Original subtitles

CHEERING

# Idi, Idi, Idi Amin

# Most amazing man there's ever been

# He the general, the president The king of the sea

# Idi, Idi, Idi Amin. #

This is a mass grave in which

at least 100 bodies lie buried - all victims of Idi Amin's army...

# Be the general, the president... #

I must reorganise this country.

..hacked to death,

or, in some cases, blown up by grenades.

I am only one leader who is not in the pocket of any imperialist.

GUNSHOT

Are you not afraid of interviewing

the conqueror of the British Empire, as you are British?

You are not afraid?

In September 1972

Uganda's Asian community is in the grip of a tyrant.

We heard horrible stories about men being taken,

women being raped, being killed,

and we didn't know what was going on.

As a child, you're holding all that horror in you.

Idi Amin has given them 90 days

to leave the country or face dire consequences.

If they fail to leave before the deadline,

they'll be sent into concentration camps run by the army.

As kids, we realised something was wrong,

but people couldn't believe it, because this was home.

You know, Uganda was home.

The British Government has finally agreed to accept them.

But Amin's threats are intensifying.

Mr Rippon seems to think that three months is too short.

And some people in Uganda say that even Saturday is too long.

Overnight, you can hear tanks, gunfire.

Bang-bang-bang-bang.

You're like a prisoner, thinking, "Are they coming here?"

With time running out, the only way to survive is to escape.

We were already a target.

The life of 26,000 people was at risk at that time.

EXHALES

I remember the day Idi Amin took over.

I had a dream. It was really weird.

And I dreamt that lots and lots of soldiers came into the town

and they started shooting randomly.

And I remember writing it down in the English homework that we did.

Miss Read, who was the head teacher,

called me into her office and she said to me,

"Where did you read this?"

And I said, "It was just a dream I had."

And then she said to me, "Don't speak about this to anybody.

"We don't need to mention this dream."

And she folded up the paper and she just put it away.

But now that dream is actually happening.

I just remember, that little boy was dead.

Just thrown down the hill like a piece of rubbish.

After what had happened at the checkpoint

I still expected to feel the bullets

coming in through the back of the car and hitting us.

It was a several-hour journey to Kampala, but we did not talk.

We did not talk about the soldiers.

When we tried to talk about the boy

my mum said, "Put it out of your mind."

It's one month since Idi Amin announced the expulsion.

Asians are now fleeing the countryside for the capital Kampala.

Many are hoping to escape to Britain.

We arrived in Kampala

and there were thousands of Asians in the streets.

It was almost surreal.

It was like, the sky is blue, the sun is out there.

It should be an idyllic place.

And yet there is this shadow

that sort of hangs over everybody.

I realised that we were in a very dangerous position.

We didn't know how we were going to get out of Uganda.

You just wait after three months.

They will be sitting like they are sitting on the fire.

You will see.

LAUGHTER

This was an afternoon get-together.

The main event was a basketball game

and the star player was Idi Amin - captain of the presidential team.

Idi Amin's team won every game and his opponents,

try as they might, never manage to get one ball in the net.

No-one seemed surprised.

At his state house, Amin is jubilant.

Britain has agreed to the expulsion in less than four weeks.

The president now feels he holds all the cards

and can afford to ignore any appeals from Britain.

I said when I took over the responsibility

of Asians in Uganda,

it is the responsibility of Great Britain.

President Major General Idi Amin Dada

has today announced his vision for the future of Uganda.

All Asians will not be allowed to own businesses after 90 days.

All businesses will be handed over to Ugandan ownership.

Amin now turns the screw.

Uganda's Asians can only take one suitcase

and £50 when they leave.

They must sell everything they have

between now and the 90 days from Monday.

This is what I have said.

I heard the news on the radio.

I was totally shocked and surprised that,

you know, we had to wind down our business completely.

At that time,

my photographic studio created jobs for local people.

So I gave the livelihood to six or seven people.

Otherwise they would be either

loitering in the farm or doing nothing.

And I did not want to leave Uganda.

But now I could see that I'll be left penniless.

