, and it was a continuing saga. So Britain at that time was not in a position to want to take the East African Indians, they were very clear about it. To Edward Heath’s great credit that he said “No it's a moral and legal obligation, we have to meet this obligation”. I think around 17th of October [1972] was when the first plane arrived at Stanstead it was immediately after Heath signed the document to say “We have a moral and a legal obligation. We will allow them to come in” and to Britain’s credit, and I say this again objectively and with all due respect, that it's wonderful that they had this vision, more than vision, I don’t think it’s vision, it had this moral commitment, moral understanding. It’s not a vision, moral understanding needs an inner thinking, you don't need your brain you need your heart, you need your soul. I think this is what was very interesting that they accepted, but don't forget that was much later than when Canada responded. Canada responded much earlier, but if you look at the program we did, the Canadians had sent people to East Africa in 1971. Molloy was playing tennis already in Nairobi with Jalal Jaffer earlier, so the Canadians were already watching the scene very carefully and they probably said, “If we had to take people let's understand how our office should work in Africa”. The United Nations came in a little later and that’s where Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan was quite a visionary. He was not only the High Commissioner for Refugees but he understood the dynamics of post-war refugee issues which originally were only to do with a particular type of convention refugees. 1951 [Refugee Convention] spoke of you as a convention refugee, I know that convention because I myself couldn't get refugee status in Canada. They said “You’re not a convention refugee. You should be running past barbed wire, one leg should be filled with blood and you should be in immediate fear of being killed”. I didn't come in that category, so I didn't get refugee status in Canada. Prince Sadruddin was very very instrumental in exploring what the United Nations calls “alternative pathways to resettlement” and that's where countries like Spain, Sweden, Malta, Austria, Italy, they came in that category where they took small groups of people and said “We’ll give them immediate refuge pending their getting resettled”. So the European countries became a point of immediate arrival and those that could absorb ,they absorbed, those other countries [in which they] had relatives [they] could [then go to] they allowed that to happen so I think the European countries played an intermediate role, A through their openness, and B through Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan’s thinking out-of-the-box. So you find the United Nations played a role, but the United Nations didn’t play a major demographic role because I don’t think they had more than about 4,000/5,000 people there. The big bulk was Britain with about 28,606 people and Canada they took about 6000/7000 people, so I still don't know where the other numbers are, people say 80,000 and when you look at Britain with 28,000, Canada with 6,000, and United Nations with another 5,000/6,000 where do you get the numbers from, but whatever they were, the point is that these countries now began to respond on a symptomatic basis. I don't think any of them if you ask me had a plan, they were dealing with the issue on a symptomatic basis, on a day-to-day basis largely out of the compassion in their hearts, a readiness to see the world changing, a readiness to play a role as part of a global network of people concerned about migrations. I don't think anybody had a fixed plan, today we can attribute a plan to them, I don't think there was a plan at the time.

Max Russel

You touched on that you eventually went to Canada, how did that unfold, and what was that process like?

