Minorities and the State in Africa By Michael U. Mbanaso and Chi ...

groups.¹⁵ Indians were victims of riots in East Africa during Idi Amin's rule in Uganda because they were seen as dominating the economy while rejecting social integration with the host communities.

The presence of a small number of Indians and Chinese in Africa obviously introduces a different dimension to African minority issues. Though often numerically small, the Asian minority has been economically successful despite being marginal in wielding political power. This ambivalent position has left them insecure and vulnerable, especially as they have successfully resisted assimilation in either multicultural or mono-cultural societies. Their resistance to cultural assimilation despite the commercial resources that their diasporic communities afforded them becomes a trade-off for the unique advantages of a middleman trading community. Their ambivalent positions as minorities have to be understood from the perception of these groups as “stranger” elements as opposed to “native” even if they have settled for generations and are full citizens of their countries. The fact that they created pockets of communities that are isolated culturally from the other groups and are most likely to marry within their own ethnic groups creates and perpetuates boundaries of social difference, which often translates to ethnic problems and hatred.

Nowhere were these sorts of tenuous relations more visible than in the relationship between Indians and Africans in South Africa. Indians were brought as indentured laborers to work mostly in sugarcane fields in the nineteenth century by the British, and the self-segregation that existed between the Indian population and the Africans was exacerbated by the implementation of apartheid in South Africa. Unlike the African population, the Indian community made remarkable economic progress, which inevitably increased the divide between the Indian population and Africans in the post-apartheid period. According to a New York Times report, South Africa's Indian population had faced a quandary in the past: “They are resented by many blacks, who see them as exploitative outsiders who treat Africans with condescension, if not outright disdain, yet they have never been accepted by whites.”¹⁶ And even on the eve of black majority rule, the Indian population supported the National Party