It is a time of rejoicing,

for only now we can build a stronger Uganda together.

Overnight, hundreds of Asian businesses go up for sale.

Kampala is full of queues.

This time they're waiting at

the Ministry of Commerce and Industry

for forms on which to list their assets,

their property and their businesses.

But at the other window, African businessmen applying

to purchase the shops the Asians are having to sell

are delighted at the prospect.

I like it very much. You see, this is a golden opportunity.

What kind of business would you like to buy?

I would like to take up hardware business.

Aha. Hardware. And you say this is a golden opportunity?

It is.

How long would this business stay here?

They will never get out.

Idi Amin didn't have any ideology.

He just wanted power, control.

And he was a cheap, cheap populist.

He knew very well how

to secure support for his dictatorship.

He was telling the black population

that the Asians have been ripping you off.

The Asians are our enemies, effectively.

They are the cancer in our society.

We've got to get rid of that cancer and then you will have a life.

Then you will flourish.

And that was very successful -

very successful amongst a lot of black population.

Well, I think that generally the resentment

is very great among the people.

They feel that they have been cheated for long...

..and certain...the people themselves

took over from these Asians.

In 1972 I was running my own business making shirts.

When Idi Amin expelled the Indians

I thought to a good extent that it was their fault

because they had exploited so many Africans.

The Indians owned probably 95% of the businesses.

The Indians were the managers, the owners, the planners,

and the Africans were just labourers.

And that's how the economy ended up in their hands.

And on top of that, they kept themselves to themselves.

And the Indians kept a kind of community of their own.

And that did not endear them too much to the Africans.

I started to notice the public become more hostile towards

the Asian people and saying,

"You people are taking all of our money from here."

They started hating Indians because we are the scapegoat.

It's good for them to go. Why?

They have sucked us enough.

I want them to go back, to go.

You want them to go? Oh, yes.

Each day now, groups of Africans

are touring Asian houses demanding what they can buy.

The beds fetched £2 apiece and the purchasers made sure

the springs were well tested while the family looked on.

It was a little bit chaotic in that people were

scrambling to get what the Asians used to have.

Many, many people thought now the chance had come.

We are sharing the fruits of the expulsion.

I think Amin thought, by upping the ante,

I will make it more

than ever certain that they hurry out,

that they surrender everything they have here before they go

and leave not a jewel in their own pocket.

He knew exactly the horrible game that he was playing.

What the people will do when they are out of job?

What they will eat? They leave you to starve?

We could only take £50 and one suitcase.

All the people who had worked their lifetime, overnight became poor.

Everybody lost everything.

All businesses had to lock up, close their businesses,

and register their keys with the local police station,

which my dad did.

So my dad was a plumber by trade and

had his own business.

But then, one horrific night,

these three armed personnel walked in our house.

They said to my dad, "We want to take you for questioning."

And they walked out of the door with him.

So at this point, Dad was missing.

When Amin kind of took over, I mean, you know,

there are lots of stories about his killing sprees

and using the armed forces to kill people.

So we were really scared.

We had no idea why this happened.

The following day, it was suggested that my dad had ended up at prison.

Thankfully, Dad was OK.

But there's other people being held there.

He could see prisoners

with their Achilles tendon cut off so they wouldn't escape.

So the foot was always limp.

The guards asked Dad, "Do you know why you've been brought in?"

He said, "No."

He said, "You've been brought in because there's a charge

"you sold one of your machines

"when you were told to lock up your workshop."

So Dad gave him the dates and keys.

He said, "If you check the logs, you will see that I logged this."

To our surprise, he was told, "Fine, that's OK.

"You've been discharged. You can go home now."

Nobody kind of batted an eyelid, which was very strange.

For me, as a 12, 13-year-old child,

Dad coming home was like the best thing ever.

My dad said he would never forget the screams in the night.

He said, "They still haunt me."

So Dad lived with that experience.

After Dad was released from prison

we decided to kind of leave as quickly as possible.

We knew we had to get out of this country.

Dad said, "We need to try to get to England."

As kids, England meant nothing to us.

All I knew about England was, "London Bridge is falling down."

