13/08/2026
My new post on a moment of sharp on-air disagreement between Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Manzoor Moghal, and what it tells us about what is at stake in competing narratives of the Ugandan Asian experience.
Kampala-born journalist Alibhai-Brown has written and spoken extensively about the Ugandan Asian experience, highlighting anti-Black racism in her own community, the brutality of Idi Amin's regime, popular racism in 1970s Britain, and her own strong sense of belonging in cosmopolitan London.
Moghal was a businessman and community leader in Masaka, then Leicester: he criticised the British state's role in expulsion and the racism Ugandan Asians faced in Britain; and wrote a biography of Amin, whom he knew personally, while stressing the depth of anti-Asian prejudice beyond him in Uganda.
The two were among five Ugandan Asian panellists who took part in a discussion about Ugandan Asian expulsion and resettlement on BBC Radio 4's The Reunion programme in 2012, in which they each broadly articulated versions of these narratives that they'd told on other occasions and formats.
The point of dispute arose when Moghal asserted that Amin was not wholly culpable for the expulsion, holding other actors, especially Britain, also responsible; this angered Alibhai-Brown, who castigated him for making this point given Amin's murderousness, describing his stance as ‘deeply immoral’.
As I argue in the piece, this was a clash between two essentially revisionist narrational projects, but also between Alibhai-Brown and Moghal's respective authority as legitimate tellers of the Ugandan Asian story, as well as between the emotions they had invested in it, and in the figure of Amin.
A sharp disagreement between Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Manzoor Moghal illustrated what was at stake in narrating the Ugandan Asian experience.
