“All those dreams and all that work we had done, we just left everything”

Born in 1933, Munjuben was 40 when she and her family left Uganda in October 1972. The country’s Asian minority had been given only 90 days to leave, and Munjuben and her husband fled to England with their two daughters, who were eight and five years old at the time.

The family had to pack their lives into 20kg suitcases when they left Uganda, leaving everything behind.

When they were forced to leave, Munjuben and her husband gave their staff the title deeds to their property and told them they could take what they wanted from their home. However, the boys who were living there were soon thrown out of the house by the army, and Munjuben never heard from them again.

Munjuben and her husband have never returned to Uganda; a decision that still brings sadness to Munjuben. However, she recognizes that they were lucky not to have been harmed in any way, unlike some others who had been forced to leave Uganda.

“It’s a very, very sad experience”, she reflects. “Still, compared to some of the stories you hear about other people, we were really lucky that we were not harmed in any way”.

We will be releasing contributors’ full stories at a later date, so please stay tuned for them. If you would like to read a full story now, then please see the first five stories posted here on our website.

This is a project by AFFCAD UK to celebrate the 50 year anniversary of the exodus of Ugandan Asians, by collating and archiving the stories of those involved. If you would like to contribute a story, do get in touch here.