Why is Apple so shifty about how it makes the iPhone?

The paragon of modern tech risks losing its shine by dodging queries about Indonesia, and an orgy of unregulated tin mining

BETA

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 23 September 2013 20.30 BST

‘When asked where it obtains its minerals, Apple looks arrogant, lumbering and unaccountable.' Photograph: Eduardo Barraza/Demotix/Corbis

Are you excited about the launch of Apple's new iPhones? Have you decided to get one? Do you have any idea what you're buying? If so, you are on your own. When asked where it obtains its minerals, Apple, which has done so much to persuade us that it is deft, cool and responsive, looks arrogant, lumbering and unaccountable.

The question was straightforward: does Apple buy tin from Bangka Island? The wriggling is almost comical.

Nearly half of global tin supplies are used to make solder for electronics. About 30% of the world's tin comes from Bangka and Belitung islands in Indonesia, where an orgy of unregulated mining is reducing a rich and complex system of rainforests and gardens to a post-holocaust landscape of sand and acid subsoil. Tin dredgers in the coastal waters are also wiping out the coral, the giant clams, the local fisheries, the endangered Napoleon wrasse, the mangrove forests and the beaches used by breeding turtles.

Children are employed in shocking conditions. On average, one miner dies in an accident every week. Clean water is disappearing, malaria is spreading as mosquitoes breed in abandoned workings, and small farmers are being driven from their land. Those paragons of modernity – electronics manufacturers – rely for their supplies on some distinctly old-fashioned practices.

Friends of the Earth and its Indonesian counterpart, Walhi, which have documented this catastrophe, are not calling for an end to tin-mining on Bangka and Belitung: they recognise that it supports many people who would not find work elsewhere. What they want is transparency on the part of the companies buying the tin extracted there, leading to an agreement to reduce the impacts and protect the people and the wildlife. Without transparency there's no accountability; without accountability there's no prospect of improvement.

So they approached the world's biggest smartphone manufacturers, asking whether they are using tin from Bangka. All but one of the big brands fessed up. Samsung, Philips, Nokia, Sony, BlackBerry, Motorola and LG admit to buying (or probably buying) tin from the island through intermediaries, and have pledged to help address the mess. One company refuses to talk.

Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive officer, claimed last year: "we want to be as innovative with supply responsibility as we are with our products. That's a high bar. The more transparent we are, the more it's in the public space. The more it's in the public space, the more other companies will decide to do something similar". Which would be fine, if Apple did not appear to be pursuing the opposite policy.

Mobilised by Friends of the Earth, 25,000 people have now written to the company to ask whether it is buying tin from the ecological disaster zone in Indonesia. The answer has been a resounding "we're not telling you".

I approached Apple last week, and it felt like the kind of interview you might conduct with someone selling televisions out of the back of a lorry. The director of corporate public relations refused to let me record our conversation. He insisted that it should be off the record and for background only, whereupon he told me ... nothing at all. All he would do was direct me back to the webpage I was asking him about.

This states, with baffling ambiguity, that "Bangka Island, Indonesia, is one of the world's principal tin-producing regions. Recent concerns about the illegal mining of tin from this region prompted Apple to lead a fact-finding visit to learn more." Why conduct a fact-finding visit if you're not using the island's tin? And if you are using it, why not say so? Answer comes there none.

Today I asked him a different set of questions. In a previous article, in March, I praised Apple for mapping its supply chain and discovering that it uses metals processed by 211 smelters around the world. But, in view of its farcical response to my questions about Bangka, I began to wonder how valuable that effort might be. Apple has still not named any of the companies on the list, or provided any useful information about its suppliers.

So I asked the PR director whether I could see the list, and whether it has been audited: in other words, whether there's any reason to believe that this is a step towards genuine transparency. His response? To direct me back to the same sodding webpage. Strange to relate, on reading it for the fourth time I found it just as uninformative as I had the first time.

While I was tearing out my hair over Apple's evasions, Fairphone was launching its first handset at the London Design Festival. This company, formed not just to build a genuine ethical smartphone but also to try to change the way in which supply chains and commercial strategies work, looks like everything that Apple should be but isn't. Though its first phone won't be delivered until December, it has already sold 15,000 sets: to people who want 21st-century technology without 19th-century ethics.

