Salim Jodiyawalla

So starting off the journey I think both grandparents came to Uganda as single males. Mum's dad came over at I believe the age of 12 and he came from Dhoraji, and he was seeing people from the town talking about going to Africa and that was very exciting for him because he didn't really recognise that there was going to be much of a future with the way the economy was running in the local town, and further afield seemed more enterprising or more interesting. He wasn't educated so he didn't have any real English skills or any schooling skills, he finished at 12 so the basic elementary stuff they would have learnt. My father's father on the other hand was educated and very English literate, and he came over at the age of 18. So swinging back to the first grandfather he spent two or three years I believe in Dar es Salaam, the family was there and worked with them in their business and they sort of helped them, gave them food and board, and then after three years he went to India trying to decide “What am I going to do, what I'm not going to do” and his experience wasn't good in terms of, he didn't get the prosperity he was looking for. Anyway in that time he decided to go back and this time somebody told him “No there's too much competition in these towns with a lot of migrants go into Uganda that is sort of virgin territory as it were and you might be able to have a better opportunity”. So he went there and when he went there he was working with a guy who was a watchmaker and he was just sort of doing very basic stuff and soon after he started he plucked up the courage to ask this man “Can you teach me? Do you mind if I watch how you [do it]?”. So this guy was quite happy, he was another Indian I don't know where he had learned it, and then he said “Yeah I'm happy” and he showed him how to repair watches and those were [watches] where you would change springs and wheels inside. So he became a watchmaker and he then went on to buy a shop. First of all he had this little box where he would sit on the pavement and somebody would go by and he’d be advertising watchmaker, drop the watch off, he’d repair it, give it back, collect a bit of money, and he had a philosophy about the money how much he would save from the money and this very sort of like “I’m building for the future so I can't spend all my money”. So there was a percentage, he had a formula, then one day he decided to take the plunge and buy a shop and everybody would sort of mock him they’d say “What are you going to do with your little box of watchmaker kit with this big shop?”. So the key to making the money was repairing the shop so if he’d repair a watch, say for one shilling, he’d put 25% towards his day-to-day needs and put 75% into buying stock for the shop and before he knew it the whole shop was full, and he would keep asking who come into the shop “Is there anything that I ought to be keeping that you might want which is sort of allied to my trade?” and they’d all say “Yeah why don’t you get this, why don’t you get that” and he started building up the shop and he had this little book which my mama told me where if somebody came and asked him for something he didn't have he’d write it in the book and then he'd try and find it. So he’d had have it [for next time] and he went on to build a huge empire, just out of this one trade, and he slowly invited all his family members one after the other “Come, come to Africa”.

Bhavisha Mehta

And is this where the journey begins for the family?

Salim Jodiyawalla

And that's when his brother, his sister, his cousin brothers, [came] and they all learnt the watch making from the watch shop and he’d very clearly say to them “Look you're not going to work in this shop, you’re just here to learn, and once you've learnt off you go, and if you want some money I'll give you some money to start your business but you're on your own”. So he was very famous and amongst, I believe, our Bohra community he was the most successful of all the people that were there in terms of what he achieved after his journey which was like 40/50 years and I think part of it was down to the giving aspect where he never really wanted anything from people he was sort of lonely in Uganda so he would invite his family to come saying “There's a better future here” and then rather than capture them and use them for cheap labour or whatever it was very much “You set yourself up, bring your extended family”. So the whole thing mushroomed, it was a big clan which grew up [there] and all of them were successful.

Bhavisha Mehta

So it seems like he set up the opportunities for everyone and created that option for them to improve their lives and do something they knew, and sharing something that he learnt on his arrival in the country with everybody else.

Salim Jodiyawalla

And it was a valuable trade because I think probably the hand watches and wrist watches were relatively new, probably they didn't have batteries at that time but the windings and whatever, something would go wrong and so possibly like mobile phones everybody needs to go to a mobile phone repair shop now, so this was the equivalent, and so it was good for people who learnt that. It wasn't just doing very basic work it was sort of a little bit value added and you know you've got a bit of money and you could save from that, so they all prospered, and then they became this whole clan of his cousins and he was also the early founder of the community and then there was the jamaat which was also founded on those principles. There is a very interesting story behind the jamaat because the jamaat was founded by these early pioneers who said “Okay we need to go and pray, why don’t we all pray together, why don't we create a hall, a Jamatkhana”. So they created a Jamatkhana and they almost actually build it up from the ground and they collected money from all the community members “We’re planning to do this” and everybody chipped in a little bit, but the founders were very enterprising so in our case they created the Jamatkhana with six shops underneath.

Bhavisha Mehta

That's impressive

Salim Jodiyawalla

And they said “We’ll give these shops out on short term let to somebody who just arrives and they just want to feel their way around, and whatever income we’ll get from this will help for the upkeep of the Jamatkhana”. So the Jamatkhana used to run self-sufficient, after they established it there was no annual fee subscription, and those shops which these new people came and run, obviously they were running business, so they paid a rent, it was probably subsidised. They were small shops so they'd start off and then once they were confident then they’d get a shop on the highroad or a bazar or wherever it was, and then they would move out. Some of them would move up to different areas of the country. So this thing was very enterprising as well, and then they linked a boarding house [to it] so again if somebody came and they didn't have a place to say there was a boarding house and that boarding house also served [as], because Kampala being the capital and the place where all the goods came in, if somebody had come, and say opened up a shop somewhere in another town like Lira, they would often come to Kampala for a night to pick up goods and then go back. So there would be a boarding house for them, so they built that as well, so there was this really good community. So what happened is that sense of community really really built up and the money that used to come through from the rental of the shops was more than they needed and sometimes you would find that a young male would pass away and he would leave behind a widow and children and the benevolence of that community was that they would pay that window a pension, an upkeep, support to help them in their difficult days. So there was this this great sort of community and benevolence and all this sort of stuff. On my father’s side he was the English literate man so all these people that used to come there and then have to do the visa and immigration, or they wanted to buy some goods from England to sell, they wouldn't know how to do it, they would bring the papers and say “Oh I need to open up this” or “I need to make a bank transfer, I've got no idea how to do this but I know I want to order these goods from there”. So he would sort of interpret for them and say “Alright you need to do this, you need to do that” and he eventually went on, my father's father, to actually settle family disputes and he did that sort of a role and people would come and there would be a succession and there would be a little bit of an argument between the family, who's going to get what, and they would all agree “Oh we go to [him] and whatever he says, however he arbitrates, that will be the way”.

Bhavisha Mehta

So he would be the mediator in any of the situations

Salim Jodiyawalla

And you know this is what these elders used to do. And so anyway both of them had shops and mum's father went on and sort of built a little bit of an empire in terms of properties for rent, and he did all sorts, and some of it was sort of initially linked to providing spaces for his extended family that came and then they would buy their own place, so then this property was empty, so he’d rent it out to probably another community member. So my father's journey was that he went to Mombasa to study at university, and it was a university where he learnt radio engineering, and it was valves and the minute he came back to Kampala they brought out the transistor and the valve basically became defunct and he thought “I've just done a three year degree and whatever I've learnt is defunct”. So he converted my grandad's regular shop, which was hardware household items, into an electric shop.

Bhavisha Mehta

Also in Kampala?

Salim Jodiyawalla

Kampala yeah and that was in the bazaar in William street. So all the Patnis were there, so we have a great affinity to most of the Patnis that are on Ealing Road, because all of those that came from Uganda we had that shared history and I still have that four generational history with grandfathers who have gone fathers who have gone or going and now we’re sort of trying to join our children to their children and help them to continue that journey.

Salim’s wife

And even my father-in-law he says that because they all grew up together he said “There was no hatred of the feeling that these are Muslims and these are Hindus” and he said that “I would go after school and be with my mates and sitting on the balcony, on the terrace, walls, and we would be enjoying ourselves and no concentration of whether he's a Hindu or he's a Muslim we all just enjoyed”, he’s a Punjabi, “We all got together and we celebrated” but over the period of time after coming into this country he says that “We all have moved different paths and very rarely do we get together and enjoy festivals but over there the unity was there”.

Bhavisha Mehta

It was very multicultural, and actually that's an interesting point because I wanted to sort of ask more around what was life like in Kampala, that you recall, and also for your grandfathers as well and you know very different experiences, I think you know from being perhaps the first generation perhaps to arrive in the country and set up a way of life and living for themselves.

Salim Jodiyawalla

It was very hard because my father's father may have spent a couple of years in Uganda then went and looked for a bride but he couldn’t afford to bring her over. So she lived in Jamnagar and had my father and his elder sister and they were born in Jamnagar and when my grandfather went to collect them to bring them to Africa my father couldn't recognise him because he'd never met his father, he was born and then the mother bought him up for three years until he was three years old. The eldest sister who was 10 at that time knew of the father because he’d sort of come and gone and she was older, she had recognition, so it was like that and in that time my grandfather used to say he would come and say to me “We couldn’t afford to shut the shop because everything was out on the street and if we went away maybe somebody would take something” and he wasn't the only one, there was a whole generation of those early pioneers who have the same story, they’d just randomly come and tell you “Don't do that it's not good for your health, I'm telling you because I’m suffering today”. So that paints a picture of what they had to go through because they couldn’t afford to employ anybody in those shops in those early early days they had to really graft and they would be without their spouses, even though they had a spouse in another country, until it was [possible]. On my mum's father side the first wife died soon after, the second wife had four children and the wife died on the birth of the fourth child. So he was left with four children but because he was encouraging many of his family members to come his sister was there, so the sister took over looking after the children and the four kids were under five, so that’s my mum’s elder, but they were step siblings because then my grandfather after a period of time he married, who is my grandmother today and my mum's mother, and so she came along and she bought her younger brother across as well because they were the two leftover again from Rajkot and she looked after the four children that were already there from a previous marriage and had five children of her own. And what those older generation did was the eldest of the first adopted child got married to the brother, so they knitted the families together and they had this very much sort of go back home, who's available there and bought somebody over and joined inter-family marriages and they used that saying so there was this great inter-family marriage in distant cousins you know this issue that you have you don't marry somebody to close it wasn't there so that was that and the family grew and there was this sort of commonality and community with it.

Salim’s wife

They did have difficulties in their early days, like everyone when they are starting something will have difficulties at learning the language and how to communicate and manoeuvre yourself, in those days and especially I was asking his mama of how did his dad come into the country not knowing the language, how did he start everything and at the age of 12 and 13 how does he do it? While in today’s days you are still debating over whether you take a plunge and go and settle down in another country although you have all the knowledge, well educated, and you have Google to help you out, still you are thinking and hesitating whether you make the move, while these guys just took the plunge.

Salim Jodiyawalla

And they always had a mentor who would help them. So what they would say is that somebody would be there and says “Look there is this person and when you go there” and they would write a letter to him “This person is coming look after him when he comes” so you wouldn't just be [left alone], Allidina Visram he would be there at the docks waiting for people to come off the ship, this was obviously in Mombasa, and saying to them where to go and what to do but he came in Uganda and there's actually a street named after him because he was prominent in the community and his life involved helping other people and I don't know how long ago the street was named, and maybe amongst the groups [interviewing] somebody will touch upon that family and then they'll be able to share that history of what his role was, but his name came up amongst the elders that I used to ask “This man was the one who helped people”.

Salim’s wife

But because there was British rule in that country English was there in the air, so they could manoeuvre themselves, because even the British were ruling India in those days so even these grandparents had a little knowledge of English. So I that's how they managed themselves and moved themselves wherever they had to move with the natives and themselves and that's how. I think so because we have asked uncles and aunts, not many have given the right story of how they climbed up the ladder but they said they made themselves they made their way so they made their way and establish themselves quite well

Bhavisha Mehta

Actually that's an interesting point that you raise there on that as well, because what are your recollections of living side by side with the local Ugandan community?