Mohamed Keshavjee

In my case I was a qualified English lawyer and part of my family left. I told you in 1971 I got my permission to work in Kenya. My sister was a legal secretary in Kenya, the plan of the family was that my sister and I would both go to Canada and open a new front for the family, so that when the rest of the family arrives there you have two people there, my sister and myself. I had another sister in Canada who was there a year earlier, or two sisters rather, so the family was in the throes of moving from East Africa to Canada, not to England, to Canada. In my case I couldn't leave because I came to realise that if I left at that time I had a lot of work with clients. I had a lot of money in my clients’ account that belonged to clients, work was not finished, I was doing a lot of property work, conveyancing work, so I decided I will stay back and finish the work rather than leaving halfway creating discomfort for people. I didn't know who to give the work to, or the money to. You know law is a very personal thing when you're running a one man office or a small office, do you take your clients amount and give it to another lawyer? God forbid tomorrow if that lawyer runs away with this money what do you do, you’re responsible to about 20-30 people, I didn't want to go through that. So I made the decision that I will give up my [possibility of] landed status [in Canada], stay in Kenya, finish the work and after finishing the work I gave my practice to an African lawyer, I didn't sell it, I gave it away, but this African lawyer who took my practice was a very very kind person. He said “Look I will allow you to work in the office without paying any rent because you’re giving me the practise, but you finish the work you have and new work that I get will be mine” and he said “If nothing works for you overseas and you come back to East Africa you can come back to the office. I’ll give you a job”. He was very kind, he didn’t have the money, he said “I don't have the money to buy you out”, I said “Look I don't want you to spend money to buy me out”, I said “Just give me enough safeguards that if nothing works with me that what I'm giving you is not something lost to me” and he was very open he said “Look we're like brothers”, just to give an example how Indian and African could work, I mean there we were, a black man, he was a Tanzania, he said “Mohamed what you are giving is what you earnt, I have to be fair to you. If you come back, I'll give you the big office” I said “No the big office will be yours, give me an office at the back”. So there was that understanding and I decided to go to Canada, but my problem was that Canada did not recognise a British barrister law qualification for practising, they said “If you are to practice in Canada you have to do an LLB at a Canadian university for three years” but I said that “I can practise at the High Court of England, and theoretically I could become the Attorney General of England” literally theoretically I could be the Attorney General of England with the qualification I had, and yet the Canadians said “You can't even practise in Toronto with that qualification, you’ve got to go back to law school”. So you see the structural inbuilt inequities that I had to contend with, and I'm going to be honest enough here that Canadian structural inequities were very much to keep people out of the legal profession it’s a reality, there's nothing magical about it I've written about it, but I had to contend with that. So what happened, I went to Canada and I had very very little money and I couldn't get a scholarship because I wasn’t a Canadian, I wasn’t a Commonwealth citizen, I wasn't a South African, and I wasn't a Kenyan. So I had to pay from my own pocket and after having practised in Kenya I ended up in Canada, on a Saturday morning selling hot dogs to earn money to pay for my books. I did it, I mean I did it, I'm not ashamed about it, I did it. I qualified, I was maybe in the top 10% of my class, I got my Canadian LLB, that was a long time ago, after that I did an LLM, I did a PhD, I went to The International Court of Justice in the Hague you know that was all in the future, but at that particular time I had no money. I had to really struggle, I had to buy my books by working in some place in the street, but I did it because I wanted to qualify as a lawyer, I didn’t want to end up in Canada picking up dustbins that was not what I was there for, and so I had to go through the whole hoop and I didn't get my Canadian landed status immediately. I had to then apply at the end of qualification, so that took me another 3-4 years, but I’m not bitter about it, all I’m saying is that we had to be culturally and politically savvy. We had to survive, there was no choice, I mean I couldn't stand in Canada and say, “Oh well I was the vice president of the debating Society of Gray’s Inn, I got the highest ratings”, which I did, I’m only telling you in context that I got the highest ratings in property law from all the Inns of Court lawyers. I got the fourth highest ranking in Contract and Tort, and yet I was told by Canada that you can’t [practice] and the irony is that Osgoode Hall Law School is named after William Osgoode, who was from Lincoln City. You can see the actual anomaly that here I am as a highly trained British barrister from a 600 year Inn, Gray’s Inn, which was twice as old as the whole country of Canada and I'm told “You can’t practice law [here] without going to law school”. So at the end of the day what do you? Go to law school, I went to law school.

Max Russel

If I’m not mistaken the wave of Uganda Asians that Canada took in was the first major non- European immigration that country had. Were you in Canada for the rest of the 1970s, did you see a change in society there from that immigration, a change in attitude towards non-European immigration? How was it on the ground in Canada?

