Fifty years ago – in early August 1972 – President Idi Amin summarily decreed the expulsion of Uganda’s “Asian” (that is, Indian and Pakistani) community. Over 50,000 people were given a scant three months to tie up their affairs and leave the country. There was a scramble to secure new homes for people rendered stateless by the Amin decree. For months, European and American media carried reports that dramatised the human misery of Uganda’s Asians.
All the attention paid to the plight of the Asian community has made it hard to see the much wider, much more violent history of Amin’s economic programme. It was Africans, not Asians, who were the targets of this larger campaign. Amin called it the “War of Economic Independence”; later it was named the “Economic War”.