# London Bridge is falling down

# Falling down, falling down

# London Bridge is falling down

# My fair lady. #

The British High Commission in Kampala

has been besieged by thousands

of Asians trying to clarify their national status

and seeking assurance

that they'll be allowed to enter Britain.

Inside, a desperately overworked consular staff

grappled with the individual problems of those who'd

suddenly realised how bleak their future in Uganda looked.

The Government decided that they had to send extra people

from the immigration service. So I was pleased to be selected,

I suppose, because they only selected a few people.

I'm not sure if I was selected or victimised.

At the time I was about 30 and this was my first overseas posting.

This photograph shows the inside of our office

and you can see me on the extreme left.

The objective was to get everybody out in the time available.

However, all the Asians had a problem.

Yes, they had a British passport, but not a UK passport.

Their passports were noted inside,

countries for which valid - British East Africa,

and generally speaking, India - but never valid for the UK.

Legislation was passed

that we could issue them with a specific document,

a settlement document,

so we would put the entry certificates in the passports

and then we would do a basic interview.

Mother's passport, father's passport,

and your British nationality documents.

They all knew that they would get their documents.

It was just a question of when they would get to the counter,

because the queue of people went out

of the door and along the street for quite a long way.

How many days have you been here? Seven at least.

Seven at least.

We never reached the door. Never reached the door?

Yeah. Never reached the door.

Are you worried?

Some people seem worried here about the situation.

Well, definitely. You see that, at the moment,

as you can see, every day you get a bloody new forms to fill it up.

And every day, new, law, you know, and new rules.

And you don't know what to do next.

I went out to Uganda at the beginning of September.

We made a point of filming the queues.

And it was very shocking.

I'd not seen human fear before of any significant kind.

I've seen a lot afterwards.

But even though the faces were still, the eyes betrayed

the anxiety, the fear, the uncertainty.

Don't forget - those were all men lining up there.

They all had families. They had children.

They feared for what was going to happen to them.

They were terrified.

As soon as Amin took over there were

so many people warning my father to leave.

People that he worked with, people that he knew.

I was nine years old at the time.

I was born in Kampala.

Growing up, there was no racial tension.

There was nothing like that.

I can remember playing football in the streets together as a team,

not having one side Africans, one side Asians.

It was mixed, but with a click of a finger,

everything changed in life.

Where are you going? Going to an appointment.

What sort of appointment? You think these people do not have...?

No, no. I can...

No, go down. I got letter.

My father used to work for a company called Motor Mart.

He was a parts manager there.

That job disappeared overnight.

So my dad said that we need to get out of the country.

We would stand in the queue,

in that heat, to get the documents signed off.

People were panicking.

Stressed.

It was a nightmare.

We need to get out, but we can't.

It was a scary moment.

We had gone to one of my cousin's houses.

My mum was at the embassy

for at least three, four days.

But at night everybody had a curfew.

You couldn't go out,

and if you went out after a certain time, you would be shot.

So my mum said, "You are not going to leave this bedroom."

GUNFIRE

There were quite often gunshots during the night.

And you could hear the trundle of the truck.

The soldiers would stop and they would knock on the doors.

My mum sent my brother to go and put a big bolt across the front door

so that the house looked like nobody was living there.

I remember there was another Asian family

who lived next door to us - a couple with twin babies.

We heard the soldiers come there.

KNOCK AT DOOR

We heard them smash the doors in,

and you could hear that really clearly.

And we were just waiting for the inevitable.

GUNSHOTS

And then...

..they came to our door.

KNOCKING

Mum was like, "Just really, really be quiet."

They rattled it,

but the lock was heavy and thick

and they didn't attempt to break it down.

We could hear the truck leaving.

And it's only later on I realised

they were taking dead bodies to the Nile.

I have directed the troops

that they must not harm any Asians.

The Government wants to be able to lift 15,000 people

in three weeks,

a job that would require at least 100 flights

at the rate of five a day.

Every British independent airline with long haul equipment

was summoned to the Department of Trade and Industry today.

