Before Idi Amin grabbed the presidency of Uganda from Milton Obote in 1971, the country’s Asian-origin citizens had already begun to suffer expropriation. Anti-Asian rhetoric was rising, and large businesses were being part-nationalised. Among them was the giant Kakira Sugar Works of the Madhvani family, located on the northern shores of Lake Victoria in one of Uganda’s most beautiful and fertile regions. Manubhai Madhvani, second son of Kakira’s founder Muljibhai Madhvani, had just finished structuring the deal by which the government would gain control of his late father’s company, when the family had to play host to the then Major General Idi Amin. “We already knew General Amin slightly,” Madhvani says, “but he was burlier now, running to fat.” After the tour of the sugarworks, the family and their guests gathered at the bungalow. “Tea was served and I remember watching in horror as Amin spooned five teaspoons of sugar into his cup. It was truly a sign of things to come.”
With sugar, metaphors involving sweetness and bitterness come naturally. But this is not fiction, and the words represent a crude reality. Amin’s grossness and appetite had a real-world impact. The Madhvanis were rich and influential, Asians were unpopular; if the Madhvanis were treated badly, the Asian community would realise that none of them was safe and all would leave quickly. Amin had Madhvani thrown into the infamous Singapore Block of Makindye Prison, used mostly for political prisoners. A few weeks later, Madhvani was released, but the Madhvanis were ousted. Their sugar estate, their properties and enterprises were nationalised. The whole family quit Uganda.
Singapore Block is where Madhvani’s memoir opens — he is shoved into the dark and stinking space and he gropes his way to an empty cell. What a fate for one of the so-called Rockefellers of Africa! Day and night Madhvani and his fellow prisoners hear the sound of people being killed nearby, with hammer-blows to the head.
This, though, was only superficially the lowest point of Manubhai Madhvani’s life. A wrenching disintegration had already begun in the joint family, triggered by the death of Madhvani’s father and accelerated by the untimely death in 1971 of his elder brother Jayantbhai — just when Jayantbhai’s skills at negotiation and conciliation were needed the most.
After the Madhvanis went into exile in Britain, the absence of a patriarch meant that Muljibhai’s descendants divided up whatever remained of his conglomerate outside Uganda. It was not an easy division, and the family bitterness resurfaced time and again over the years, sometimes with catastrophic financial effect.
The chief asset in Manubhai Madhvani’s share of the family business was a large glass container factory in Lebanon. So, he put all his energies into building that up. Against the odds he did so — it had an annual turnover, he says, of $26 million at the time it was bombed flat by the Israeli army (who knew, Madhvani says, that it was only a factory), wiping out $70 million overnight.
In the 1980s, the Madhvanis were finally returned their Ugandan properties, including Kakira. But getting ownership issues sorted out and putting the estate back on its feet again involved yet more bitter and difficult negotiation for Madhvani, his youngest brother Mayur and their children with the other brothers and relatives.
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At one level, this is a fairly typical business biography, an account of the ebb and rise of the tide of fortune in one entrepreneur’s life. But there is more to it, because there is more to the man. Most affecting is his evident love for what he does — the land, the product, the people he employs and works with, and even the machinery and manufacturing processes. Lovingly he describes how sugar is made, every step from growing to packing, pricing and shipping. Equally proudly he tells about his glass factory — at one point when there was a threat of Israeli attack, most of his workers fled, except two who stayed bravely to drain the precious furnace of molten glass as it cooled so that it would not be damaged.
It is also clear that money was never the chief motive. A business disaster is a hurdle to overcome — but the emotional cost to himself and his family, of running widespread businesses and of the family disputes, is plainly worse. Love for the work and for his family is not separate.
In Idi Amin’s prison, moreover, Madhvani says he found religion. Business and religion are intimately intertwined, in India as anywhere, and it is pleasing and occasionally moving to observe in his matter-of-fact words how this works.
The pleasure of this book is amplified by the fact that it was ghostwritten by Giles Foden, a first-class British novelist. Foden wrote The Last King of Scotland, a novel on Amin’s Uganda, later made into the Oscar-winning movie of the same name.
TIDE OF FORTUNE
A Family Tale
Manubhai Madhvani with Giles Foden
Random House India
X + 270 pages; Rs 395
