Seriously...

General Idi Amin seized power in in Uganda in 1971. His brutal dictatorship is synonymous with the deportation of the country's 80,000-strong Asian population fifty years ago this year. As the popular story goes, Asians built the economy and the country. Then a brutish African leader exiled them from their adopted homeland. Some 28,000 arrived in the UK in the summer of 1972. The story of industrious, virtuous Asian families being thrown out for no reason and succeeding against all odds, has been endlessly recycled according to Ugandan-born journalist and broadcaster. But, she argues, though powerful and moving, it is incomplete and simplistic. Their story in East Africa has much more humble beginnings and goes as far back as the Victorian era. The colonial rulers had set Asians up to be the buffer between them and and the lowly black Africans. At the time native Ugandans had little or no education, little or no knowledge of how to do business, to access loans, trade etc. Asian middlemen ran everything and w