Manubhai Madhvani: Asians from Uganda

Twenty five years ago, Manubhai Madhvani joined thousands of Asians fleeing Uganda in the exodus of 1972. It was a traumatic uprooting, precipitated by the ruthless dictator ldi Amin, who with Teutonic efficiency, purged the country of around 80,000 Asians in just 90 days. Madhvani’s first glimpse of the dull grey skies of England was from an old army barracks set up near Stansted to accommodate planeload after planeload of refugees. Around 35,000 landed with very small suitcases and a handful of their possessions, some with no more than the shirts on their backs, as the army would often stop departing immigrants and steal everything they had.

Britain, at the time, was not particularly receptive to the immigrant flood – it was the years of the fiery Enoch Powell rhetoric and his famous “rivers of blood” speech. He told a meeting in Southall that “Asian immigration was more dangerous than black power.” English towns like Leicester bore warning placards: “No more Asians. Leicester is full up,” “Our plight was very close to that of the Jews during the war,” the 82-year-old Madhvani recalls. He had only just made his financial mark in Uganda when the order to leave came. At the time, his businesses were at their peak, employing some 12,000 people and accounting for 8-10 per cent of Uganda’s GDP. He says he lost Ł62 million invested in property from a family business originally set up in Uganda by his uncle in 1896.

Before leaving, Madhvani was imprisoned for three weeks – suspected by the Ugandan authorities of being a British spy – an episode linked to the English director of one of his companies, a man he remembers only as “Mr Stewart”. Mr Stewart, based in Kampala, wrote regularly to his wife who lived in Britain. On one occasion, his letters were intercepted and opened by Amin’s police. They happened to contain several political comments on the state of things in Africa including disparaging remarks about several senior African politicians. He was arrested at once and jailed and Madhvani took it upon himself to inform and liaise with the British high commission in Kampala as to the whereabouts of his employee. This angered the authorities and Madhvani was also detained and placed in the same cells as his director.

The British high commission then swung into action, filing a writ of habeas corpus for the release of Mr Stewart; this was granted by the then chief justice Ben Kinwaka who only a few days later was dragged from his home by Amin’s bodyguards and brutally killed.

Madhvani was a Ugandan citizen at the time and his wife kept up a steady stream of phone calls to Makinde prison where he was being held. Her repeated pleas for information about her husband were persistently fobbed off. Madhvani says he really felt no danger to his life though. “It was a threat to frighten Asians by Amin, I was interrogated about various things – how many Asians I employed in my businesses, how many North Africans and so on.” But when Madhvani’s wife asked Amin what he intended doing to her husband, she was told: “Don’t worry, he is my brother.”

He recalls Amin as a “rough man”, a “soldier with animal instincts”, a brutal man who forced his children to observe the mutilated body of their mother after Amin killed her and who had a sixth sense about plots to overthrow him, which is why many attempts to kill him failed.

But Madhvani believes, as several political commentators do, that Amin’s entire plan to rid the country of Asians was no more than a huge smokescreen to hide his real intentions. “Not more than 3-5 Asians were actually killed. In the enormous publicity glare that accompanied the Asian migration, Amin secretly eliminated almost 3000-4000 of his political enemies.”

Today, Madhvani has clawed his way back up the success ladder. Seated in his luxurious office in central London where the setting and decor speak of refinement and restraint, he is far away from these memories. A gigantic engraved seven-foot map of the world is sprawled across one wall and Madhvani’s glance falls upon it sometimes like Alexander surveying the breadth of his Macedonian empire. Historians say Alexander wept because there were no more worlds left to conquer but Madhvani’s genial face is serene. At the age of 82, he has achieved it all, business success, a family, the works. After the expulsion, he set up his own company in London called Indeco dealing in glass, property, technology and electronics. But he kept a 20 per cent stake in family’s Ugandan based Madhvani group whose fortunes are once again on the upswing.

“What does one do now,” he asks mildly with a slightly perplexed expression. “I’m semi-retired,” he says, with the manner of one all dressed up with nowhere to go.

“Uganda is the country of my birth and I have a strange attachment to the country I was born in. It’s a beautiful place, all 93,000 square miles of it. Mind you, one third is water. Anywhere you throw a seed, it grows. Plant any stick from a tree, it grows. It’s a fertile country and the temperature is not high – only 15-17 degrees Celsius – ideal for agriculture – it grows 250,000 tonnes of coffee” he drones on with a faraway dreamy look sounding very much like an advertisement for the Ugandan Tourist Board.

His demonstration of gratitude is to play a major role in the 25 year silver jubilee celebrations of Ugandan independence that begin all over Britain next month. These include a visit by President Yoweri Museveni and a multi-faith celebration at the Swaminarayan temple in north London.

Madhvani’s demons would appear curious to most of us Schedule E taxpayers who live from one salary cheque to the next. He has no fear of losing it all- he has lost it all before.

Asked to enumerate his favourite novelists, he takes on the elusiveness of a Zen master. “All or none,” he intones cryptically in East African English accent, brushing aside any persistence with a Sphinx-like “there is something to be found in every book one reads so they could all be my favourites or none.”

“Contentment is simply understanding oneself” is another of his pat quickfire answers.

At 80, he has matured like a bottle of good wine – he has seen it all, done it all and nothing seems to faze him. His story perhaps bears resemblance to that of another adventurous entrepreneur who made his fortune in Africa, Tiny Rowland. Like Rowland, Madhvani has known success and failure and treated those two impostors just the same. Like Rowland, he was a pathbreaker, matching Lonrho’s sprawling businesses with a Ł500 million sugar empire that stretched across most of East Africa. But the similarity stops here: Rowland was a man in a hurry, driven by demons, a rebel tycoon who bent the rules, bribed African dictators, and was once called by Edward Heath the “unacceptable face of capitalism.” Madhvani, on the other hand, is held in high esteem by the Asian community as a gentleman who plays by the book. He admits to being an archetypal establishment man, an admirer of Gandhi, who he says embodied the virtues of patience and humility which he so admires. His one small vanity however, seem to have been to publish a book of photographs entitled A Reflection which was taken on his trips to India. The photographs are quite ordinary. “But they are my unique perception of India,” he says.