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Uganda – Idi Amin – Asian Expulsion – 1972
- ggm 6y agoThis had significant impact on the acceptance of South Asians in Scotland. Before the expulsion of the Ugandan and Kenyan Asians, Scotlands community was tiny. Most of them were workers in the industrial south, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford and the like. They had migrated differently, direct from the sub-continent mainly to work in the factories there. I remember meeting my first member of the community at primary school in Edinburgh. We used to eat jelabli at his parents shop, and I bought my first Bidi (tiny semi-illegal Indian one-leaf cigar-cigarettes) there. Shades of Rudyard Kipling and "Kim" The ones I got to know were the kids of Gujurati traders. They were part of the indian trading diaspora, which went worldwide. Nice people. They took over the corner-store niche pretty solidly, branched out. We had a really quite racist term for the shops I won't repeat, shameful how that was normalised. But, having said that I really do think their acceptance into Scottish society was broadly speaking smooth. and probably heavily influenced by mercantilism, something the Scots have always related to. For contrast, I believe it was a Pakistani migrant family who took over the video market, for all of scotland (just about) out of Glasgow. I didn't see many Sikh, I think they also stayed south mostly.