Sacking Kenyan workers in Uganda: nation-states and migrants’ trans-border (imperial) networks

As a second-year master student from SciencesPo Paris, I work on mass expulsions from the standpoint of nation-building in postcolonial Uganda (1966-1972). My master’s dissertation deals with two of these events; the sacking of about 20,000 Kenyan workers in 1970 and the expulsion of 55,000 “Asians” (meaning people of Indian descent in East Africa) by Idi Amin in 1972.

Encountering networks where they were not (initially) expected

During a fieldwork conducted in July-August 2014, I confronted the governments’ narratives of the “Kenyan sacking” (national archives) with the views expressed by the Kenyan migrants themselves (interviews). They turned out to be quite dissimilar. On the one hand, in the national archives, the narrative was taking the shape of an interstate crisis between Kenyan and Ugandan ministers in the middle of which migrants found their future in Uganda in jeopardy; but, on the other hand, the former expellees had a very different version to offer, a version in which they displayed agency through colonial-inherited networks.

Therefore, I happened to take interest in trans-border networks in East Africa and I am hoping to learn more over the analysis of transnational networks and find inspiration at GRAINES.

Integrating imperial trans-border ties to national(ist) policies

The immigration and labour policies behind the Kenyan workers’ crisis in 1970 were conceived and implemented

Western Indian Ocean routes of migration. Michel ADAM (dir.), L’Afrique indienne: les minorités d’origine indo-pakistanaise en Afrique orientale, Paris, Karthala, 2010, p. 12.

by the Ugandan Government in order to favour the employment of Ugandan citizens inside Uganda. However, this very national(ist) policy ended up being faced with the permanence of local trans-border links with Western Kenya. These connections which had been established when East Africa was still a “British” region allowed for expellees’ agency and frustrated the government’s attempt at “Ugandanizing” employment opportunities. Therefore, whereas immigration and labour policies are intrinsically seen as “national” problems, there is an equal need to combine the national approach with a more transnational outlook. Thereby, we might get a greater understanding of the role of imperial connections initiated within the British Empire and perpetuating themselves beyond independences.

Meanwhile, we are witnessing an important renewal of the historiography surrounding the so-called “Asian question” in East Africa (ie: the problems and challenges faced by the people of Indian descent in East Africa after the independences of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania). There is an increasing pressure to re-contextualize the presence and activities of Asians in East Africa within the British imperial mobility space opened in the Indian Ocean. However, the historiography has concentrated exclusively on Asian populations and, consequently, it has so far failed to adapt its conceptual framework to other migrant populations whose fate has been forgotten (ie: Kenyans).

    We advocate for a need to review the histories of “Africanisation” and “Ugandanisation” of economic opportunities by both enlarging the “Asian focus” and by taking into account the imperial connections which migrants settled in Uganda enjoyed.

Readings

• There are very few references concerning the Kenyan sacking of 1970. Ali Mazrui’s chapter is one of them. He compares the 1970 expulsion of Kenyan workers to the 1972 expulsion of Asians in Uganda. Beyond his Marxist understanding of both phenomena, the reader can very easily able grasp the importance of networks which characterizes the migrant’s situations in Uganda (Available on Google books).
  • Ali Al’Amin MAZRUI, « Casualties of an Underdeveloped Class Structure: The Expulsion of Luo Workers and Asian Bourgeoisie from Uganda », in William A. Shack et Elliott P. Skinner (dir.), Strangers in African Societies, Berkeley ; Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1979, p. 261‑278

• Sana Aiyar’s work dealing with Asians’ political activism in colonial Kenya well-illustrates the current historiographical trends which tend to review the Asian question by situating the Asian question within a broader imperial/”transcolonial” context.
  • See (either): Sana AIYAR, « Anticolonial Homelands across the Indian Ocean: The Politics of the Indian Diaspora in Kenya, ca. 1930-1950 », American Historical Review, 2011, vol. 116, no 4, p. 987‑1013 ; Sana AIYAR, « Empire, race and the Indians in colonial Kenya’s contested public political sphere, 1919–1923 », Africa, 2011, vol. 81, no 01, p. 132‑154. => AIYAR SANA – Anticolonial Homelands across the Indian Ocean The Politics of the Indian Diaspora in Kenya (1930-1950) ; AIYAR SANA – Empire, Race and the Indians in Colonial Kenya’s Contested Public Political Sphere (1919-1923)

• Broader references on the Indian Ocean imperial space may include : Thomas R. METCALF, Imperial connections: India in the Indian Ocean arena, 1860-1920, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007 ; Sugata BOSE, A hundred horizons: the Indian Ocean in the age of global empire, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 2006.