Britain, India and Canada

have agreed to accept many of Uganda's 80,000 Asians.

To conduct the evacuation,

their governments have turned to the private sector.

# I've found a better way to fly

# I've found a better way to touch the sky... #

British Caledonian.

# British Caledonian. #

In 1972, I worked for British Caledonian Airways

and I would have been 28.

To describe my role in one sentence,

it was to make happen and facilitate the whole of the airlift.

The British Government had decided they would call a meeting

of all the British airlines that served Uganda.

They had absolutely no idea of basic questions,

like how is it to be organised?

So we were in something like an information vacuum there.

But it was made clear to us that we had to help these people,

and the deadline was fast approaching.

So I was on the first flight the following morning

to start work.

I mean, if you think about an airlift,

first and most important is how many people?

And nobody knew how many people were involved.

You know, we had things like...

If we were going to issue tickets to people -

and legally you had to issue a ticket to somebody -

where were we going to do it?

We set up what was, by any standards,

a unique airline ticketing office

on the roof of the Bank of Uganda building in Kampala.

It was an open roof.

There were no awnings of any sort up there.

There were no phones, nothing.

And the only way to access it

was up a staircase of three flights.

It was a logistical nightmare.

The British Government said that the tickets

had to be paid for by the travellers themselves,

and I was very shocked at the time that that was the requirement.

I passionately believe that the correct thing to do

was for the British Government to pick up the bill.

It didn't.

But the passengers tolerated this system

because it was their exit route from Uganda.

ON RADIO: Attention all Ugandans.

Our country has been under attack.

Radio Uganda has heard that, last night,

rebels attacked our loyal forces.

Our brave soldiers successfully destroyed these traitors.

On the 17th of September,

Amin's army crush a small uprising in southern Uganda.

It rattles Amin,

and he claims without evidence

that Uganda's Asians are involved.

Anyone who seizes power illegitimately by force

never feels safe.

Idi Amin had no legitimacy apart from the barrel of a gun.

He was observably paranoid,

so any threat had to be suppressed immediately.

Very often, like people with paranoia,

he saw threats that didn't exist.

We left on the 18th of September, when everything got even worse.

There was an intensification of the pressure on anyone

who could be seen as a potential opponent to his rule,

who were rounded up, imprisoned and, in some cases, murdered.

Barbaric new techniques of mass murder were patented here.

A prisoner would be made to lie face down and then wait

for another prisoner to smash his skull

with a hammer or other heavy object.

His killer would then suffer the same fate

until the last in line would be shot.

Around that period,

I think there was a significant element of apprehension,

concern, uncertainty for Idi Amin.

And indeed, that's why he killed so many people -

because he thought they were just about to kill him.

Confusion is the true description of how those days were.

Fear, especially by the Asian community.

People changed.

Before that, the African people

would not look eye to eye with an Indian woman -

and respect was given.

That changed overnight. Changed.

Now they were looked at as a piece of meat.

My dad had sorted out all our paperwork, passports.

He came home, and he says, "It's time to go."

I can remember packing.

I asked my mum, I said, "Do you want me to take my books?

"My school books?"

She goes, "No, nothing.

"Just take what we need to take."

My dad says, "I've got a coach from Kampala

"to Entebbe Airport."

I think my mum and dad were on the left-hand side.

I was nearest to the window, next to my brother.

Then, my sister, she was behind him.

Halfway to the airport, we got stopped.

Idi Amin's people walked in.

All they were interested in - gold and money.

So my dad started collecting it.

Everybody else started doing the same thing.

Hey!

And a gentleman was sitting in the back,

got up and came forward,

having an argument with the officer.

And he says to the Asian gentleman,

"Where's your family?"

So he called his family over.

Come.

The daughter must have been 16, 17.

And he says, "Come outside."

I can remember...

..the leader slapping this Asian gentleman on the face.

The daughter...

They...

They raped her.

They raped...

..that girl...

..in...

..front of my eyes.

Just there.

My brother couldn't see it.

They were screaming. The mother was screaming.

The grandma was screaming.

My dad looked at me

and made a hand gesture for us to stand up

so that we can shield my sister,

who was just behind us.