Mohamed Keshavjee

Max, slowly, very slowly, very slowly. Canada today is a country that espouses pluralism, it is quite open about it, but let us also be aware that Canada is a society that espoused racism at one time as well. Talk to any indigenous person in Canada you’ll get the story loud and clear, listen to the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the 93 items that need rectification I don’t think they’ve gone beyond eight or nine. So let us not be oblivious let us be aware that Canada did play a role and people who love Canada love it beyond imagination because they said “Canada open its door it’s the most loving, wonderful” and that’s exactly what it did, but we must be realistic that immediately post-expulsion there was racism in Canada. I remember a chap and I can’t recall his name right now his name was Shamshu Ddin, he was a chap that was pushed onto the railway tracks in Toronto called “A paki” and both his legs were broken, only for the reason that he happened to be on that platform and happened to be coffee coloured instead of pure white, this reality was there. So there were pockets of racist feelings in Canada, but to Canada's credit, I've always said that Canada is a country that espouses a multi pluralistic vision, for every one person who may sound racist there would be six or seven people who would stand up which is a great hope for the future. So as time went by, don't forget they cane 50 years ago, over a 50 year period today now you have the first Governor General of Alberta happens to be any Ismaili woman, Salma Lakhani, you have the first South Asian mayor of Calgary [till 2021], Naheed Nenshi. There are now many of those children of the immigrants of Uganda who are now in the foreign service, not all of them, but three or four I can count some of them are in government, but it's been a 50 year trajectory, it wasn't an overnight epiphany to say “Oh right you guys are all great you arrived three weeks ago, now you've got a job already running a Dunkin Donuts and your son is at a good school”, it wasn't that way. I think if you read the literature of people today you will see that people went through a lot of difficulties, they went through difficulties, but Canada over and above became for these people a very enabling place, they did see difficulty but they also saw the ability to overcome that difficulty through hard work, through making friends, through developing a civic consciousness, or expressing a civic commitment and meeting other good minded people. Canada had its trajectory, but it wasn’t overnight, and I think that Walter Stewart [a journalist] has written a brilliant book on this But not in Canada! and I would recommend if you can get hold of that book have a look at it. Canada has its own experience of what they did with the Japanese what they did with the Komagata Maru boat were 300 plus Punjabis who came from India the boat was sent back, they were told “They’ll blow the boat up up if they didn't leave” all these are racial blots on the horizon which we can't overlook, we can contextualise them, we need to understand them, and we don't need to be stuck with them, but we need to understand that that wasn’t a society that was totally free of racist thinking, that's a reality.

Max Russel

50 years later if we think about the modern day and reflection, your relationship with East Africa and South Asians, why do you think it's so important that histories like that of East African Asians, and of the Uganda Asians, and the [1972] Expulsion are taught and what can we still learn from those?

