Idi Amin's Expulsion Scatters East Africa's Jains

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 1972 Uganda's president Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of the country's Asian minority, a measure that formed part of a wider policy taking hold across the newly independent states of East Africa restricting commerce to citizens alone. The order fell on a Jain community that had spent the preceding century building businesses, homes and temples across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, a community whose presence traced back to Kutchi Jain traders who had first crossed the Indian Ocean generations earlier.

Within months, that century of arrival and settlement in East Africa reversed into a further migration outward, this time to Australia, North America and Europe. Families who had put down roots across three East African countries found themselves uprooted a second time, carrying what remained of their community life to entirely new continents rather than returning to India itself.

What this expulsion changed for Jainism's spread was decisive for where the tradition's Western institutions would eventually take shape. The displaced East African Jain community that scattered from Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania in 1972 was the direct cause of the community that would settle in Leicester and go on to found Britain's first fully consecrated Jain temple anywhere in the Western world, a foothold that traced its own origin to this expulsion rather than to any direct migration from India.