Arabs, Persians, Indians and even adventurous traders from the Far East had already set foot on the eastern coast of Africa many centuries ago. Whereas the continent’s entire western coastline borders the immense part of the Atlantic Ocean, its eastern coastline borders an interior sea lined by countries that are endowed with commercial traditions: the Emirate coast, the southern part of Persia, India, which even shares its name with the eponymous ocean and has since ancient times dotted its shores with trading posts.
Brief background on immigrationĢ Let us look at a map of the African continent. In relation to the urban population, this decline is even more spectacular for Kenya alone, dropping from 18 % in 1962 to 1.5 % in 2001. In addition, the relatively high population growth recorded from the 1980s should not conceal the fact that the ratio of this immigrant population to the entire population of the three countries shrank from about 1 % in 1963 to 0.15 % in 2007. It explains difficulties for members of the diaspora to fit into the newly founded national entities. Resulting from xenophobic reactions, this demographic instability was also caused by identity insecurity. Reaching a population of over 350,000 people in the beginning of the 1960s, the Indian diaspora went through great changes in terms of population growth, with a 100,000 decline towards the end of the 1970s and a contemporary rise of 150,000 (100,000 in Kenya, 40,000 to 50,000 in Tanzania and 10,000 in Uganda) 1. Divided into multiple religious communities, but united in a mutual feeling of meta-cultural identity, their arrival in East Africa followed two demographically disproportionate migratory waves: the first one took place before the 20 th century and mainly brought in island and coastal traders (Lamu, Zanzibar, Mombasa) the other, which was largely characterised by a wider social diversity (labourers, employed workers, technical workers, small-scale traders, etc.), resulted from European colonisation. The East African Indians, whose main occupations are in business, manufacturing and the service industry and who make up a large proportion of the liberal professions, play a leading social and economic role, considering their number. Locally referred to as “Asians”, these people are essentially concentrated in the cities, particularly Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Kampala, but can also be found in smaller urban centres, and even in the remotest of rural townships. The figure of 350,000 attributed to people o (.)ġ Just like Southern Africa (South Africa, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe), the three countries of East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania) have minorities from the Indian sub-continent among st their population.
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