Mohamed Keshavjee

I think the East African Asian situation for me has two dimensions of learning, the one dimension of learning is the more universal dimension of learning where people tend to look at immigrants always in a negative light. Immigration is not seen as an asset it's been seen as a deficit there's a deficit dimension of the understanding “They will come here they will take our jobs away, they won't integrate, they’ll do this, they’ll do that” there's always the negative dimension and yet when I see the history of the 20th Century. Everywhere you've seen great developments it’s always been immigrants, whether they’re white immigrants, brown immigrants, black immigrants, I don't care. The point is that immigrants bring a new vigour into an area and when you think of people like the great musicians you think of people like Leopold Stokowski, if I’m not mistaken even Walt Disney I may be wrong, but people who have come from one part of the world to another part of the world have always, Albert Einstein himself is a case in point, he was a German immigrant who came to America, and you think of great musicians today like Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang, think of at the end of the Bolshevik revolution Tamara Karsavina, Mathilde Kschessinska, all these great ballet dancers who came to France from the ex-Soviet Union were people who brought new vigour into the country and I'm talking at a higher echelon if you go deeper down, I mean take our own country, go into any medical practice today you're going to see outstanding doctors people in their fields who are from different cultures, not necessarily non-European cultures, but different cultures. So, at the universal level I think Uganda gives an idea of an asset-based approach to immigration. We tend to overdramatize the greatness of the Ugandan Asians, I think they also had problems, they also had failings, not everyone is a success, but I think by and large you can talk about a group that came to this country, did not want to be stuck in the camps, did not want to be stuck in council housing wanted to improve their lot in life and were able to do it but that doesn't mean that everyone of us must be walking around with a sandwich board and saying “We did it , we’re great”. We’ve got to be understanding of other immigrants who do not have that opportunity of family, solidarity, of village networks, of the ability of the families to work together. We need to be sympathetic to others who don't have that opportunity and work towards helping them to be able to find a space. So that's at the one level, that my approach would be that, yes, I understand countries have the absorptive capacity I'm not here for unbridled movements of people but I'm here for compassion, lets be compassionate, let's not wait till that one child drowns in the Mediterranean for all of us to say “Well what can we do?”. We need to be compassionate because every one of those children could be our son, could be our daughter, could be our grandchild, could be our mother, could be our sister. I think we need to extend that compassion as human beings beyond our own little group, so that is at the level of universality and migration. Now at the level of specificity I think Uganda is critical because you have today Asian minorities in South Africa, Botswana, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Fiji, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Madagascar and I think it's important for Indian minorities in ex-colonial territories to understand the structures in which they were placed and which structures have not dissipated, and today they are now seen as the only group making money. And if the larger populous see themselves as being deprived in anyway, then these small minorities are going to stand out as being the exploiters, and I think Indian communities actually have to know their history, they have to understand their situation contextually, in the colonial context, and they need to learn from what happened in the past to say “What should we do now, if we were not able to do what we were meant to do 50 years ago are we in a better position today to do something so that we don't repeat what happened in the past?”. To me that is important, that is very important. If today somebody says “Oh well I live in Uganda but I’m not worried about Uganda. I live in a gated community, I'm from India, I’m here, I’m running an IT business and it doesn't matter”. I would say “No, no don’t do that, because you’re going to place yourself in a worse position than where people were 50 years ago. If you're living in this country, if this country's responsible for giving you your bread on your table then make sure that that bread has a little piece for those people who don't have a piece to eat”. I'm not saying don't go into entrepreneurialism, entrepreneurship is very good, one has to make money, but how do you make your money? Do you make your money at the cost of anything, or do you make your money in a way that you can make the people who work with you feel that “we have skin in this” if we do this we will enlarge the pie, and as you enlarge the pie there are more people who can enjoy, they will protect it. That is my philosophy and that is what I would say that the Ugandan crisis is something very valuable for places like South Africa. There are about 1.2/1.3 million Indians in South Africa, what is going to be their future tomorrow if something goes wrong? It could go wrong, it could easily go wrong, and people can’t say that “Oh well it won't happen here, our demography is different, we have a different type of constitution”. I told them “You can have the best constitution in the world, once the economic situation starts collapsing, once people start going into the street and start breaking into shops and killing people on the road, the rage will be so great that you’re not going to wait until the constitutional court decides on an issue”, we saw that in America last year. So I think that these are issues that as human societies we have to be aware of, in today's global context where there is such cut down, where people are struggling from deprivation, where young children are going without food, and I think when you see those type of situations civil society has a positive obligation to ensure that there are sufficient bulwarks to promote greater collaboration, greater understanding, so that issues don't become unnecessarily racist and they don’t become unnecessarily polemical. I think that for a more healthy society we have to have greater and a more committed civil society that looks at individuals, not only using their education to make money or their position to be entrepreneurial, but to be more civic, to be more thoughtful, to be more conscious of what it means to be human, and to contribute towards the structures of society, to bring about greater understanding.

Max Russel

Finally, I wanted to ask why do you think Idi Amin as a person was so forthright and aggressive towards the Ugandan Asian population?

Mohamed Keshavjee

You know that's a question that I don't think anybody has really deeply tried to probe. There are different views that come up, that he was in love with an Indian woman and then they sent her away and he felt very much aggrieved and very much disrespected. My own interview shows very authentically that that was not true, I wouldn’t like to give names now but somebody close to the scene says they think that was something that was set up by the media, it wasn't absolutely not true. Now whether it’s true or not I think we need to try and probe little deeper that what did Idi Amin feel, that he reacted the way he did. One thing I think is to try to understand why he reacted the way he did, presupposes that Idi Amin thought what he was doing, and I don't think he was a person of a long-range thinking process. Idi Amin, I think from what I, I've never met him, but from what I've come to understand from the people whom met him or knew him is that he wasn't the person of long range thinking. I think if he was he would not have made a declaration of telling people to leave [in] 90 days when the Indians were so critical to Uganda’s economy, and to East Africa’s economy for so many decades. I mean the Indians were there during the Portuguese period, they were there during the Zanj Empire, they were during the British period in Tanzania and Kenya, they were there during the German period. So, I think that I would be a little cautious to attribute to Idi Amin too [much] long term thinking for what he did. Now one can look at the context in which he was operating to say, “Why did he do what he did?”. I think one has to remember that at the time when he came on Obote was moving towards the Common Man’s Charter and Uganda was veering towards a socialist camp, perhaps at that time geopolitically the western world did not want East Africa to be too polarised, so that is one thing to keep in mind. Number two, when Idi Amin came on the scene there was a lot of jubilation, Indians, blacks, everybody was happy. They said “Wow this guy is now going to make sure that what Obote was trying to do by nationalising the banks and all Indian businesses and white businesses, maybe he will put a halt to it”. So I think Idi Amin came on the scene very much like being the grand old daddy. I mean he used to go around in a Jeep and told people he’ll solve their problems if they have matrimonial problems “Phone me up, I’ll come and solve it”. He was quite gregarious, he was funny in a way I’m told to believe, that when the Indians went to him with this big petition which they spent two or three or four weeks preparing he took the petition and just put it to one side and said “I’ve cooked some curry for you, let me give you the curry I’ve prepared”. You know he was quite earthy and funny, in a way he was quite funny, he was entertaining. I think that as he took over, the conditions in the country were very problematic, the security, the law and order situation was very pathetic. There was what was known as kondos, a lot of robberies were taking place, people were being killed. So you had a lot of robberies that the country could not handle at that time, there were tribal difficulties, a lot of tribal difficulties, there were economic problems the country was facing, and then you know he went to Libya. Whatever he may have discussed with Gaddafi, and Gaddafi himself told him that he’d got rid of many people, I think the Italian community, so Idi Amin was quite mercurial and he was quite unpredictable, one wouldn't know what was the next thing he was going to do. My feeling is that he must have thought that “Here is a popular issue, the Indians in East Africa, let me see if I can try this one and if it works, I will deflect the attention from everywhere onto something new so that we can deal with issues as they come up” but it’s just that I think that the Indians were caught unprepared for this exigency. They knew it was going to happen, but not that quickly that’s number one, and I think the western world was also caught unaware they thought “Well look this guy sounded like an amenable person, but he's unpredictable we don't know what he’s going to do next”. So I think everybody was caught unaware and everybody thought that the next few weeks will suddenly subside, everything will be okay, the storm will be blown over, we’ll all be okay. So I don't think the Indian community as such, felt that he was against them in anyway, it's just that he found this is a popular move and he thought “If I can pull this through I will be a hero” and he became a hero immediately because certain people did feel that that was the way to go. There were Africans who felt that way, they must have said that “Well you need a man like him to solve this problem, if you’re going to get somebody who's a World Bank thinker it's not going to happen, better have this guy, he’ll put the thing through”. So there were those tendencies as well until many Africans began to see that “Look the Indians may be able to leave and they’ll have somewhere to go”, I think about 93,000 Africans were killed, so you can see that the problem, and also then Amin became difficult because of not only the geopolitical reality, but also the national political reality, because he went to war with Tanzania, started then bombarding certain areas, said certain areas belonged to Uganda. So I think that the problem became very murky at both the local, the national, and the international level and I think the global community had to deal with it. Now how does that augur for national governments? Well, what was the position of the Indian community in Uganda at the time, which was not different from the Indian community in Tanzania, and the Indian community in Kenya, and in Zanzibar. Professor Yash Tandon says “The Indians were termed as stepchildren of the colonial empire” Here