Indian diaspora in East Africa
|
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| Regions with significant populations | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 South Africa
|
1,300,000 | |||||||||
 Mauritius
|
882,000 | |||||||||
 Réunion
|
220,000 | |||||||||
 Kenya
|
110,000 | |||||||||
 Tanzania
|
70,000 | |||||||||
 Mozambique
|
40,000 | |||||||||
 Madagascar
|
25,000 | |||||||||
 Zambia
|
13,000 | |||||||||
 Uganda
|
50,000 | |||||||||
 Malawi
|
4,000 | |||||||||
 Seychelles
|
5,000 | |||||||||
 Lesotho
|
4,000 | |||||||||
| Languages | ||||||||||
| Colonial Languages: Indian Languages: Local Languages: | ||||||||||
| Religion | ||||||||||
| Majority: Minority: | ||||||||||
| Related ethnic groups | ||||||||||
| People of Indian Origin | ||||||||||
The Indian diaspora in Southeast Africa consists of approximately 3 million people of Indian origin. Most of this diaspora in Southeast Africa arrived in the 19th century as British indentured labourers, many of them to work on the Kenya–Uganda railway. Others had arrived earlier by sea as traders.
In the British Empire, the labourers, originally referred to as "coolies", were indentured labourers who lived under conditions often resembling slavery. The system, inaugurated in 1834 in Mauritius, involved the use of licensed agents after slavery had been abolished in the British Empire. The agents imported indentured labour to replace the slaves. The labourers were however only slightly better off than the slaves had been. They were supposed to receive either minimal wages or some small form of payout (such as a small parcel of land, or the money for their return passage) upon completion of their indentures. Employers did not have the right to buy or sell indentured labourers as they did slaves.
Of the original 32,000 contracted labourers, after the end of indentured service about 6,700 stayed on to work as dukawallas, artisans, traders, clerks, and, finally, lower-level administrators. Colonial personnel practices excluded them from the middle and senior ranks of the colonial government and from farming; instead they became commercial middlemen and professionals, including doctors and lawyers.
It was the dukawalla, not European settlers, who first moved into new colonial areas. Even before the dukawallas, Indian traders had followed the Arab trading routes inland on the coast of modern-day Kenya and Tanzania. Indians had a virtual lock on Zanzibar's lucrative trade in the 19th century, working as the Sultan's exclusive agents.
Between the building of the railways and the end of World War II, the number of Indians in Southeast Africa swelled to 320,000. By the 1940s, some colonial areas had already passed laws restricting the flow of immigrants, as did white-ruled Rhodesia in 1924. But by then, the Indians had firmly established control of commercial trade — some 80 to 90 percent in Kenya and Uganda was in the hands of Indians — plus some industrial activities. In 1948, all but 12 of Uganda's 195 cotton ginneries were Indian run. Banknotes of the East African shilling had values written in Gujarati as well as English and Arabic.
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Wikipedia