Boarding the last charter flight to Canada. Roger St. Vincent, Seven Crested Cranes. The Uganda Collection. Archives & Special Collections, Carleton University.
By Jackie Mahoney
On August 4, 1972, the President of Uganda, General Idi Amin, announced that South Asians who were British citizens would be expelled from Uganda because, according to him, they were sabotaging the economy. This decree set into motion a mass exodus of the South Asian population of Uganda, who were given just ninety days to settle their affairs and start a new life in a foreign country. Over 7,000 South Asian Ugandans found themselves re-settling in Canada in the months following the expulsion announcement. For many, Canada would become their permanent home.
To share the lived experiences of these individuals, Carleton University Library, which located on the traditional lands of the Algonquin nation in Ottawa, Ontario, is developing the Uganda Collection, originally donated by the Canadian Immigration Historical Society in 2012. This archival collection consists of over 1000 newspaper clippings from the 1970s about the expulsion and reception, a personal memoir that documents the experiences of the Canadian Immigration team in Kampala in 1972, a logbook of arrivals to the Canadian Forces Military Base Longue Pointe, an interactive map of where Ugandan Asian refugees were resettled in Canada, and oral histories from Ugandan Asian refugees who share their lived experiences of the expulsion and their subsequent resettlement in Canada. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the expulsion this year, the library is hosting Beyond Resettlement: Exploring the History of the Ugandan Asian Community in Exile, a conference that will explore the historical context of the expulsion, Canada’s response and the reception of a large number of the refugees, the larger diaspora of Ugandan Asian refugees, and the lived experiences of the community in Canada and the diaspora over the past fifty years.
