Migrating to East Africa to work on building the British owned 600-mile stretch of railway linking Uganda to the port of Mombasa in Kenya was seen as an opportunity for families in India who were keen to escape poverty and famine at home. For the British Empire these workers provided a useful source of cheap labour during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Thousands of the Asian migrants alongside their African counterparts would lose their lives in the process, mostly from heat exhaustion and disease and several hundred were reported to be killed by lions in the Kenyan Savannah. Kassam Majothi who opened the Bristol Sweet Mart in 1978 arrived in Uganda as a young boy and unlike his father who worked on the railways, he became a merchant from a young age.
Just short of ten years into Uganda’s independence a man who had previously served in the British army as an officer came to power and began to stoke divisions between Ugandans and Asians. The Asians were accused by president Idi Amin of taking wealth from Ugandans and on August 7, 1972 they were told to leave the country within 90 days or risk being put into concentration camps.
