All events · Empires Unmade

Idi Amin's Expulsion of Ugandan Asians

1972 · Sub-Saharan Africa

Displacement

Displaced

80,000

approximately 50,000–80,000 people of South Asian descent were expelled within a 90-day deadline

Share of the population affected

100%

of the South Asian population of Uganda at the time of the expulsion order, 1972

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What happened

In August 1972, Ugandan President Idi Amin announced that all South Asians in Uganda, many of them descendants of laborers and traders brought under British colonial rule, had 90 days to leave the country, citing an alleged 'economic war' to transfer control of businesses to Black Ugandans. An estimated 50,000–80,000 people, most of them Ugandan citizens or British passport holders, were stripped of their property and forced to leave, with the largest number resettling in the United Kingdom and smaller numbers going to India, Canada, and other countries. The expulsion devastated Uganda's economy, as expropriated businesses were handed to Amin loyalists and largely collapsed. The event remains one of the most widely cited examples of state-directed ethnic expulsion in postcolonial Africa.

Parties

Ugandan President Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of the country's South Asian minority and seized their businesses and property

The denominator

The 1969 census counted 74,308 Asians in Uganda, and the figure usually given for August 1972 is about 80,000, of whom roughly 23,000 held or had applied for Ugandan citizenship. Amin's ninety-day order was applied to almost all of them: some 27,000 went to Britain, about 6,000 to Canada, 4,500 to India and several thousand to the United States and elsewhere, and their businesses and property were seized and redistributed.

The community was expelled in its entirety, so the share is near 100 per cent by design and records the completeness of the order rather than a measured proportion.

Where the baseline comes from

Expulsion of Asians from Uganda — Wikipediaopen-edited
Asians in Uganda — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

No significant direct death toll; the expulsion was accomplished by decree, harassment and asset seizure rather than killing. The House of Lords Library's fiftieth-anniversary briefing puts the number expelled at between 55,000 and 80,000 (about 76,000 covered by Amin's 4 August 1972 decree), with nearly 40,000 admitted to the UK, roughly 10,000 to India and Pakistan, about 6,000 each to Canada and to continental Europe, and about 1,500 to the United States; it records no deaths from the expulsion. The far larger death toll of Amin's rule as a whole — commonly given as 100,000 to 500,000 — arises from his regime's wider repression and is a separate matter.

Documented forms of violence

Denationalization

The House of Lords Library's fiftieth-anniversary briefing records that many Ugandan Asians who held Ugandan citizenship 'were later compelled to leave the country and rendered stateless in the process'.