Salim Jodiyawalla

So I remember this very clearly and obviously we had house help and one of the house helps and I remember him very very clearly because after I became a little bit older, went through nursery, he would take me to school in his basket in his bicycle I’d just jump on his basket and he’d take me to school and he’d be there to pick me up and then he’d bring me home and then we’d have lunch and then I’d say to him “I want to go to the shop”. I was only four years old so I remember the words and he would do that and I can remember his face, such kindness in his face, and you know it's, so somehow if we talk about the expulsion and I listen to my father about the stories “What brought this man Idi Amin to actually come to that position?” and my dad used to often tell me he said “There were some within the Indian community who would flaunt their wealth and where there were these Africans who had little or nothing they would flaunt their wealth and there were some that would use the staff and the help that they had and abuse them in terms of not treating them with respect” and therefore this sort of, can we call it this sort of animosity, it started “Why are this lot doing so well and we just seem to be the ones that are their donkeys as it were supporting them?” and so my father used to say the family, our families we had a very low profile approach to life, and we would also look after these people. My dad actually tells me the story of how many many years later he had this dream and there was probably one occasion where he may have taken advantage of one of his workers and he tells me the story very clearly he said “When the goods used to come, they come to the train station for the shop and you’d have to go there and do the customs clearance and then you’d have to put them on bicycle and bring them to the shop, and often there were so many goods you couldn't do it in one bicycle trips so you’d have to make several trips”. So my dad used to do [that], I used to say to him “Dad you’ve got really strong legs” he said “You should see the amount of cycling I have to do” and Kampala wasn't a flat land, it was full of hills, so you were going up and down the hills and your muscles grow so that was the story and then there was one day he told me, he said “I remember after the shop became established and we had help in the shop, staff working, I used to get one of them to go and get the goods and he'd come back and be sweating” and then he said “Boss I need to eat something” and he said I told him “No no, you need to go and get the goods” and he came back and [he] saw him [exhausted] and many years later he had a like a repentance nightmare over that situation. But as far as my dad goes that was his only sort of regret, a one-off situation where the local people were taken advantage of, because it was easy I suppose you could take advantage of them because they had nothing else to do, nowhere else to go, they were there. So anyway this whole expulsion situation when I look at it I've asked my dad he said “I could see something was going to happen” because apparently there had been some nationalisation of industry in Tanzania which had happened and all the Ugandans were worried “Well what if something like this was to happen here?” so they had this sort of awareness that “We're not quite secure here and tomorrow something could happen to us and our world could sort of be a bit topsy turvy” and so a lot of people started trying to get money out of Uganda because they had more money than they needed in Uganda. They’d have a house, they’d have a car, and whatever else they need, and they’d still have money leftover but it wasn't a currency that was international, you couldn’t just go to the Bureau exchange and just get dollars, then it was the currency shillings which was local to there, so the only way you could do it is if you were doing some business with an overseas country you get some out in that way and there were moneychangers who would say “Oh we can transfer you the money” but they would take a hefty commission and the commission was like 25% or 40% sometimes and they’d say “He's just making easy money out of us” and they wouldn't do it, and in the case of my father's father I don’t think he got any money out of Uganda, everything was there. My mother's father had actually sent three of his children to England to study and so they had taken money out for that purpose, how they’d done it I don't know, there was probably a process for that. So they’d got some money out so that was their sort of situation, their economic plight as it were, they were very very well-to-do there and my father he used to say to me, he was like 33 when this expulsion was announced, but he said that “I had enough money there not to work for the rest of my life”, not that he was going to do that, but sort of had accrued that much money, but it was all in Ugandan money, and to live that Ugandan life there was enough, more than enough he said. And what happened was that this expulsion notice was given, and I don't know if you know the exact date that it was announced, and my mum’s two sisters were both studying here in England, at university, and mum's elder brother, who is a stepbrother had already been and gone, come to England, studied, and come back and because he knew what was going on he bought a house for the two younger sisters. So there was a house, so my dad said “Look they've given us 90 days to leave, god knows what's going to happen here” and he packed my mum and me and my two siblings off and says “You need to go right now” and “There's a house there and you will go in to stay with your sister until I get there”. So we were packed off within three weeks my dad made the decision within a week that that's what's going to happen, apparently there was some plans to come to the UK [already], I don't know what for but they were longer term plans, nothing that had crystallised, and this announcement that you've got 90 days to move springboarded him and he got this sort of inner knowing that that's what I need to do, so he packed us off. So I remember leaving Kampala and the whole family had come round and we’d packed our bags and I'm going to the airport and all our family coming and my dad, or somebody, is coming to me and saying “You're the eldest male” and I'm six years old “You need to look after everybody, your younger siblings and your mum as well” and I’m thinking “Alright yeah” I’ll rise to the challenge, but I didn't, when I think back at it I’m thinking “I'm only six years old what are they asking me to do here?” but it was just like this sense of responsibility, this sense of duty.

Bhavisha Mehta

Duty and I think change, immense change that was happening, you just had to be I suppose reactive, you didn't really have time to process, and I was actually going to ask you, you've touched on it, how old you were and what you remember, because some of these things being so young, what were your feelings at the time, do you recall?

Salim Jodiyawalla

This feeling of uncertainty was there, there was a feeling somewhat of fear and somewhat of dread “What's going to happen to us?” okay when we were coming here we knew that we weren’t just going to go anywhere, we were going to a particular destination, so there was comfort in that. I probably wasn't so conscious of that being six, my younger sibling was five, and the youngest was 2 ½ , and so we basically were driven to Entebbe, we got on our plane and we came here, and I remember the plane going via Frankfurt, it was Lufthansa, I remember arriving at Frankfurt Airport and sort of spending a few hours there. I remember my sister going around the belt because it was quite funny she just jumped onto the belt and she was going round and round.

Bhavisha Mehta

I assume these are maybe your first experiences of airplanes and airport international travel?