The Restart Project, which helps people to repair their own phones (something that Apple's products often seem designed to frustrate) was at the same show, pointing out that the most ethical phone is the one you have in your pocket, maintained to overcome its inbuilt obsolescence.

This isn't the only way in which Apple looks out of date. Last week, 59 organisations launched their campaign for a tough European law obliging companies to investigate their supply chains and publish reports on their social and environmental impacts. Why should a company be able to choose whether or not to leave its customers and shareholders in the dark? Why shouldn't we know as much about its impacts as we do about its financial position?

Until Apple answers the questions those 25,000 people have asked, until it displays the transparency that Tim Cook has promised but failed to deliver, don't buy its products. Made by a company which looks shifty, unaccountable and frankly ridiculous, they are the epitome of uncool.

Make London independent to mend the north-south divide

The south may be recovering, but the north shows Ed Miliband's aspiration for One Nation Britain is far off from reality

• 
• • Larry Elliott
  • The Guardian, Sunday 22 September 2013 17.01 BST

London, Europe's unrivalled financial capital. Making it an independent city state would give the rest of Britain a competitive boost. Photograph: High Level Photography/Rex

Go to Preston and tell them that Britain is booming and the notion will be greeted with a hollow laugh. Tell the folks in Hull that the housing market has caught fire and they will assume you have taken leave of your senses. Mention in Rochdale that a corner has been turned and you are likely to be run out of town.

Ed Miliband's big idea at last year's Labour conference was One Nation Britain. This is a nice as an aspiration but bears no relation to the country we actually inhabit.

The latest growth figures are a classic example of Disraeli's dictum that there are three sorts of falsehoods: lies, damned lies and statistics. Sure, if you take the UK as a whole it is true that growth has returned. National output is expanding by 3% a year, slightly above its long-term trend.

But the country-wide average disguises considerable regional disparities, which are reflected in Britain's political make-up. Areas where the Conservatives are strong tend to have above-average prosperity; areas where Labour is strong tend to be poorer than the average. Marginal seats are clustered in those areas where the two nations collide.

House prices are one example of how regional economic performance varies. The Office for National Statistics said last week that property was 3.3% dearer in July 2013 than it had been a year earlier. But strip out London, where the cost of a home increased by almost 10%, and the south-east, and in the rest of the country prices were up by just 0.8%. That's below inflation, meaning that property prices are falling in real terms. In Scotland and Northern Ireland they are falling in absolute terms.

Now look at the regional breakdown for workless households, where the five areas with the worst record are all former industrial powerhouses lying north of a line drawn from the Severn estuary to the Wash: Glasgow, Liverpool, Hull, Birmingham and Wolverhampton. For the UK as a whole, 18% of households do not have anyone in work; in the unemployment blackspots it ranges from 27% to 30%.

At the other end of the scale, the areas with the fewest workless households are all in the south of England. Hampshire has the lowest percentage, at 10.6%, followed by North Northamptonshire (11.2%), Buckinghamshire (11.3%), West Sussex (11.3%) and Surrey (11.4%).

The north-south divide is not new. Far from it. There has been a prosperity gap for at least a century, ever since the industries that were at the forefront of the first industrial revolution went into decline. But the disparity between a thriving London and the rest has never been greater.

On past form, there will be a ripple effect from the south-east and there are tentative signs that this may be happening. But it is early days and, understandably, there is concern in the rest of the UK when it is mooted that economic policy needs to be tightened to tackle a problem that is chronic and heavily localised.

This is well illustrated in an article by Paul Ormerod published in Applied Economics Letters. Ormerod drills down into the UK labour market to see what has been happening to unemployment at the local authority level.

He notes that most labour market economists have seen the cure for unemployment as a good dose of "flexibility".

According to this approach, joblessness will only persist over time due to "rigidities" in the labour market. Remove the rigidities – such as over-generous welfare systems, employment security provisions, working time regulations, national pay bargaining – and the price of employing workers will adjust (ie reduce) to a level that will ensure that everybody who wants to work can find a job.

Unemployment blackspots

That's the theory. Ormerod tests it by looking at what has happened to unemployment over time. If greater labour market flexibility is the answer, then local authority areas with high levels of unemployment 20 years ago should have witnessed an improvement. But Ormerod finds no such correlations.

