ABSTRACT

The twice-migrant East African Sikhs form one part of the total Asian Indian population in the United Kingdom from East Africa. This population is estimated to be around 206,000, of which slightly over half are men. 1 The majority of East Africans arrived in the United Kingdom from the mid-1960s onward, their pattern of migration being different from that of direct migrants from the Indian subcontinent and Pakistan (Ballard, 1973; Ballard and Ballard, 1977; Saifullah Khan, 1976, 1977; Helweg, 1979; Anwar, 1976; Dahya, 1973, 1988; Jeffrey, 1976; Robinson, 1984; Eade, 1989; Shaw, 1988; Werbner, 1990). These settler Sikhs are twice removed, having left the Punjab during the early part of the twentieth century as indentured labor to build the Kenya-Uganda railway (Mangat, 1969: 32) and thence to the United Kingdom in the 1960s, having been affected by post-independence Africanization policies.