Find Your Way Home

This is a brown person story from postcolonial East Africa. What I saw growing up in Uganda was extraordinary. My family was among the last to live through what was a golden era for many South Asians in Uganda. I was born in Kampala in 1981 and left when I was eleven years old. Hardly a decade of my life was spent there, but the experience has sculpted me. My outlines belong to this beautiful nation.My father was an educationist from Pakistan who was sent by his government on a teaching assignment to Africa. He loved Uganda so much that he decided to make it home until he died. He passed away in 1992 in his 60s. He is buried under a tree near a football field at the same small town university where he taught History and worked as the registrar. He lived in Uganda for 35 years with my mother. My mom was a homemaker and a kind person who made him possible. She lives in California now. I have three older siblings, Bhaijan, Bhai and Baji. The infamous ruler of Uganda, Idi Amin did draconian things to South Asians and frightened most of them to go home - to "go back where they came from." This is the same anti-immigration slogan that we now hear at political rallies of many rightwing politicians across the world, from France and US to Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Most South Asians in Uganda who originally came from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh didn't know where home was really. They had owned East Africa as their own. Sadly, the brown people, called Muindi by the Ugandans, had collectively done terribly racist, classist and bigoted things to Africans while they lived in their country. Remnants of a colonial mentality perhaps, or even one lavishly borrowed from ingrained caste systems back in United India pre-1947. Africans then turned on these Muindi, with some help from Idi Amin. I grew up right into that shift of power. There was disdain for my color and my kind. I was picked apart in school as if I was inspired by both fear and awe. I asked myself who I was much later in life, but in those formative years, I asked myself why I was not black all the time. I wanted to belong. My father Abu and my mother, Ami stayed on through that turmoil of civil war and I remember the fear of gunshots as both a chill and a fire. We were under threat, but Abu thought we would be spared because he kept telling us "this is home," "we have done nothing wrong," and "this will pass." We almost didn't survive. These stories are perhaps a slice of life in the sense that parents are the shelter over one's proverbial soul. These stories are about losing it all and what happened before losing it all.

• | Author: Aisha Sarwari
• | Publisher: Independently Published
• | Publication Date: May 19, 2019
• | Number of Pages: 121 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1099319889
• | ISBN-13: 9781099319884