Those parts of the country that had relatively high levels of unemployment in 1990 still had them in 2010, even though the rates of joblessness went up or down according to whether the national economy was booming or struggling. "The striking feature of the results is the strength of persistence over time in patterns of relative unemployment at local level," Ormerod said.

Those who say flexibility is the answer may counter that the problem with Britain is that the labour market is still not flexible enough, and that only by making the UK more like the US can the problem of persistent unemployment be tackled. The only difficulty with this argument is that high levels of unemployment persist in America as well, although the correlation is not quite so strong as it is in Britain. This, though, may have more to do with the willingness and the ability of Americans to move than it does with the flexibility of the labour market.

Ormerod concludes: "The labour market flexibility of the theorists, beloved by policymakers, appears to be at odds with reality. This is especially the case in the UK, where relative unemployment levels persist very strongly over long periods of time. The findings certainly call into question the efficacy of policies that were designed to increase flexibility and to improve the relative performance of regions."

The cross-party support for a new high-speed rail link to the Midlands and the north is one attempt to find new ways to tackle the two nations problem. Supporters of HS2 say the cost will be worth it because the new line will lead to higher investment, increased rates of business creation and enhanced spending power in the northern regions.

Another solution to the north-south divide would be for London, rather than Scotland, to get its independence. Although Britain is not part of the single currency, London is Europe's unrivalled financial capital. From the dealing floors of Canary Wharf in the east to the hedge-fund cluster in Mayfair to the west, London is where the action is. Upmarket estate agents can tell where the world's latest troublespot is by the source of the foreign cash buying up properties in Belgravia and south Kensington: currently, it is Syria.

Were the government to publish regional trade figures, they would show that London runs a current account surplus with the rest of the UK, offset by capital transfers from the rich south to the poorer north. As an independent city state, London would have a higher exchange rate and higher borrowing costs. The rest of the country would, by contrast, get a competitive boost.

The reality is that London is a separate country. Perhaps we should make it official.

Clearing projects is not the Cabinet’s job

by Swaminathan Aiyer in Times of India

The rupee has bounced back, the stock market has soared, and finance minister Chidambaram is smiling again. This will not last, because there’s no clear strategy to remedy the economy’s structural weaknesses.

One big structural problem is the creation of ever more laws, rules and regulations. Every new rule has admirable aims like inclusivity, environmental preservation and fair land acquisition. But no law ever provides finance for staff and expertise required to implement the new regulations effectively. This overloads a bureaucracy already collapsing under old commitments. Some district collectors say they have to oversee 3,000 schemes.

No new law does cost-benefit analysis. Yet good governance requires laws that provide enough financial and administrative resources to actually work. Otherwise, we get unending delay, cynicism and corruption.

Don’t confuse this with policy paralysis: that’s a separate problem. Even when policymakers want to proceed, rules and regulations produce delays that are not merely long but cannot even be quantified or provided for. For example, the POSCO steel project in Odisha has not started despite a dozen years of effort backed fully by the chief minister. An NTPC official recently said it now took 12 years to clear and acquire land for a new coal mine. This is why, despite having the third largest coal reserves in the world, India has become a massive coal importer.

Yes, we need rules sensitive to inclusion and the environment. But they must also be designed for clearance within reasonable, predictable periods. Alas, we see no sign of this.

Chidambaram said in a recent interview with the Financial Times, “What is keeping investors out is the experience and the fear that we cannot implement a project on time…The Japanese, for example, if they have a start date, they also have a finish date... But in India they run into delays of months or years…the foreign investor is frightened by that kind of delay.”

This frightens the Indian investor no less than the foreigner. The most frightening phenomenon is that of Indian investors saying that they would rather invest abroad than in India.

I recently met a medium-scale businessman who said that earlier too, rules and regulations made honest clearances impossibly long. But quick clearances were possible through bribes. However, the recent anti-corruption mood and fear of the courts and CAG meant that, even after making payoffs, clearances did not come. The businessman said he was switching to Africa, which was highly corrupt but allowed investment to go ahead after payoffs.

To end the investment drought, the Cabinet has often met to clear projects worth lakhs of crores. Do not cheer. The very fact that projects galore cannot proceed without Cabinet intervention is a serious structural failure.