Half an hour later,

the family walked in.

The father was holding the daughter in his arms.

And they went to the back of the coach.

Pin-drop silent.

Nobody said anything.

Idi Amin's people just left.

50-odd years I've been carrying this story.

What happened to the family, where they went -

nobody knows. I don't know.

Every time I talk about it, it...

..er, destroys me a little bit.

# London Bridge is falling down

# Falling down, falling down

# London Bridge is falling down... #

How do you think Birmingham's going to cope

with all the Ugandan Asians coming here?

Well, that's it, isn't it?

We're overloaded now, aren't we?

We've got enough here to start with.

It won't help the situation whatsoever, will it?

In Britain, a newspaper poll reveals only 6% of the population

want Uganda's Asians to come.

I'm just fed up to here. I am.

You don't think they should come here?

No, I don't. Definitely. Why not?

They've got no ties with Britain,

neither by creed, way of living or anything else.

By mid-September,

one city has become the centre of opposition.

Today, Leicester has 26,000 Asians,

the largest immigrant community in Britain,

and many new arrivals are bound to be attracted here.

I was born in Leicester, so Leicester was my home town.

And between 1970 and 1973, I was in the City Council.

There was a real fear in Leicester

that they were going to take our jobs,

cause problems in the schools.

Every area of life was thought to be likely to be affected.

I always thought that Leicester was a very good place to come,

because it would benefit from people who were relatively well educated,

who were entrepreneurial.

All this would be good for our local economy.

But also, I just felt huge compassion for them -

because they were leaving behind everything.

I felt in my bones

that we had a moral obligation to welcome them

and to look after them,

and I wasn't expecting the degree of anger and animosity.

ON LOUDSPEAKER: This is the National Front,

Britain's new patriotic political party.

SHOUTING

The National Front moved to Leicester.

They drove around the city with a Jeep-like vehicle

with a Union Jack on it.

They had marches and demonstrations,

and we had counter-marches

and counter-demonstrations against them.

SHOUTING

We had hate mail shoved through the door.

We had telephone calls in the middle of the night

saying pretty vile things.

It became a time of great tension.

The City Council is doing everything in its power

to discourage Asians from coming.

We asked one of the leading councillors,

Alderman Kenneth Bowder, why.

If these Ugandan Asians come,

there's no doubt that they will add to overcrowding.

And once they arrive within the city,

we won't get rid of them once they've come.

It was decided by the City Council

that we should do what we could in the first place

to stop Ugandan Asians coming.

So what I'm looking at now is an advertisement

placed in newspapers in Uganda by Leicester City Council.

And it says:

"Housing - several thousand families are already

"on the council's waiting list.

"Hundreds of children are awaiting places in the schools.

"Social and health services already stretched to the limit.

"In your own interests,

"you should accept the advice of the Ugandan Resettlement Board

"and not come to Leicester."

I remember this particular advertisement

saying that Leicester has got "too many of you people".

I would use the word deplorable.

When you see something like that,

people didn't know what to do.

Do we leave the country? Is this a joke?

If we leave the country, where do we go?

For all patriots in Uganda,

today is the day that the first plane carrying Asians

will be leaving our country.

Only now we can build a stronger Uganda together.

The day of the first airlift flight, I was in the city of Kampala.

The aircraft arrived at the airport

ready to take people nonstop to London.

The airport was built for about 40 people per flight to depart.

And on that first flight, there were going to be nearly 200.

So it was a melee.

The feeling in the airport that day,

you never forget it.

You never forget it.

BABY CRIES

If I had to choose a single word to describe it,

I'd say it was forlorn.

You could see the look on their faces.

They were in a place they never wanted to be.

They'd been through experiences

they'd never wanted to experience.

They were being expelled from their homes of decades,

going to an unknown world.

This was something that,

a few weeks before,

none of them would have contemplated in any way whatsoever.

And, er, what would you do?

With a simple order - "get out" - the Asian has been humbled,

stripped and revealed to the African as a mere mortal.

The first flights really made it dawn on people...

..that it was not a mere dream,

that actually it is true.

The majority of Ugandans

did not expect the expulsion of Indians.

Idi Amin thought he would be supported

and loved for that.

We were jubilating at that time, that the Indians were leaving.

People were extremely happy about it.

More Asians prepare to leave the country.

More shops were being closed.

Their bid to turn Kampala and other towns in Uganda

into another Bombay had failed.

The African businessmen were eager to take over

the running of their country's economy.

When the Africans took over the businesses,

of course there were some who took over

some complicated businesses.

I knew of a company

which was manufacturing glass tumblers -

using boilers, I think, which smelted sand

or something like that.

And his friends would say,

"Well, what pressure must be in the boiler and what temperature?"

And he would guess.

The boiler blew up

and the business came to a standstill.

The shops which were taken by some Ugandans -

the new owners would sell everything

and then there would be no restocking.

The business literally collapsed.

The Asians had not allowed the Africans

to know things about how to order things

from foreign countries.

They had no idea about how to run the businesses.

So there were some shortages.

As the Asians leave,

Uganda's economy begins to crack.

Some of the Asians who were expelled were not just businesspeople,

but were leading specialists in medicine,

prominent professors,

great researchers.

Those fields where they were suffered.

Undeterred,

Amin presses on.

Mr Rippon seems to think that three months

is too short to send all the British Asians away.

And some people in Uganda say that even 30 days is too long.

Thousands of Asians are still trapped,

waiting for visas.

We had to stand in the line for days.

But eventually,

when we got the permission to come here,

we had a relief.

But on that night,

my wife rang me up and says she had a visitor.

Our friend, who was a Ugandan army sergeant,

had come and informed her:

"Tell Mr Mashru to go overnight - because his name

"is on a hit list."

Could you imagine?

Over my head, there is a sword hanging.

I understand it was because of my involvement

with the photographs of those dead bodies in the lake.

Those dead bodies had come from the army people

who probably were the opposition for Mr Amin.

So this is why they were coming for my life.

I told my wife to make sure that all the bags were packed up,

and pack a bag of cameras and my press card.

Whether we will come out of that country alive

was the question.

Luckily, we were able to get all our visas sorted,

so the house was left as it was

with all the tables, chairs, everything, fully furnished.

Never saw the house again.

That's how simple it was at the time.

A taxi had been arranged by my mum.

When we got inside the airport, it was packed!

There were loads of soldiers with their guns

walking around,

and they really went through our suitcases

with a fine-tooth comb.

My mum had some gold wrapped in a hanky.

The soldier said to her, "You can't take this."

And I remember my mum started crying.

And she said, "I'm a widow.

"I've got these five children.

"How am I going to survive?"

And I remember it was a female soldier.

And she looked at me.

She looked at my brother and my sisters.

And then the woman said very loudly, "You can't take this.

"I'm going to keep it."

Then she handed it very surreptitiously

to my mum and she said, "Don't say anything.

"And if anybody asks you,

"I did not give it to you - or I will kill you."

So my mum put it away in a handbag

and we just ran onto the plane.

And at this point, we're excited - as kids.

Never been on a plane before.

And I'm looking around at the other passengers,

and they were quite scared,

wanting to leave as quickly as possible.

But for me, we had our family around us.

It felt safe.

So we sat. The doors are locked. Everything's OK.

And then suddenly somebody says,

"Look, there's Amin."

President Idi Amin was here at the airport.

It's like somebody's turned the tap off.

Absolute silence.

Do you know the sense where your face changes

when you're tense?

And looking around, you can see other passengers.

Eyes wide,

furrows on their forehead

and jaws clenched.

And then he went back into the car.

The cavalcade's gone past the wing

to some parade further up the field.

And the captain announces:

"Fasten your seat belts, please sit down."

And: "We're ready for take-off. We've been given clearance."

Still not sure what's happening.

Slowly, the plane starts to move.

And it's palpable, the tension.

You can... You can feel it.

And then, eventually, you can hear the plane start to rumble.

Slowly picks up speed.

The wheels have just kind of left the ground.