Salim Jodiyawalla

Of course, never been on a plane before and sort of coming here, and we arrived at the airport and my two masis had come and my dad had a friend who had moved to the England many years before, maybe in the 60s, and he came to pick us up, he had a car. We got in his car and they dropped us off in Finchley, was where the house was, in fact they’ve still got the house, the same house, my mama lives there now. And as soon as we got there literally my two masis who were there who sort of knew how everything works in England, my mum wouldn’t have had a clue how to navigate all of that, but my masis were there and they put us into school and we went for six weeks between sort of September and mid-October to school in Finchley Moss Hall School, and in that period my father arrived by himself with his brothers and his siblings and they ended up going to the camp, which is actually Greenham Common, Newbury camp they used to call it but I found out it was actually the Greenham Common camp because funnily enough, not consciously, but I ended up at the Greenham Common camp last year and I don't know we just sort of decided to do a weekend away, we’d gone to Newbury town and on the way back we just decided to drop in there. We sat there for an hour or two, you know in the gardens there, and it's actually where the Greenham peace protesters were but the army barracks was where they housed [people]. So my dad, and I can't remember who else was with him, possibly my grandfather, and possibly my dad's elder sister and her family because she had four children as well, they were all there together possibly in Greenham. I'm not sure of the details and the British government had a policy that they would split families up and put them in different directions to integrate them into English culture rather than all arrive at the same place, so they had no choice of stay, and I remember my grandfather my dad's elder siblings, they got a house [near] Stoke-on-Trent in Newcastle-under-Lyme and the eldest one with her husband and four kids they went right near Sunderland and my dad said “Look my wife and kids they're not here with me but I have them, they're in Finchley”. So he got a house in London and that house was actually in Euston in a place called Somers Town and just two weeks ago I visited Somers Town, and there was a little community event there and the building that we were living in was a council block and this council block was set for demolition. So I think the building had been gutted and the crane was going to come with the ball just to knock the building down and they decided to reequip these houses for these refugees. So I think there are three buildings they’re three storeys high and the buildings had no internal doors, the external doors were fitted, there was no bathroom and they just fitted the kitchen sink ,and I remember this bath being in the middle of the room where you could fit it and maybe there was a hose connection pumping into the sink to empty it out or something, I don't know, but none of us had baths. We didn't know what a bath was, it was just showers with running water, so my parents used to go to Euston station where they had public baths to have a shower and the three of us used to be bathed in the kitchen sink, because we were small, and so we lived there. We were supposed to live there for weeks but we ended up living there for 9 months and in that time my father went to claim Social Security, whatever it was you know where you went to the office, and he went there one week and he came back depressed and he never told me this but he was crying, and he went there the second week and he came back and he said “I'm not doing this again. I can't put my hand out to anybody”. So he had this sense of pride and he said “I'm not going to put my hand out and take a hand out”. Now in the building where we were staying there was a younger chap, just with his wife, and he was an Ithna Asheri and in Kampala he was working for an international company who had an office here in the UK so when he arrived he got a job with them in London. My dad knew he was working, so my dad went and said to him “Have you got any jobs in your office I didn't get a job I can't do this handout business that's just not me” so he went and asked and he said “Yeah there's a bookkeepers job” and my dad used to run a big business in Africa “I'll take anything” he said. So this company was an importer, anyway he went and worked for them for a year and in that period we got a council house in Battersea, and I remember going to this council house in Battersea and that's the first time I really experienced racism because we had this fear while we were living that where we were living, there were all these people out there to get us, and I grew up with that fear and I didn't have any experience but you know one day, I remember somebody had thrown a box of matches and newspapers through our letterbox saying we are going to burn your house. I remember that experience very very clearly and you used to here these sort of things, nothing ever happened, but we would be shouted at on the streets, called pakis and all sorts of things, so that is the something that stayed with me until I was 20 and that experience, because we lived in this council house in Battersea, and the primary school education was okay. There was a little bit of bullying but there were Afro-Caribbean people and they were bullied as well so it wasn’t just like we were the only ones, but if you imagine, I remember this particular road that we were living in called Stewart’s Road, Beattie House this council estate which has about 50 blocks in it, and then there was another council estate, there were 3 council estates in the whole street, probably there were only 2 or 3 Indian families in the whole street. So that’s where we grew up and we didn’t have a car so if we wanted to go to the community centre, the Jamatkhana, which was here in the UK which mushroomed because of these Ugandan refugees before there was probably only 5 or 10 families but suddenly 50 families or more arrived in London, so the community mushroomed, we would be going there at night on the buses, it just didn’t feel safe and comfortable, you didn’t feel like you belonged in this country and when I went to senior school it was a very very rough school, and this was in Tooting, and you’d have people that would threaten you for whatever reason and there I befriended some Jamaican boys who ended up being protection for me and my brother because there would be people out to get you, but these Jamaican boys their parents had been here and been through this. I’d help them with their homework and they’d give me protection

Bhavisha Mehta

That seems like a fair exchange.

Salim Jodiyawalla

It was a fair exchange, their parents, because they’d come through the Windrush, they’d already been through this experience and their parents were probably persecuted and these youngsters grew up and they were stronger and bigger and they weren't looking for trouble but if trouble came their way they knew how to deal with it, and the friends of mine, because I learnt how to speak in a Jamaican accent, they said “You want to mess with him, come mess with me first”  and that's how they used to say and that would be it if there was a skinhead because that was the sort of generation at that time that were deemed to be the National Front movement, they’d all have skinheads that's what they were called skinheads, and what we have today the British National Party they don't have a particular look, but in the 70s you had this skinhead movement. And I remember I learnt at a very young age, the age of six or seven, how to walk down the street and look for danger and I'd be crossing the road if I thought somebody dodgy was coming my way, just not to be on the same side of the road as them, so you’d cross over to the other pavement on the opposite side and I’d be zig-zagging as I was going up to the bus stop to catch a bus to go to school. So that was the experience that we came throughs. Now my parents, my dad used to say he would cry often thinking about what has he left behind and where has he come and my mum used to say “I need to go shopping” and then she’d go shopping and then she’d come back and even though she had gloves on her fingers would be frozen, because you'd be dragging trolleys or carrying bags and it's cold, and in Kampala we lived in Market Square so everything was there, and in fact the home help would go get the shopping.