was a group of people who came on the backs of colonialism, at the end of slavery and the beginning of the indentured system 1850s/60s. South Africa with sugar, Kenya with railways, Uganda with the Kenya-Uganda railway, different places with plantation economies. Amitav Ghosh writes beautifully about this, if you read the book The Nutmeg’s Curse you’ll see what I mean, that Indians came on the back of western colonialism at the end of slavery and the beginning of the new plantation colonies whether it's Zambia, or Northern & Southern Rhodesia, or Nyasaland, or Botswana, or South Africa, or Madagascar, or Fiji, or Mauritius, you’ll see the same patterns of plantation economy plantation economics and the point I was trying to make was yes how did governments looks at this, how did  colonial governments look at it. Well, I think colonial governments looked at it in a way by saying “We’ve left, we’ve given you independence, it’s not our job, you people sort yourself out”. As far as India was concerned, I think that Nehru’s philosophy’s seems to have been a dominant factor, when in 1949 he sent his ambassador Apa Pant to Kenya to tell the Indians in East Africa that “You don't belong to India, you belong to Africa, your grandparents, forefathers went to Africa. So sort yourself out, Africa is your destiny”. So Indians in East Africa couldn't look to India. So what was the responsibility of everybody,  East African governments said “You guys are not our responsibility, clear off, you should have left already” western government said “We’ve given independence already we have nothing to do [with it]” India said “You people left a long time ago, what do you want us to do?” other governments would say “Well we’ve not been colonially implicated, what do you want us to do?” I mean Canada could easily say that, they didn't, but they could have said “It’s not our problem, we have our own problem in Quebec and other places, East Africa is not our problem”. So the Indian minorities in 1972 sadly had nobody to speak for them nobody. Countries took people, some took 8 people, some took 50, some took 14, some took 30, some took 6,000, some took 28,000. They went wherever destiny took them, no different from the way their grandparents came when India had famine and drought. They went wherever the boats took them, if the boats took them to Guyana they went to Guyana, if the boat took you to Fiji you went to Fiji, if the boat took you to Madagascar you went to Madagascar, and if in the middle of the ocean you were shipwrecked you went to wherever the boat took you, two brothers would go to one island, and six or three brothers would end up in another island. So, 1972 for the Indians in East Africa was not different from 1872. Western governments today may have learnt much more, immigration policies perhaps are a bit more sophisticated today, hopefully hopefully, I’m saying hopefully, perhaps there’s a different approach to how alternative pathways could be explored and leveraged. If you ask me today the average Indian from East African doesn’t have the same worry today that they had in 1972, the average original East African, I’m not talking the new Indians. If you talk about the new Indians who have come there and starting you know IT companies and all that that's a different story. I’m talking about the original East African Indians who have children, one in Dubai, one in Euston, one in New Jersey, somebody in California, these families don't have the same problem 50 years later. They've got kids all around the world, they've got their mind and their body and their soul exactly where the East African governments didn’t want them, culturally they are close to India, economically they are close to the West because they have their Assets in the West, emotionally they will go to Africa because they say “Well we were born here, we want to come here for a holiday”. They’re not in one place, in a global context they are everywhere, and the East African Asian minority is a diaspora that is quite global. If you take the Madhvani’s, the Mehta’s, they’re not only in East Africa, they are very much in Uganda, but today they are, to quote [them] in their own words I quote Manubhai Madhvani I met him personally, and Manubhai said this to me, he said “Today we could never imagine that we could have diversified to the level we have, had it not been for the expulsion” he said “[The] Uganda expulsion opened up our minds to our own potential that we would have never even imagined that we could have done” he says “Today we are doing that”. So I think that the East African Indian diaspora has become rather multinational, it has become global, and I mean just an interesting phase if you take our Prime Minister in this country is an example, his parents came from Tanzania and Kenya, he was born in Southampton, he was educated in America, then he got into politics in this country, his wife comes from a very very prominent Indian family, and they are operating at a global level. So you can just see that that one family, in 1968 if you spoke to Rishi Sunak’s father and asked him “What’s your next five years going to be like?” I would be surprised if he even knew that he would have something beyond a pharmacy. Well today if you talk to Rishi Sunak you’re probably going to get a totally different vision of what he saw the last 50 years as. So if Rishi Sunak is one example, might I be able to tell you that perhaps you’ll find in a large segment of that demography, a diversification vision, if not a plan, that embraces a number of countries, a number of professions, a number of connectivity’s, and where people are not beleaguered anymore. They look at not Gujarat as their home, they do not look at Uganda as home, but they will look at you know you Euston, New Jersey, New York, London, Copenhagen, Paris, Lisbon, as part of the world they live in.