And then eventually you hear the clunking of the landing gear

and everything else folding into the plane.

And it's at that point you hear this huge sigh of relief.

And we leave Uganda.

Well, we didn't leave.

We were forced out.

As children, it never struck us

that we were never going to see Uganda again.

We thought, "We'll be back.

"When Idi Amin's gone, we'll be back."

But my mum knew that was it.

We were never going back.

REPORTER: The Asians arrived in cold, wet weather.

Many of them lack rainwear,

yet most seem cheerful and pleased to be in England.

We arrived in England in October, 1972.

And I just remember getting off the plane.

I looked down, and all I could feel was this mighty pinching

on the skin.

Then I realised it's the cold.

It was, like, biting my skin.

It felt like bites all over my skin.

Because we only had a cardigan on.

It was absolutely freezing.

Many of the newcomers were ill-equipped

to face the chilly English drizzle that greeted them.

You've had a very wet welcome this morning.

How do you feel to be here?

Well, we enjoy it.

You're happy to be here, are you? Yeah.

When we got into the building,

there were English people who handed us a coat.

The sense of relief of that coat was just...

Never felt anything like that.

It just felt like being cocooned with warmth.

Those people were very kind to us.

They were served with refreshments by voluntary welfare workers

from at least eight British organisations.

We arrived there safe.

I had no idea what England was,

where we were.

And suddenly this was home.

What a start.

£50 and a few suitcases.

You know, you think about it and you think,

"My God, we've come a long way," you know?

LAUGHTER

Over 28,000 Ugandan Asians arrived in Britain.

They settled across the country.

Some 5,000 moved to Leicester.

When we arrived, we were not welcome in Leicester,

but we managed to get a house.

I had no money, but I built my own studio

with the £100 limit I had on my credit card.

That was my humble beginning of life in UK.

As the time progressed, there was a change.

People realised that we did not come here to exploit

the riches of this country.

We came here to make our livelihood again.

And now I've got a happy house, happy family,

and I'm enjoying the life.

I'm glad I'm here.

I love it.

I love England.

And we Asians respected the country.

I've just turned 63.

I've been working from the age of 16.

I've got three kids.

Two boys and a girl.

I've seen some of the worst things in life.

And that's, I think, made me stronger.

Life goes on.

Although it was traumatic in the beginning...

..in a strange way, I'm grateful.

Because coming to England,

I got opportunities

I probably would never have had in Uganda -

as a female.

I went on to study to be a social worker.

My job is to just make sure that children

who are in care,

that their needs are being met.

And that's where I am now.

I've been in the job for coming up to 40 years.

For a long time,

I really wanted to adopt a child.

I think I wanted almost, like, a full circle.

I was adopted. I was happy.

And, er...

Yeah, my daughter, she was abandoned, just like me.

And I was really, really blessed to be picked for her.

And, yeah, my daughter is now 21 and going to university,

and I'm just a very happy person.

I'm in a very happy place.

Rajni Mashru, you've got a successful

photographic business here in Leicester now.

Would you go back to Uganda? I don't think so.

Because the thing is that, you know, I've just settled down -

or I'm settling down into this country.

And going back into Uganda,

it's like sort of I'm going back to a country

where it's 20 years behind the civilisation.

When Idi Amin expelled the Asians,

Uganda's economy collapsed.

The social services suffered immensely.

It left many scars.

It is, in fact, Uganda as a country that suffered most.

Throughout the 1970s,

Uganda's economy shrank by 20%

as Idi Amin continued his reign of terror.

The number of Ugandans dead

was estimated to be about half a million.

It could even be more.

And this turned people against him.

CHEERING

In 1979, Amin was overthrown.

We have won! We have won!

CHANTING

He died in 2003,

exiled in Saudi Arabia.

I look at it as having been one of the very dark moments

of Uganda's history.

Uganda's example has been a powerful lesson to show

that it does not pay to persecute or punish people

because of their race.

And I hope no country will repeat such a mistake.

You hold on to these memories that make you as a person.

You live them in your heart and your mind.

But you can't go back.

So you have to move forward.