‘Asians Flee’, ran the headline of a 4 July 1963 Reuters article.

“Fifty Asian men, women, and children – shopkeepers and their families – are reported to have fled from the Southern Nyasaland town of Chiromo to Blantyre after a reign of terror by the Malawi Youth League there. The league is the junior organisation of Dr Banda’s ruling Malawi Congress Party. Malawi youths have demanded free goods from storekeepers and forcibly collected donations to the Malawi party. One trader who refused to hand over free goods was reported to have been seized by the youths, beaten, and left unconscious on his shop floor.”

It would take just over a decade for this resentment at the success of Asian traders to find expression in government policy in Malawi, following the ascent to power of the “life President” Hastings Banda.

From the mid-1970s, Malawi’s government introduced regulations aimed specifically at excluding Asian shopkeepers and traders from rural areas. In 1978 the Business Licensing Act was amended to prohibit all Asians from participating in trading activities in places outside a few urban centres. Parliament justified the discriminatory law on the grounds that black Malawians should no longer have to compete with the Asian traders in rural areas. Restrictions were also placed on Asians’ ability to access banking credit.

An estimated 80% of Asians left Malawi altogether in response to these laws. Those who remained moved their business to urban areas, with many prospering. The effect on rural areas of Malawi, however, was deeply destructive.

“The departure of these traders and business people from many thousands of rural communities has had a major impact on the availability of goods, and the various other services, that the Asians had been providing,” notes a 2003 USAid paper on the topic. “The business experience, the financial resources, and the trading contacts and communication networks they had developed were not readily taken up, or even available to local people.”

Another suggested reason for the difficulty experienced by black Malawians in replicating the success of the Asian shopkeepers was the pressure on them to support numerous dependents. In travel writer Paul Theroux’s 2002 book Dark Star Safari, he writes of dining with erstwhile vice-chancellor of the University of Malawi David Rubadiri, a former Malawian ambassador to Washington. Rubadiri brought up the topic of Asians being chased out of rural areas. He himself had bought one of the shops, he said. Theroux writes:

“I’ll tell you why these shops didn’t work out, said the former ambassador, addressing the table at large. When Africans run businesses their families come and stay with them and eat all their food—just live off them. As soon as an African succeeds in something he has his family cadging from him. Not so?”

In 1995, with the introduction of a new Constitution, these discriminatory laws were scrapped, but the damage had been done. Asian shopkeepers who had established thriving businesses in towns and cities showed little desire to return to the rural areas, particularly given the increase in poverty and crime. The USAid paper states that policy-makers even had discussions about trying to attract another influx of foreign migrants to try to remedy the situation.

“Rural people, and their production systems, depend critically on a network of efficient, low cost traders and other intermediaries,” the paper concludes. “Impairing or undermining such a network, and discriminating against the entrepreneurs who develop and manage it have turned out to be a serious disservice to rural communities, who find themselves less well supplied with marketing and business services.”

There were unavoidable echoes of this history in 2012 in Malawi, when new legislation was introduced to force out Chinese traders from rural areas, following pressure from Malawian traders who argued that they could not compete.

What happened in Malawi in the 1970s was several shades less dramatic than the situation in Uganda in 1972, where President Idi Amin ordered the population of 60,000 Asians to leave the country within 90 days. God had spoken to Amin, he said, and instructed him that Asians had to leave because “Your main interest has been to exploit the economy for years and now I say to you all – Go!”

Many Ugandans, recalled New African Magazine in a 2012 analysis by Agnes Asiimwe, actively celebrated Amin’s action, taking to the streets daily to chant: “Go home Bangladeshi! Go home Bangladeshi!” But because many of the Asians were importers of essential goods, their absence was soon felt acutely.

“Amin’s government distributed the Asian businesses to Ugandans,” Asiimwe reported. “Many of them collapsed in no time. One lucky recipient was the former Kampala City mayor, Hajj Nasser Ntege Ssebagala, who believes that Ugandans failed to run the shops because of lack of experience. Some sold the shirts by collar size where size seven would be sold at seven shillings.”

There were, however, a “handful of success stories”.

Amin’s successor, President Yoweri Museveni, subsequently returned confiscated Asian properties and toured abroad offering incentives to members of the expelled Asian community to return.

Last week, in response to the outbreak of xenophobic violence in Soweto, Small Business Minister Lindiwe Zulu called for stronger regulation of foreign business in South African townships, said “foreigners need to understand that they are here as a courtesy”, and suggested that they should feel obliged to share their secrets.

It subsequently emerged that Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane had posted a Facebook status in early January saying that “almost every second outlet or even former general dealer shops are run by people of Somali or Pakistan origin” and that this was a “recipe for disaster”.

“This phenomenon needs a coherent formal attention,” Mokonyane wrote. “Our townships cannot be a site of subtle takeover and build up for other situations we have seen in other countries.”

Zulu has since clarified that she meant that foreigners should be better integrated into communities beyond merely running shops. Mokonyane’s spokesperson, meanwhile, said that the minister “wants to emphasise the importance of cross-pollination of business ideas”.

The original off-the-cuff comments by the two ministers might seem leagues distant from historical events in Malawi, Uganda, and elsewhere – xenophobia is by no means a solely African phenomenon, as the rise of the far right in Europe amply proves. But they contribute to a xenophobic discourse from the top which should be strenuously condemned, with a sharp eye kept on “regulation” attempts. As the old line goes, those who don’t remember history may be doomed to repeat it. DM

Photo: Undated file photo of Idi Amin, the former president of Uganda. Amin, who seized power in 1971 and was ousted in 1979 after a bloody reign of terror, has died aged 80, on Saturday 16 August 2003 according to hospital officials in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, where he lived in exile following his years as president. EPA PHOTO/EPA FILES/THE JOHANNESBURG STAR

Read more:

• Our silence is our disgrace, in Daily Maverick