Salim’s wife

They had a lot of people helping them in Kampala, all the household chores and everything

Salim Jodiyawalla

My mum would cook, they’d go do the shopping, and you’d just say to whoever it was they said “Can you go and get some potatoes, can you go and get this, can you go and get that” so when they came to this country they had to do all of this and they didn't know what tin food was in Africa, but they were bringing back tins, and tins are heavy if you have to carry them and this sense where you came [from] my parents just had to tell me once “Make sure you do well at school, you need to do well” and my siblings [and I] we never thought back and if I look at today my kids I’m telling them “Please do well in school” and they are like “Yeah okay we’ll see” because everything is comfortable, whereas with us we had this we need to do [well]. So you know we were living in this sort of council house and even my dad got a job because he couldn't work in this office, he wasn't an office guy, he was very much an out and about [guy]. So after a year he got this job as a washing machine repair engineer and he took that job because it came with a car, a van, he said “I've taken this job, I’ve got a van” and it was Hotpoint and he worked that job for nine years. But what my dad became very good at was, just his nature was such that he would go and repair 9 washing machines or 10 washing machines and do whatever calls he was given and he finished by 2:00 o'clock, whereas his compatriot, this English guy, would take all day and so it worked out well for him and we got a car.

Salim’s wife

He had the van and he converted it into a car because he put a partition in the middle so the kids could sit at the back and he and his wife could sit in the front, and then after because he’d finished being a business minded man and he was an engineer because he learned engineering in college, so he knew how to repair things, and he repaired the washing machines very well and very fast, and he even took extra jobs.

Salim Jodiyawalla

Sometimes some people would come and say to him “Oh can you do a private job?” and he said “No I'm not allowed to” but they said “Yeah but it's for my for my cousin” and he said “Oh if it’s your cousin okay yeah then I can do it” so he used to get a little bit of side income from that.

Salim’s wife

And half of the day would also be free and he would take the family out on picnics.

Salim Jodiyawalla

And that early time I remember with my dad, he was a very outgoing person, and he would take us everywhere, we would go to Brighton in a van, Southend, and imagine the vans only got two seats and then there's this like cage which separates the goods at the back so that nothing comes over and falls into the drivers side, but he moved that cage back and he got Yellow Pages and he put them there and some cushions on top of it and we'd sit behind on the Yellow Pages, and in those days you know you didn't have this seat belt rule, you didn’t have to wear a seat belt. I don't think anybody would stop you, police wouldn't stop you for doing that, it was all okay, even here. So yeah that was our life. But I remember sort of growing up with this sort of racism, the need to do well, I remember living in a house with no heating and being absolutely freezing cold and all we’d have is in the living room a gas fire, and okay we had electric heaters which we would have to turn on, but I remember that being very very cold and my dad said to me, he says “Look you need to do really well in education because I've come from Mombasa I’ve got a higher education degree, I've tried to use it here, it doesn’t work, they don't recognise that”. They said “Okay you went to a Muslim institute of higher education but it has no value I mean we know that because doctors come from India who are working in hospitals and they have to go through a bit of a process before they get accepted here into the system here. So that spurred us on to sort of do well. So I think that sort brings our journey from Africa to the early days of the UK and I just want to say one thing that, when I said it wasn't until my 20s, because I grew up in this environment where we were thinking that there are no English people who like us, and this is not a country for us. We've ended up here because we had no choice, we were kicked out of our land, so I was very keen to look for a future overseas. But it wasn't until I went to university and when I was sharing a university flat with some other English people and I remember I had this one incident where, I had a car at university because my dad had started a business thereafter, and we had a little bit of money so I had a car and somebody knocked my car and my friends, these two friends of mine who were living in the flat, said “Oh somebodies damaged your car” so they went round the whole university accommodation campus looking for another car with that paint colour on it to find out who the culprit was, and they found it, and then they went and cornered the person and said “I think you've smashed into this person's car and driven away without you know owning up to it”. And I thought “Oh my god these people they've gone out of their way” and it sort of brought back my faith that they are not all the same, but that was my experience you know growing up, I was 18 and 19 at university and that's when I sort of said “Oh there is another reality here”. But having gone through this sort of exodus, refugee living in the council houses, and a poor existence as it were, poorer existence, I remember going to the sweet shop at break time from school and I had no money in my pocket and my friends would be buying stuff.

Bhavisha Mehta

Compared to your memory of going to the sweet shop in Kamapala very very different.

Salim Jodiyawalla

In Kamapala what do you want, you can have everything that you want, and I know we had all of that and I know that when we arrived here how we grew up was totally different result, it was a big flip from being very rich well-off and you can do whatever you want, to the opposite side where you know my dad used to often say “When I was working in that office I would arrive at the train station and decide to do a 40 minute walk because it would save me 2p on the bus”. He had given me that sense how could I spend 1/2p on a packet of crisps or a bar of chocolate or whatever it was at that time. So I just wouldn’t buy it and they would go out at lunchtime to the fish and chip shop and buy some chips or something and I had my packed lunch from home because we couldn't afford to have that money for that, and even I remember this I was in school and I wanted to play a musical instrument and I could get something for free from the school or something where we need to buy something to have it at home to practise. They couldn’t give us a piano and organ or something because you couldn't carry that backwards and forwards between school, so they said “Well if you want to learn the piano you got to have one at home” so I remember coming home and asking my dad “I'd like to learn to play the piano” and he said “I haven’t got the money to do that I'm really sorry”, so I played the flute because I could carry that backwards and forward.

Bhavisha Mehta

And I think just in terms of everything you've mentioned there, that's very insightful in terms of your journey from Kampala, getting here to the UK, and also what life was like in the UK. But if I can take you back a little bit because there's a couple of things I'd like to unpick, and maybe get your views on what life was like through those experiences, I think it’d be quite helpful. So first and foremost when expulsion and that announcement was made in Kampala what was that process of trying to get to the UK, because I know for some people they had to arrange for visas, for example do you recall much about what that process as like for your family?