In any good system, the Cabinet makes policy, and project-by-project implementation is done by the ministries. If rules and regulations make it impossible for ministries to clear projects, the answer cannot be Cabinet meetings that guillotine the scrutiny process. Rather, the scrutiny process must be overhauled thoroughly so that clearances occur predictably within a fixed time frame, without Cabinet rescues.

RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan says repeatedly that we must slash red tape and unnecessary regulation. But where is the action? The government keeps coming out with more new laws, rules and regulations. Not a single legislative or administrative effort aims to ruthlessly prune red tape.

The problem is worst in infrastructure, without which the rest of the economy simply cannot grow sustainably. Historically, infrastructure was funded almost entirely by the government. A decade ago, the government ran out of money because it has so many other commitments. The private sector and public-private partnerships were seen as the solution. The boom in such deals was accompanied by accusations of crony capitalism.

However, constant delays have converted those crony deals into financial quicksand. Many supposedly top cronies are going bust. The stock market price of Reliance Infrastructure is down from a peak of Rs 2,584 to Rs 396 today, GMR from a peak of Rs 131 to Rs 21, GVK from Rs 85 to Rs 7, Lanco Industries from Rs 113 to Rs 18, and Lanco Infratech from Rs 84 to Rs 6. Several of these companies are sick, on life support from banks.

Historically, the government built infrastructure with long delays. The government met the resultant cost escalation through tax revenue. But when the private sector entered big infrastructure, after taking large loans, it found that even modest delays made projects unviable, and long delays could bust a company. This structural problem cannot be overcome by emergency Cabinet clearances. It needs a totally new system of predictable, reasonably rapid clearances that make Cabinet rescues completely unnecessary.

American gun use is out of control. Shouldn't the world intervene?

The death toll from firearms in the US suggests that the country is gripped by civil war

• 
• • Henry Porter
  • The Observer, Saturday 21 September 2013 22.12 BST

A man on a rifle range: 'More Americans lost their lives from firearms in the past 45 years than in all wars involving the US.' Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Last week, Starbucks asked its American customers to please not bring their guns into the coffee shop. This is part of the company's concern about customer safety and follows a ban in the summer on smoking within 25 feet of a coffee shop entrance and an earlier ruling about scalding hot coffee. After the celebrated Liebeck v McDonald's case in 1994, involving a woman who suffered third-degree burns to her thighs, Starbucks complies with the Specialty Coffee Association of America's recommendation that drinks should be served at a maximum temperature of 82C.

Although it was brave of Howard Schultz, the company's chief executive, to go even this far in a country where people are better armed and only slightly less nervy than rebel fighters in Syria, we should note that dealing with the risks of scalding and secondary smoke came well before addressing the problem of people who go armed to buy a latte. There can be no weirder order of priorities on this planet.

That's America, we say, as news of the latest massacre breaks – last week it was the slaughter of 12 people by Aaron Alexis at Washington DC's navy yard – and move on. But what if we no longer thought of this as just a problem for America and, instead, viewed it as an international humanitarian crisis – a quasi civil war, if you like, that calls for outside intervention? As citizens of the world, perhaps we should demand an end to the unimaginable suffering of victims and their families – the maiming and killing of children – just as America does in every new civil conflict around the globe.

The annual toll from firearms in the US is running at 32,000 deaths and climbing, even though the general crime rate is on a downward path (it is 40% lower than in 1980). If this perennial slaughter doesn't qualify for intercession by the UN and all relevant NGOs, it is hard to know what does.

To absorb the scale of the mayhem, it's worth trying to guess the death toll of all the wars in American history since the War of Independence began in 1775, and follow that by estimating the number killed by firearms in the US since the day that Robert F. Kennedy was shot in 1968 by a .22 Iver-Johnson handgun, wielded by Sirhan Sirhan. The figures from Congressional Research Service, plus recent statistics fromicasualties.org, tell us that from the first casualties in the battle of Lexington to recent operations in Afghanistan, the toll is 1,171,177. By contrast, the number killed by firearms, including suicides, since 1968, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI, is 1,384,171.

That 212,994 more Americans lost their lives from firearms in the last 45 years than in all wars involving the US is a staggering fact, particularly when you place it in the context of the safety-conscious, "secondary smoke" obsessions that characterise so much of American life.

