ECAS 2013

This paper explores the history of the Madhvani family in Uganda as part of the wider Indian community in the Great Lakes. It focuses on their localisation through the establishment of economic enterprises, social philanthropy, and cultural practices.

Muljibhai Madhvani (1894-1958) came to East Africa in the early 1900s. After working with relatives in the 1940s he set up a business that became one of the largest economic enterprises in Uganda. Particularly important was the sugar factory at Kakira near Jinja, where the Madhvanis lived. Madhvani built schools and hospitals open to all his employees irrespective of race, caste, or creed, and extended his philanthropic work across Jinja and Kampala districts. After his death, his son Manubhai Madhvani (1930-2011) took over the company, which is now directed by his grandsons.

In 1972, the Madhvanis were expelled from Uganda, but returned in the 1990s after Museveni invited Asians to come back. The Madhvanis perceived Kakira to be their home. Their localisation and sense of belonging was underlined by the burial ground and monument, by Lake Victoria, that was established in 1958 at the time of the founder's death, and where Manubhai Madhvani was buried in 2011 - reflecting the deep roots the family established in the Great Lakes region.

The paper uses archival and oral history as well as participant observation and argues that the rootedness of the Madhvani family has remained despite the dramatic shifts and transformations of the political landscape, the economic set-up, and personal lives that characterized twentieth-century Uganda.

For most of the colonial era, Bujumbura was a predominantly Muslim town. Although their numerical and political importance in town steadily declined, Muslims remained a part of the urban population to be reckoned with. In this paper I want to make sense of the evolution of this community's internal organization as interplay between local circumstances and challenges on the one hand, and long distance connections and influences on the other hand.

Having their ancestral roots west of the African Great Lakes and drawing their religious inspiration from the Indian Ocean world, the town's Muslims are carriers of a culture that is both East and Central African. At the same time, the community building as well as the changes in religious practices and social organization can only be understood within the very local circumstances of colonial Bujumbura.

I endeavour to disentangle these dynamics, bringing together Congolese, Swahili, Islamic, Burundian, intra-community and local/urban influences and interactions. The gradual adoption and adaptation of an Islamic identity, Qadiriyya Sufism and orthodox reform are explained against a background of very local challenges, a regional East Central African embeddedness.

In the end I argue for an explanatory scheme that includes layered and intertwined spatial scales that are simultaneously at work. Moreover, interlocking historical developments take place in different spheres of life and in different places, thereby constituting trans-local interconnectedness and local specificity at the same time.

In 1951 a survey of patients at Mulago Mental Hospital, Kampala, revealed that Banyarwanda immigrants comprised the second largest in-patient group at the hospital. Over the next two decades, immigrants and refugees from Rwanda became the subject of investigations into the relationship between migration, mental ill-health, and the 'African mind'. While at first psychiatrists argued that the Banyarwanda, like other Africans, held a form of 'psychotic immunity' in their 'natural environment' that was disrupted by migration and urbanization, by the early 1970s these migrants were regarded as representative of 'a disintegrated society'. Using interviews, reports, and research papers from Makerere Medical School, Butabika Hospital, and Mulago Mental Hospital, this paper examines ideas about the mental health of Banyarwanda immigrants and refugees in Kampala, 1951-1972. It focuses in particular on how mental health was related to living environments, behaviour, and race, and the implications this had for ideas about changing society in East Africa.