Salim Jodiyawalla

So what happened was that my dad had a Ugandan passport, but my mom from my nana side right had a British [passport]. So in those days the three of us were able to travel on mum’s passport as dependants and I think it was a very very minor formality, I don't think even you needed to go and register it. I'm not sure what the process was but we got out, they got out on the refugee thing my dad and his family, and so yeah I think we didn't have that issue where I believe some people didn't know where they were going and they ended up taking Norway, Sweden, some of them went to Canada, and some of them actually went back to India and Pakistan, and in that sense I believe possibly because of my two masis who were there [in the UK] it sort of set the scene for the rest of our family that we're going to England. But you see I would have been removed from that decision because of my age and the conversation around that and also okay, maybe we had arrived here and my dad would probably arrive here, what decision his siblings made and my grandfather made, I don't know what they did in the background, maybe the fact that we were there sort of it made sense for them we’d all go there, does that answer the question’

Bhavisha Mehta

No it does it does and in terms of everybody was given 90 days to exit the country, which when you think about it isn't a lot of time where you have your whole life set up.

Salim’s wife

They could not bring anything along with them.

Bhavisha Mehta

And that was it, how was that decision made? Perhaps for your grandfathers in terms of what do they, bring how do you make that call, and I appreciate yourself and your siblings and your mother had been sent over here first so you may not be able to recall.

Salim Jodiyawalla

I do know the story [from] afterwards. So what my dad had done was he because he was a distributor in a shop selling stuff, I don't if you know what a tea chest is, it's a wooden box it's almost like 2ft by 2ft by 2ft, but it's actually got plywood sides with metal ends and then tea would come from, I presume Ceylon at that time, and we had all these tea chests and my dad had packed tea chests full of stuff from Kampala, household items, and he had packed them into these tea chests and he had couriered them to the UK. And I remember these boxes arriving after we got here by ship, but he did tell me that not all of them arrived, and we got some of the household items. Because obviously when they came on the plane they could hardly bring anything with them. In terms of personal possessions something I forgot was when we went which was on, I believe it was the 21^st of August we arrived here because you often have to answer the question when you take out an insurance policy like a car insurance “Where you born here? “No” “When did you come this country?” luckily they don't ask the actual date but on certain passport applications they ask the date and it's 21^st August if I'm not mistaken, its either 21^st or 24^th, I’ve got it written down somewhere. And I remember that we were going to the airport, and the other thing I forgot to mention was that they were told that your not allowed to even take your jewellery with you, and apparently some people had their jewellery confiscated from them at the airport. So I think what had happened was that us, as in the three young children we’d actually got some necklaces of my mums around our neck, and my dad because of his affinity to radios and all that, I remember this very clearly, we were leaving and he's got this, I think it's a Hitachi radio, and it was sitting on the window shelf and it's just sitting on the shelf and he's given it to me and said “Take it with you” and he’s given me this radio. And I remember I'm carrying this Hitachi radio with my life to the airport and I don't even know if they had overhead compartments at that time but putting somewhere and then in Frankfurt carrying it around with me, and bringing it here, and then carrying it everywhere and we had it for many years as well.

Bhavisha Mehta

Wow so it survived the journey.

Salim Jodiyawalla

Because that for him, it was important, and it was probably valuable, probably like an iPad it's worth [something]. Of all the possessions that you had it was something that stood out it had value, it was an electronic item, there weren't many electronic items in that time. So we came with that and then the other thing was in these tea chests, I don't know why, he knew this before, he put Ugandan shillings in so he’d be opening of the boxes and in this sort of little compartment in there he’d bring out these Ugandan shillings and he’d known after he got here that they are worth nothing, anyway, so he used to say “Waste of time” so that was the experience regarding bringing the goods across.

Bhavisha Mehta

And did you have much of an understanding of what the UK was like when you were in Kampala, was there any information about life in England or what to expect perhaps?

Salim Jodiyawalla

No I would say we didn't have any expectation other than the two masis were there and I didn't have any sort of conversation with them because I think at the age of 6 it is a very limited conversation I was 6, turning 7. I do remember the Kampala scenery as being very sunny and I remember you come here it's very dreary because we arrived, okay August wasn't so bad, but soon September and October came along and it started getting dreary and cold, so there was this sort of like weather interpretation. We were told before we went and when the decision was made “Oh you’re going to a modern city and it's advanced and they’ve got so many things there traffic lights and escalators” and all sorts of things that you didn't have in Kampala, in Africa, so there was this sort of expectation “All right yeah fair enough it's something bad that's happened to us but we're going to a modern place, we're going to a more advanced country with better infrastructure” not that that word was used, but it’s a better place is the perception that you had.

Bhavisha Mehta

Do you think that helped give you maybe a sense of, I don't know if you can call it in such a way, but maybe hope or positivity?

Salim Jodiyawalla

Positivity, a bit of strength, it was a consolation. Okay we're leaving Africa and we're coming here but I do hear you know my mum, because if I was to talk about their post departure experience my dad was very bitter about the whole affair that he had to go through, to the point he never wanted to go back, he said “No I'm never setting foot there again” and he hasn't. I think now he would, although his health probably doesn't permit it, my mum has been back many times and she often talked about fond memories and if she was given the option to go back she would have gone back.

Bhavisha Mehta

That’s very interesting .

Salim Jodiyawalla

So she was somewhat more forgiving of the expulsion because she said “It was paradise”. They called Uganda the Pearl of Africa and she remembers from her perspective that everything was so fresh and beautiful, so she connected with that sort of natural aspect, and the food aspect was what she normally really connected with, the tropical fruits that we enjoyed over there ,which we couldn't get here, no way. You probably wouldn’t even be able to see those things, today you can get anything and everything but she would even still comment that it doesn't still have the same taste and my father often used to say that when we came here, because we eat meat, he’d try chicken and he wouldn't eat chicken for two years he said “This isn't the same as what I was what I was used to over there”. So there were those food sort of things which bring up memories, but your question was this expectation of what you had here. I think from my personal perspective, and my youngest sibling didn't have this same experience because she was only 2 ½, is that this modernity I knew about and I related to it, she wouldn't have. But the experience of this feeling unwelcome and the racism that we suffered and I think some people suffered a lot of physical harm, I think mine was more verbal and intimidatory, I don't think I suffered anything physical, maybe something very minor, but nothing major. It left a big scar for me and left a big impression whereas my younger sibling she said “No I didn't see any of that, none of that”.