Everywhere you look in America, people are trying to make life safer. On roads, for example, there has been a huge effort in the past 50 years to enforce speed limits, crack down on drink/drug driving and build safety features into highways, as well as vehicles. The result is a steadily improving record; by 2015, forecasters predict that for first time road deaths will be fewer than those caused by firearms (32,036 to 32,929).

Plainly, there's no equivalent effort in the area of privately owned firearms. Indeed, most politicians do everything they can to make the country less safe. Recently, a Democrat senator from Arkansas named Mark Pryor ran a TV ad against the gun-control campaign funded by NY mayor Michael Bloomberg – one of the few politicians to stand up to the NRA lobby – explaining why he was against enhanced background checks on gun owners yet was committed to "finding real solutions to violence".

About their own safety, Americans often have an unusual ability to hold two utterly opposed ideas in their heads simultaneously. That can only explain the past decade in which the fear of terror has cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars in wars, surveillance and intelligence programmes and homeland security. Ten years after 9/11, homeland security spending doubled to $69bn . The total bill since the attacks is more than $649bn.

One more figure. There have been fewer than 20 terror-related deaths on American soil since 9/11 and about 364,000 deaths caused by privately owned firearms. If any European nation had such a record and persisted in addressing only the first figure, while ignoring the second, you can bet your last pound that the State Department would be warning against travel to that country and no American would set foot in it without body armour.

But no nation sees itself as outsiders do. Half the country is sane and rational while the other half simply doesn't grasp the inconsistencies and historic lunacy of its position, which springs from the second amendment right to keep and bear arms, and is derived from English common law and our 1689 Bill of Rights. We dispensed with these rights long ago, but American gun owners cleave to them with the tenacity that previous generations fought to continue slavery. Astonishingly, when owning a gun is not about ludicrous macho fantasy, it is mostly seen as a matter of personal safety, like the airbag in the new Ford pick-up or avoiding secondary smoke, despite conclusive evidence that people become less safe as gun ownership rises.

Last week, I happened to be in New York for the 9/11 anniversary: it occurs to me now that the city that suffered most dreadfully in the attacks and has the greatest reason for jumpiness is also among the places where you find most sense on the gun issue in America. New Yorkers understand that fear breeds peril and, regardless of tragedies such as Sandy Hook and the DC naval yard, the NRA, the gun manufacturers, conservative-inclined politicians and parts of the media will continue to advocate a right, which, at base, is as archaic as a witch trial.

Talking to American friends, I always sense a kind of despair that the gun lobby is too powerful to challenge and that nothing will ever change. The same resignation was evident in President Obama's rather lifeless reaction to the Washington shooting last week. There is absolutely nothing he can do, which underscores the fact that America is in a jam and that international pressure may be one way of reducing the slaughter over the next generation. This has reached the point where it has ceased to be a domestic issue. The world cannot stand idly by.

Big Brother BCCI's Watching!

Sharda Ugra in Economics and Political Weekly

In May and June this year, when the Indian Premier League (IPL) was, much to its self-regarding outrage, being hauled away for questioning, N Srinivasan, president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), found himself trailed by reporters, cameras and mikes. Distinctly displeased, as he headed for his car on one occasion, Srinivasan (Srini, to friends) barked out: “Why are you hounding me?” The simple answer? His son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan, “high official/team principal” of the Chennai Super Kings, Srinivasan’s beloved IPL team, had been arrested by the Mumbai police for placing bets during the IPL. On the day in question, Srinivasan was three stories on two legs – BCCI chief, IPL team owner, father-in-law. The most powerful man in cricket tripped up by a black sheep in the family who had toppled his business. What’s not to hound? A simple answer to that question: because Srini was in the dock, because the media are hounds, because they – we – can.

It was a twisted, ironic turning of the tables on the man under whose regime BCCI has become not only enormously richer but also enormously in control of the messages around Indian cricket. During the IPL corruption scandal, those messages, for perhaps the first time in his reign, had gone out of Srinivasan’s control. His otherwise glacial disdain for a notoriously fickle 24×7 media was suddenly put under unrelenting headlights and left unprotected by either his position or influence.

