BY MRINALINI REDDY, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

[to the sidebar story, "Scramble for Africa: Asian inroads into East Africa"]

Debolina and Prashant Choudhary are
recent transplants in Kampala,
raising their two-year-old daughter.

A family friend Goswami Debarata, from Calcutta, has been a resident for about ten years and plans to go back in a few years.
Debolina Choudhary had been married only a few weeks when she left Calcutta to join her husband Prashant, who had relocated to Kampala four months earlier. Neither had visited the bustling capital city of Uganda, let alone Africa. Yet, this country, that threw out its entire Asian population not too long before, made sense for their short-term goals.

Asian immigration to Uganda is not a new phenomenon--it dates back more than a century when Indians were brought over to East Africa by the British to work on building railway lines. When the work was done, some remained to fill the vacuum of trade in an agricultural economy and went on to become successful entrepreneurs and eventually big stakeholders in the Ugandan economy.

Eventually, a harsh expulsion order in 1972 by Uganda's infamous Idi Amin Dada removed this population--estimated between 60,000 and 70,000-- in its entirety.

The Asians have trickled back in and it is not unusual anymore to find convenience stores on Kampala Road with proprietors of Asian descent. Or sari-clad women walking into the Hindu temple situated prominently in the heart of the city, while others shop in nearby vegetable markets. Indian restaurants appear quite popular and "chapatti" or bread, a mainstay in North-Indian diets, is as common on any menu as the local favorite "matoke," or cooked bananas.

However, only about 10 percent of the 20,000 Asians in Uganda today are "returnees," or Asians who were expelled in 1972. The majority are new immigrants like Prashant and Debolina Choudhary. Despite the recent history of turbulent race relations, Uganda has once again become a land of economic opportunity for these first generation Indians.