Bhavisha Mehta

So maybe she benefited from being younger perhaps and maybe her experience was therefore different to what you had encountered. Would you say that would be a fair summarization of it?

Salim Jodiyawalla

Yeah I mean if I was to ask my children today, have they experienced it, well the ethnic structure here, there’s probably 95% Indians in the school that she goes to even though it’s a regular school and even the private schools they even have the same ratio in this area where we live,. But that's now but you go back…

Bhavisha Mehta

in the 70s when you first arrived very different…

Salim Jodiyawalla

very very different. Yeah I think that my younger sibling, myself, and my brother who is just a year younger than me we really felt it, we really felt it. If I look at my other cousins and all that and they also experienced it in the other places so that touched me a lot. So that is one of those of things and I never really identified with [being] British, whereas if I ask my children they’re British and they’re happy to be British. I had this sort of sense because of my experience, and I didn't have this sense at all in Uganda, it wasn't something that was inside of me but I definitely won't be supporting England on a cricket match, or rugby, or football, or whatever, and that was all born out of those experiences, those early experiences.

Bhavisha Mehta

And actually you’ve touched on something that I was going to come onto, and you know I'll take your lead on how comfortable you feel with answering this, but do you have a sense of belonging? And I say that in terms of the journey you've had to maybe get here and now obviously London is where you’ve set up, and this is where your family are and where you are. Where would you say you connect with the most, do you have an affinity to Uganda still and Kampala? I appreciate you were still very young at the time everything happened and probably didn’t get to spend as much time there as maybe your family would have hoped to have, but what are your views?

Salim Jodiyawalla

So if I say to you for me emigration from this country is a possibility, but my primary driver today would be weather, it is to have a more warmer climate than the climate we have here. Although the winters are much milder than when we arrived in the 70s, we've had a bit of a colder winter this year than most. Nut I think what's happened is that the ethnicity in the areas that we live in and my interactions with the native English here have changed my perception, because if I say to you that in say 10 years after I got here and I had applied for a pre-university sponsorship which I got, but I remember that I'd send out so many applications that I'm guessing that many were just rejected based on the name on the application, many were told that your application would just be thrown in the bin because they’d had experience of it, because of your name, to the point where when my oldest daughter was born we chose a name for her which wouldn't identify her [as Asian] from her first name, we called her Maria. We call her Maria but it's Maria how we spell it and a lot of my other friends did the same thing they picked names like Adam for boys, names that would not [have] connotations and that was all due to this sort of racism. So I remember going for this sponsorship interview, it was in Cheltenham, it was for some sort of Defence company and I saw racism in my face then, that was as a 17 year old, I saw it stare me in the face, where I went through the interviews and passed with flying colours, because they do aptitude tests before you get to an interview, and I was good at school because my parents told me “You need to do this”. I [try] very very hard to do well and I was good at what I did, so these tests they weren’t a problem, but I remember going to the interview and I said to the guy he said “So what's your aspirations?” and I said “I’d rather go into management” and you know it was very much blue collar white collar and the blue collar was dark, and the white collar was white, that's exactly how it was, and he said “If you want a job in management go and work in Sainsbury's”. That's what he said to me. I wanted to go into engineering and on the flip side I got a job at Jaguar as a sponsorship because the Commission for Racial Equality had been in there for three years, done an investigation saying how come the shop floor is 90% dark and the white colour is 99% white, and so actually positive discrimination got me into that job, my merit which I'm sure I had, didn't count for anything. So these are the challenges and you'll find that you go into a shop and wouldn’t get served, and it was the Indians wouldn’t serve you, the Indians would serve a whiteface person [first] it's just the way it was. They made comedy programmes in the 70s about that and people make comedy about that today as well, stand up comedians, so that was very much the sort of culture that we're in.

Bhavisha Mehta

And maybe a final point and feel free to share anything else as well, it's very interesting that you mentioned that both your mother and father have a very different view of Uganda after their experiences. I think obviously for your father you know for him the situation is very different to what he left it in and I think it's a difficult to process what's happened to you, whereas your mum has obviously been back and visited. What about for yourself, have you been back to Uganda?