BCCI’s relationship with the independent, mainstream media has gone from general chumminess to a teeth-gritting tolerance on either side. During the last five years, the time when Srinivasan rose from BCCI treasurer to secretary to president, the Board has become more determined to tighten an iron-fisted grip over the media, starting with the medium that generates the bulk of its revenues and reaches an audience of millions – television.

In 2008, BCCI put Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri on its payroll with gargantuan price tags. “Sunny & Ravi” Inc became mandatory mascots, required to be on commentary duty wherever India played, regardless of who owned the TV rights. The two most influential Indian voices on cricket television were safely co-opted. Their signing coincided with the advent of the IPL and the rise of BCCI’s Midas-like monetiser, Lalit Modi. The Gavaskar-Shastri duopoly was a beginning. As revenues skyrocketed through the IPL, BCCI set up its own independent TV production unit. This new team (partly cannibalised from Neo Sports/Nimbus who owned the TV rights to cricket in India until 2012) even purchased its own outside broadcast vans. Ownership over Indian cricket was to be established at every level.

Much of this could be put down to Lalit Modi’s desire to commercialise every inch of the Indian cricket “property”. But when the first round of IPL sleaze excised Modi from the system in 2010, his philosophy was kept alive. India’s wealth had earned it the right to become cricket’s Big Brother. When, during the 2011 tour of England, former England captain Nasser Hussain criticised BCCI’s obduracy over the Decision Review System (DRS), Shastri’s rebuttal was slightly petulant:

England are jealous about the way IPL is going, jealous that India is No.1 in world cricket, jealous that India are world champions. They are jealous because of too much money being made by BCCI.

The repercussions of that skirmish went deep when England toured India a year later. Star Sports won “media rights” for all cricket played in India but BCCI retained its hold over production rights. Through production came the full force of Big Brother’s thought police. Commentators on the home networks were told that three topics were taboo, never to be brought up on air: selection, administration and DRS.

Then followed a bitter battle over the cost of providing space and access to Sky TV and BBC radio in the broadcast areas at grounds. Sky had paid Star for the world feed, but a BCCI official huffily asked why the Sky commentary team should be given access in Indian grounds without a cost: “So that Hussain and others can come here and criticise India?” The inability to accept criticism was turned into a national project. Sky’s expert team worked out of studios in west London.

BCCI then refused accreditation to photo agency Getty Images for its use of Indian cricket pictures for commercial gain rather than editorial purposes. A media coalition made of wire services like Reuters, Associated Press (AP) and Agence France-Presse (AFP) boycotted the matches in protest.

Most certainly, there are commercial constraints at work in each of these incidents. In the past, overseas broadcasters have talked through requirements and arrived at agreeable fees or quid pro quo arrangements. Even in the case of the England tour, solutions could have been worked out, but BCCI chose to bring in the heavies. Sanjay Manjrekar, who did studio work for the England series for Star had tweeted “Fans like Boycott. Only guy who is free from BCCI shackles on our show”, before pulling it off his Twitter account. The kerfuffle with Getty continues; when Australia toured India in early 2013, Ian Chappell refused to be a part of the commentary team because of BCCI’s unwritten three-point don’t-do list. Commentary during the series sounded programmed and tinny: catches that went down after hitting Virat Kohli on the chest and M S Dhoni on his wrist were called “half-chances”.

In the IPL that followed, commentators Danny Morrison and H D Ackerman, in their high-volume excitement, introduced Virat Kohli, talking of him as a possible “future captain of India”. That happened to be the last IPL game both worked on. Big Brother was watching and listening.

Since the IPL’s second round of sleaze hit the headlines (but not on IPLTV, where the game’s greats made no reference to it), there came one final squeeze – this time, on the players. “Quiet words” have been had with Virat Kohli, Cheteshwar Pujara and Rohit Sharma for giving interviews to newspapers. Sharma called up one reporter, requesting him to spike the interview. This, after the players had produced the best news around Indian cricket in months – by winning the Champions Trophy.

On 19 July, 35 contracted players were sent an email which read:

Dear All, Trust you are well. You are requested to refrain from giving interviews to the media, without the prior, written permission of the BCCI. Regards, Sanjay Patel, Hony. Secretary, BCCI.

Never let it be said the BCCI’s Ministry of Truth doesn’t fill in its paperwork.

