Ugandan Asians repair the ruins that Amin left

Many of those kicked out in 1972 are being wooed back from Britain, reports Simon Reeve

When Khalid Sheikh was forced to leave Uganda in 1972 as a teenager, it was to the sound of gunfire and looting as the country entered a reign of terror under the brutal dictator Idi Amin. With 70,000 other refugees, Mr Sheikh's family fled Uganda clutching their passports and whatever they could carry.

Now, like thousands of other Ugandan Asians who have spent decades in exile, the successful 39-year-old from Leicester is returning to his country of birth to play his part in its economic regeneration.

Mr Sheikh, managing director of Clifton Packaging, a leading packaging firm with three factories in and around Leicester, commutes from Britain to Kampala to check on the businesses he is setting up. "We have invested a lot already, six-figure sums," he said. "I want to prove that we are returning as a British company who were kicked out and now we are back."

Mr Sheikh, the oldest of four brothers and one sister, remembers the terror of expulsion. He was 13 and says the desperate 21-mile drive from Kampala to the airport at Entebbe was "like climbing the side of the Eiffel Tower barehanded. Cars were being stopped all around us. We didn't know if we would survive."

Asians owned 90 per cent of Uganda's businesses and when they left the economy collapsed. But the current president, Yoweri Museveni, is the West's second most popular African leader after Nelson Mandela. He has opened the economy to foreign investment and is encouraging the exiles to return. In the past two years the Asian population in Uganda is estimated to have doubled to about 6,000.

As if to illustrate the importance of Asian investment, David Seddon, the head of the commercial section of the British High Commission in Uganda, has just visited Leicester to see members of the Leicestershire Asian Business Association, which organised a trade mission to Uganda last year.

Mr Sheikh has resumed working in Africa with trepidation - he speaks movingly of friends whose relatives disappeared without trace. But many havefound the courage to return. Two of his friends have recently moved back to Kampala. "The family of one used to be the largest producers of cooking oil in East Africa, and he has gone back to reclaim his houses - which are like mansions - and the factories."

Bharat Chandarana was another young Asian forced out of Uganda in 1972. He also settled in Britain, living in Cambridge and London while studying and working as an engineer. The 44 year old has now returned to Kampala with his wife and two children and works as a civil structural engineer. "It was very emotional at first but the new Uganda has grown on me. It is true that we were treated very badly but it was by the country, not the people; if I was beaten up by a skinhead in Neasden it wouldn't put me off my friends. Uganda has changed so much, and I feel I'm home."

But going back can be a nerve-racking experience. "It was a very emotional and traumatic experience because, like so many other Ugandan Asians, we lost so much when we were kicked out," Mr Sheikh said. "Some people died of grief after watching their life's work taken away from them. They never came to terms with the shock. Many cannot return because it is just too painful.

"On my first trip I went to look for my best friend. We were at school together, played the same games together, and I wanted to find out what had happened to him and see whether he had survived. It took me a week to find that he was killed. Shot one day while walking home."

One of the main reasons Mr Sheikh originally returned was to find the spot where his mother was buried. "It was in an overgrown graveyard and I spent many days removing the plants and renovating the area. It was almost difficult to cry; standing there I realised that this country had thrown me out at the age of 13 and now, after a quarter of a century, I had returned. At the same time I knew those of us who survived have a duty to remember the two million people who did not make it."