Salim Jodiyawalla

Yeah I went back because my mum's side of the family they have property and I went back in 1991 and to be honest, you said to me “Do you feel at home about this country?” Uganda was on my list, on my top list, I want to go back to Uganda but unfortunately the whole thing was vetoed [by my wife] “No way am I going to Africa” “But you haven’t even been to Africa to know what it’s like” “Not going there” “Should we go and have a look?” “No”. So I wouldn't mind going there because you see in terms of my own life journey, independent of the exodus experience, I would much rather live a life in a natural environment than in an artificial environment, we find ourselves in artificial environments here, so that was my motivation, my driver. I would equally go to a place in India but I think what had happened was because these early migrants, my grandfathers had left, my mum's side of the family they’re quite connected my dad’s side of family they’d welcome us if he went there. So I didn't tell you what the reason was why my dad's father left Jamnagar. It’s a very simple story, his father had a shop and he had three brothers and the three brothers were going to inherit the shop, the two sisters were going to get married and go wherever their journey took them, and one of the brothers, my dad's kaka, he had nine kids and my grandfather wasn't even married then and he said “This shop will not support the nine kids that this man has had, forget about even if I don't have any kids, it's not going to support me” and so that was his reason for going there. But when he went he hardly went back, so there's no connection with the motherland as it were, and it was severed, and so when my dad actually went back to India he was 50. So it was a big gap and although they were all welcomed, there was no sort of ongoing connection and he felt different and I think maybe if he went back there and he wanted to sort of stay there for six months you might be able to rekindle those relationships and feel comfortable. So in answer to what is home and where are your roots, well now if I had made the move out of this country because I wasn't happy when my kids were younger they wouldn’t have had a choice, if I tried to ask them today none of them are going to leave this country because they see this as their home, and so from that sense, the feeling of not being at home not feeling at home, the racism that I experienced here although it's melted I still see it, I can spot it a mile off when it's prevalent, and I don't know if you spotted it in in the law field today, I'm sure it's rife there, I'm sure it is. Depends where you're at in the corporate ladder, in the time that we grew up you'd have to become very anglicised, and I tell you why I didn't stay with Jaguar because I noticed earlier on, I don't drink or smoke for my religious beliefs, and while I was a student graduate trainee within their graduate trainee programme in Coventry, and I lived there for three years and I had a guaranteed job with them and it was exactly engineering management it was what they had recruited me for. Recruitment opportunities were determined by the Friday pub and the bosses would be there and you’d have to rub shoulders with them, and I just didn't go because I didn’t want to drink, I just didn’t want to be in that environment so it wasn't home for me even from a religious ideology perspective,. I didn't want to do what I was required to do to succeed in that environment, and there was this phrase that went on about those people who did what they needed to do and they were called, I cant remember what it was, coconuts but it was the reverse, they were white on the outside and brown on the inside rather than what they actually were and they had to compromise their own identity and their own values to actually to do well in those settings. And you find those that went into corporate world in the 70s they had to do a lot of that, and so it depends who you were and where you are, whether you wanted to do all of that to determine what was home, but it wasn't a comfortable place to call your home that was my experience. Okay today I'm sort of detached from all of it because I ran my own business so I didn't have to be answerable to anybody, I never had to sort of please the boss, I've never had to do that in all my working life. So I've been my own person so I haven't been affected by that, and I chose to do that for that reason, I'm not going to have to suck up to somebody. So I didn't have that experience, but had I not then I probably wouldn't feel comfortable here, because whether it was happening or not you’d always feel “Oh its because of the colour of my skin that I'm not doing well here” and it was a definite reality then and I felt even in very limited capacities like interviews, I felt it. So because there's two aspects to reading people, so you learn to read people and you wanted to decide very early on, and first impressions best impression, I always say that, because you can be persuaded otherwise when they open their mouth and then they start saying things which you think “Okay he’s not a bad person”. But the first impression is the best impression usually, because it's come from the heart, and I can still see today that that element of racism exists, prejudice, and that would be the only aspect of this country which, in the circles I mix in now I don't come across it, in fact even at school if there was a pure English person they would have to mould to the rest of the consensus of that group, they wouldn't be able to survive, they’d have to move out to the country and go into their circles if they wanted to be snotty about somebody of another colour.

Bhavisha Mehta

That's very interesting. I think that covers everything that I wanted to know from you and I'm very grateful to you for sharing your experiences, was there anything else that you would like to mention or?

Salim Jodiyawalla

The country has served us well. I mean there is this scenario where a lot of the elders in the family talk about, the rich became poor and the poor became rich, I don't know if you've heard that. So the experience amongst certain families was they were not doing well, but as soon as they arrived here they had six kids or eight kids where all of them could get a job and they were still living in one house. So suddenly they had surplus money much quicker than what we ended up doing, where we were split into three families, we were one family back in Africa, and had we been able to survive in one unit we would have done that, so there was that flipping. But the thing is as a journey, even a migratory journey, and I look at what did my grandfather do by leaving for Africa. So I'll just share with you my experience because I went to India three years after my dad's first visit at the age of 50, he took us, we went again and I remember going to Jamnagar specifically, and I arrived in Jamnagar and I'm looking at my dad's cousins, my grandfathers’ brothers’ families, and I was thinking “Oh I'm so glad my grandfather decided to leave Jamnagar in the late 1880s and come to Africa. And then from there we got to England, we’re doing so much better than this lot over there”. Because there’s a place in Jamnagar we used to come from and it was really backward even in the 80s. I haven't been [back] to Jamnagar but it's there on my next trip. I mean I go to India regularly but it just tends to be Bombay because my wife's family is from Bombay. I want to go back to Jamnagar because from what I understand, if I look at 100 year migratory cycle, India is the place to be tomorrow, I believe so. Whether my children recognise that or not in terms of cycle of migration, for my grandfathers in the early 1900s outside India was the right place to be but I believe that there will be a shift in wealth from West to East and possibly opportunities maybe, although the population in India is big and if they all step up then it may not be so easy to succeed in that environment because they are far more competitive then we would be, and the culture is different, the business culture. But from a quality of life point of view it might be, so it's very interesting because I've looked at that 100 year migration cycle. But England has served as well because the thing about England is they gave us a roof, we didn't sleep on the streets, I mean I hear friends of mine who come from Iraq, Iran, and you know you hear them sleeping out in parks for two or three days, we didn't have to do any of that. We had roof, food, money, education, health we had all of that. So for that reason we have to be grateful for the opportunities that we had here and when you listen to some of the other experiences of some of the other people who went to India and they had a really hard time, Pakistan, and then they ended up back here. So I think yes on the whole if we look back on it retrospectively it's been good, but it did set us back and in my dad's case it set him back a minimum of 10 years, and I think his and mum’s stories why they are so different is that he felt his whole world and his hard work was all just taken away from him, and that's why he has bitterness towards his time in Uganda. And mum has chosen not to focus on that, and remember the better times that they’ve had there, and I know that there were many who arrived did pass away early because they couldn't reconcile them being here and they contracted illness of whatever description.

Bhavisha Mehta

A big shift in every which way wasn’t it.

Salim Jodiyawalla

Yeah and the displacement. Being younger I don't think we felt the brunt of it. Yeah we didn’t feel the brunt of it. But I do believe because I've shared the history and I haven't sort of put it to one side and left it I tried to ask them “How did you feel?” and it's sort of still alive in me. I can recollect what they all went through, all the other elders, not that I experienced the same thing myself.

Bhavisha Mehta

But you can relate to it

Salim Jodiyawalla

I can relate to it and I recognise it as being alive today as opposed to something of the past which is forgotten about.

Bhavisha Mehta

Thank you.

Salim Jodiyawalla

Thank you.