Idi Amin expels Uganda's Asians

Who: Idi Amin, Uganda's president; the roughly 80,000 people of South Asian descent then living in Uganda; and the British Government, which resettled about 27,000 Ugandan Asians who held British passports.

What: On 4 August 1972 Amin ordered the expulsion of Uganda's Indian minority and gave them 90 days. The order first covered British subjects of South Asian origin, and on 9 August it was extended to citizens of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Wikipedia puts the community at about 80,000, of whom 23,000 had citizenship applications processed and accepted and up to 50,000 held British passports. Amin said he was “giving Uganda back to ethnic Ugandans”; his motive is unclear.

Those who left were limited to $120 and 485 pounds of belongings, and about 5,655 firms, ranches, farms and estates were confiscated. Wikipedia counts about 27,200 who went to the United Kingdom, 6,000 to Canada, 4,500 to India and 2,500 to Kenya, with about 1,000 each to Malawi, Pakistan, West Germany and the United States and about 20,000 unaccounted for. The South Asian Canadian Heritage timeline says more than 7,000 Ugandan Asians came to Canada in 1973, the first large group of non-European refugees Canada accepted, many of them Ismailis. The Indian community went back to the 1890s, when the British brought 32,000 indentured labourers from British India to build the Uganda Railway; 6,724 stayed.

None of the sources opened counts the Sikhs among those expelled. Wikipedia's article on Indians in Uganda lists Sikhism among the community's religions, and the 2017 British Sikh Report, as reported by Wikipedia, says 8 per cent of Britain's Sikhs were born in East Africa.

Where: Uganda; the expelled went chiefly to the United Kingdom, Canada, India and Kenya.

Why it mattered: A whole South Asian community was forced out of the country where its families had lived since the railway was built, and tens of thousands were moved to Britain, Canada and India. For the Panth it belongs to the diaspora story, but the sources opened do not say how many of those who left were Sikhs. The British Sikh Report's East Africa figure covers a wider region and a wider span of departures than this one order.