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South Asian Heritage Month…

October 30, 2024

If someone had asked me to tell my story of my South Asian heritage growing up I would have said no, because the reality was I was ashamed. I didn’t feel like I belonged and I spent most of my time wanting to just fit in. I didn’t know much about where I came from because my parent’s didn’t talk bout it much, because to talk about would be to relive the trauma of displacement which isn’t something that is done in the South Asian community. (that’s a whole other piece)

My parent’s were part of the South Asian East African Diaspora, Dad from Nairobi in Kenya and Mum from Kampala in Uganda. The significance of South Asians arriving in East Africa was the construction of the railways described as the ‘Lunatic Express’ due to its high cost and dangerous nature between 1896 to 1901 South Asian and the Indian subcontinental communities were a useful and ‘cheap’ source of labour under the British Empire, with many of them motivated to migrate to escape crippling poverty and famine. By the early 19th century, the Indian Indentured Trade came to replace the lost Black indentured labour following the ‘official’ abolition of the slavery in 1834. There is so much more to say about this so and this is a whole blog in it self which will come later this month.

I grew up in Northampton that was a predominately white community and I spent my younger years growing up as the only child of colour in my school which made it hard to embrace my heritage, because in spaces other than home no one looked like me. This didn’t really change until I went to university which is when I really started to understand myself more but I was still faced with a sense of otherness because I wasn’t either from a South Asian country and when people asked me where my family were from and I said Kenya and Uganda I would get that look — you know the look… “but you’re not Black” I lived with a real sense of no belonging for a long time.

Over the past 5 years or so I have really started to embrace my heritage — all of it. And I found an amazing friend though the power of LinkedIn who felt is from the East African Diaspora and felt all the feelings I felt so we have been on this incredible journey together of exploring our heritage (the good and the bad) and breaking barriers and generational curses. It’s not been an easy journey and we have a lot of work to do in the South Asian community to heal, to start talking more, to release anything that doesn’t serve us, to understand the impacts that white supremacy and colonisation has had on us as a community and how we have played a part historically and today in systemic racism and how that impacts our Black siblings. We all deserve to have better mental health, to break patriarchal systems and to have better healthcare.

Our heritage is beautiful and there’s a lot to celebrate but I can’t celebrate while some of our community are still struggling and we all have the responsibility to ensure we lift each other up and that starts with us. Our ancestors gave up their lives not through their own choice, we have the choice to be a good ancestor and what better time to start than South Asian Heritage Month.