Our Imam, Prince Karim Aga Khan, was friends with Canada’s Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau. Canada was looking for more immigrants, and the Imam convinced him to accept the Ugandan Asians; Canada accepted many of them. Some went to Britain that took them grudgingly. Racist editorials in the British newspapers welcomed them to the cold country.
Other Asians became stateless and ended up in refugee camps in different European countries. Sweden and Germany took a few thousand Indians. Others went to India and Pakistan. The close-knit community was scattered to the winds. The Indians were not compensated for the property they were forced to abandon and not allowed to take out their savings. Women tried to conceal their wedding jewelry hidden on their bodies and sewn into their clothes, but the soldiers soon learned about this and searched them, brutally confiscating the gold.
Prince Karim sent planes in 1972 to fly out the last few people when the deadline was almost over. They let some Hindu families take the empty seats. Ismailis always remembered those planes, “If something goes wrong, Hazar Imam will send aeroplanes for us; he will rescue us,” they would say.
Most of my family fled to Vancouver a few days after the expulsion order came in. They flew straight from Kampala, so we didn’t even get to see them one last time. They hurriedly crammed suitcases with clothes and a few keepsakes and left. Amin’s soldiers reportedly raped Indian women and attacked Asians with impunity in the interim period. Anyone who tried to stop them was themselves brutalized. No one knows how many people were attacked as the crimes went unreported. Many black Ugandans were appalled by the crimes and the expulsion of their friends and neighbors but mostly stayed quiet out of fear for their lives.
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