Mavelli comes to Cambridge

Lyrics - Girish Menon

The Asura king Mahaballi
Rich, generous had a big belly

The Devas just hated him
Into Patalam they kicked him

But he can visit us once a year
To meet his beloved, near and dear

SWAGATAM O MAHABALLI
TO CAMKERALA'S ONNAKALLI

For his sadya we've made Ollan
Sambar, Erisserry and some Kallan

He likes his rice mixed with Rasam
And tops it up with Payasam

To lift his spirits we've got Nadan Cull
For entertainment we'll do Onnam Thall

SWAGATAM O MAHABALLI
TO CAMKERALA'S ONNAKALLI

The story of exiled Ugandan Indians in the UK

It’s not over Ugandan Indians landing in London, 1972

LONDON: EXHIBITION

Goodbye Africa

HASAN SUROOR 

There is an apocryphal story about an American tourist who, upon arrival in London, was greeted by a friendly taxi driver called Patel; then discovers that the hotel he was booked in was run by a Patel; the corner store was owned by a Patel; the pharmacy next door was managed by a Patel; and the money-changer across the road was a Patel. After he goes to a rest­a­u­rant and realises half the staff was  Patel, he shakes his head in disbelief and jokes: “Is the blooming queen a Patel too?”

That American tourist would probably have loved to see ‘Exiles: the Ugandan Asian Story’, an exhibition tracing the roots of Britain’s Ugandan Indians (the Patels, Shahs and Amins) who settled here after being expelled by Idi Amin in 1972, sparking one of the biggest waves of migration of Asians from east Africa.

Forty years later, they are a thriving community with a foot in every door and the biggest immigrant success story.(Editor's note - Similar to the Sindhis in post independence India.) But, as the exhibition tells us through perso­nal testimonies, photographs, letters, new­spaper reports and TV footage, it could have had a very different ending but for the sheer tenacity and enterprise of a people who, despite having lost everything, refused to accept defeat.

Being suddenly uprooted from their homeland and forced to make a home in an alien, cold, rain-sodden country was a traumatic experience. And memories of that nightmare still haunt them. Many retain vivid recollections of the day, August 4, 1972, that was to change their lives forever following Idi Amin’s dramatic radio broadcast: “I had a dream that if I expel all Asians with whatever passports they are holding, take away all their businesses, Uganda will prosper.”

Kirit Thakkar was 17 at the time. “It was two in the afternoon. I had come home from school and we had just finished our lunch when we heard it on the radio. It was a big shock...what would happen to our extended family? What would happen to the businesses we had built over the last 40-50 years? Apart from Uganda, we did not know any other country where we could make a permanent base for ourselves,” he says in a podcast rec­orded by the National Archives to mark the 40th anniversary of Amin’s expulsion of some 70,000 Indian-origin Asians.

“We came in chappals. It was all new. We had never eaten cornflakes, didn’t know it was to be had mixed with milk.”

An estimated 28,000  arrived in Britain, most with virtually nothing except the clothes on their bodies. They were given just 90 days to pack up and leave, and  allowed to take the equivalent of only £50 out of the country. “You can call it a riches-to-rags story,” says Jyoti Patel, who was 13 when her world suddenly tur­ned upside down. Her father was a well-to-do businessman, but had to leave everything behind. “We came with noth­ing. It was a cold, freezing night when we landed here. Most of us didn’t have warm clothes or even proper footwear. We came in chappals,” she told Outlook. They were put up in disused military barracks which had been converted into refugee camps. Many could not speak English, so it was hard to get around. “It was quite a culture shock. Everything was new. We had never eaten cornflakes before and didn’t know you were suppo­sed to mix it with milk!” she says, recou­nting the initial adjustment process.

It took them some time to find their bearings, but once they did, there was no looking back. Soon, many of them gave up jobs to set up their own businesses. They bought homes, built temples and started their own newspapers, laying the foundations of a successful close-knit community which today is the envy of other immigrant groups. Many Ugandan Asians see the exodus as a blessing in dis­guise. An old lady thrown out by Amin in 1972 is said to have preserved a photograph of him as a mark of “gratitude”.

The exhibition is the culmination of the Council of Asian People’s year-long Exi­les project. “It’s the story of ordinary peo­ple who experienced extraordinary trauma before starting a new life in  the UK. It is a story that needs to be told before memories are lost forever,” says project coordinator Jayesh Amin.