On 23 August 2022, it will be 50 years since my parents, my brother and I landed in Stansted airport as refugees, expelled and made penniless by Uganda’s General Idi Amin. A brutal dictator, he made sure that Ugandan Asians, who had lived for three generations in the country, were stripped of all their assets and kicked out.
In an August 1972 edition of the Uganda Argus, Amin was reported as asking the British government to take “responsibility” for British passport holders in Uganda, because they were “sabotaging the economy of the country”. He gave Asians three months to leave the country from 5 August 1972 and said that they “only milked the cow, but they did not feed it”. The loss of Uganda’s Asians, who accounted for most of the tax revenue, sent the economy into a slump – it was an act of economic self-harm created by a leader who had initially been backed by the British. The British government thought Amin was “their man”, until he turned on it.
