Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's personal account of growing up in East Africa up to the time of Idi Amin. Uganda in the 1950s had become home to a dispossessed Asian community who had left India in the decades before. Some came as indentured labourers, later becoming dukanwallas running their small dusty shops - laying the foundation of a future entrepreneurial empire in East Africa. Against this backdrop, Yasmin grew up in a family and a community whose belief in its supremacy over the African and its subservience to the European was riddled with contradictions, fear and paranoia which culminated in Idi Amin's violent expulsion of Asians from Uganda in the 1970s.