{UAH} Exiled by Idi Amin
|
8:01 AM |
No comments |
Exiled by Idi Amin
It was a case of taking whatever you could in the time that you had – a memorable photograph, a favourite necklace, a warm jacket. That's what my grandmother told my mother to do. Everything else stayed, ending up who knows where. The tears came hard and fast, and the goodbyes were too brief. Time was scarce; they were lucky enough to be on one of the few scheduled flights out. Then they were gone.
That was 1972, and my mother wasn't to return home to Uganda for 18 years. The country's dictator, Idi Amin, had ordered all non-Ugandan Asians to leave within 90 days, following a particularly vivid dream. It wasn't until 1990 that she would set foot on that red earth again, with me in tow.
That year, my mother was, for the first time, visiting her brother, who had moved back to Kampala in the early 80s after Amin's overthrow in 1979.
In my excitement at arriving, the armed soldiers patrolling the airport had escaped my notice, and my attempt to photograph my mother's return was met with a rifle butt. But we were here, in my parents' birthplace, and it felt momentous. I had grown up hearing so many family stories that began, "This one time, in Kampala ..." that the memories felt as much mine as theirs.
As we drove through the city, my gaze flickered constantly to my stricken mother's face. As we passed bullet-ridden buildings and dilapidated houses, it was apparent that this was not the same city, the one evoked in tales of weekend escapes at the family's tea estate and lazy summer evenings sitting out on the porch, chit-chatting and nibbling sugar cane. Here, things were still unstable, armed soldiers were visibly present, roads precariously pot-holed; and a sense of dereliction left the city in a shroud of dirt and dust.
The family home, star of so many tales, hadn't escaped either and was reduced to little more than an army base. Two soldiers lingered around the main gate, the crumbling backdrop bearing no resemblance to the house in the black and white photographs I had seen in London. Even so, capturing this dark reality seemed essential. The soldiers finally noticed us, but at least this second attempt to photograph a piece of the past was successful before we were forced to speed off.
For all its happy memories, the house remained the most poignant reminder of the circumstances under which the family had left. Following Amin's decree, many homes were looted or raided. Families such as ours rushed to protect their goods and safeguard their businesses, some successfully, others less so. On the day of the decree, a friend of my mother's returned home to find very little left to salvage. But as my mother says, there was little time to "feel" or even acknowledge emotions. "Everyone knew they were leaving the only home they had ever known, but the need to leave quickly, safely and together was all that mattered. Sadness and nostalgia came much later."
Those were dangerous times, controlled by an impulsive and unpredictable man whose next dream could signal far worse. Despite the decree to leave, no one knew who would make it out safely. At the airport, jewellery had to be hidden, tucked into clothes and cases with the skill of a smuggler. Wedding rings and even radios could be forcibly removed.
Until the plane took off and they were airbound, there were no guarantees. Lucky ones, such as my family, escaped relatively unscathed, but others were stripped of virtually everything en route to a land with which they had little or no connection.
The Britain of 1972 was an alien one. True, my mother had been privileged enough to have already been once, in 1968, at the age of 18, to attend finishing school in East Sussex. She recalls a cousin meeting her at the airport without servants to help with luggage.
Once back in Kampala, she received a marriage proposal from my father and they married in 1972, but little did she know that she would return to the UK as a 22-year-old newlywed, under more stressful circumstances.
My mother joined my father and his family in east London, while my grandmother, head of the family, adjusted to life in Harrow, north-west London.
My mother, never one to mince her words, says, "It was like arriving in hell from heaven." Panic attacks followed. Leaving Kampala under duress had taken its toll. For my mother's younger sister, it took years to shake off the feeling of constant fear.
In 1990, walking past my mother's Kampala haunts, we stopped by the Standard Life bank, where she had worked as a secretary for three years – her first job. This experience was to prove invaluable when she secured her first job in Britain, with an Essex-based shipping company. From being a member of the Ugandan elite, it was an almighty fall down the social ladder. Asians may have been a minority there, but it was a wealthy one. My mother recalls one English colleague having trouble remembering her name. "She asked if she could call me Carol instead of Shobha. I politely said I wouldn't answer to Sheba, Shena or any other variation, including Carol."
We stopped by Kololo senior secondary school. The classrooms where my mother and her sisters once studied lay in ruins; the peeling buildings another reminder of the destruction Uganda experienced under Amin. This empty feeling was echoed the next day as we drove an hour from Kampala and wandered around the family's old tea estate, my mother and uncle lost in their own recollections. Swathes of lush green grassland folded out in front of us, the air tinged with tropical heat and the last rains. It was the perfect African view, but what struck me was the rusting machinery of a once-thriving tea factory. Dust, dereliction and disappointment.
Eighteen years on, it's 2008 and the family reunites in Uganda for my cousin's wedding. There has been a sea change since 1990. The Kitante Road house has, miraculously, become our family's property once again, since President Museveni relaxed the law and asked Ugandan Asians to return in 1992. My cousin has spent half her youth in a house that has now been home to three generations.
As we pull up to the iron gates, I see joy and gratitude in my mother's face that her childhood home remains a living, breathing family house. In these same corridors, her eight siblings were once admonished by my grandmother, brandishing a rolling pin, after one of their mischievous pranks, perhaps switching salt for sugar, to the servants' despair.
With this new optimism, it's easier to see the new Kampala, the new hotels, businesses and shops busy and bustling. Old buildings have been spruced up and roads are somewhat smoother. Amin is dead and the years have reshaped so many lives. I ask my mother and the rest how they perceive their old life. Was it stolen from them? One uncle still wonders about the life he had imagined, working on the tea estate and growing old under the coconut palms. But for another, business opportunities in the UK surpassed anything he might have encountered in 1970s Uganda. For others, the memories are too painful to contemplate a return.
I know why my mother likes to go back. It's the balmy African air, the smell of the red earth after the rains, the warmth of the people and the memories of a tropical childhood. I remember our last day in Kampala on that holiday. The sun was shining. Outside, as the palm tree swayed, throwing down a couple of coconuts, she sat in the garden she grew up in, sipping fresh passion fruit juice. Later, we wandered along Kampala Road and enjoyed a sundowner in the Diplomat hotel up in the hills. Writing this in north London, where it's colder and the only palm I see is my own, I appreciate even more the effects of that life in the tropics ending so quickly for so many.
It's been quite a journey; for my mother, her siblings, my cousins, me. Even the family home has seen its own rise, fall and resurrection. As we gathered around my cousin in the old living room, she in her red bridal sari next to her groom while the priest performed Hindu marriage rites, I looked across to my mother. She was smiling, often laughing, with her siblings. For a split second, it was as though the hand of history had never touched their lives.
--
Disclaimer:Everyone posting to this Forum bears the sole responsibility for any legal consequences of his or her postings, and hence statements and facts must be presented responsibly. Your continued membership signifies that you agree to this disclaimer and pledge to abide by our Rules and Guidelines.To unsubscribe from this group, send email to: ugandans-at-heart+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment