It was the building of the Uganda railway from 1896 to 1901 that brought the biggest influx of Asians to Africa, with some 32,000 indentured Indian labourers imported to East Africa by the British colonisers.

2,500 workers died during the construction of the Mombasa-Kampala railway

The railway was notoriously difficult to build

"There has been a remarkable vacuum or lack of understanding in the way African-Asians were represented and this is what I wanted to bring out in this exhibition."

The author Shiva Naipaul once described the East African Asian as "the eternal other".

A lot of young Africans have only heard about money-making Asians, but now they realise that there are others who are as Kenyan as they are

Nira Kapila

Anti-Asian feelings and resentments, especially over their perceived economic successes and commercial pre-eminence, were fuelled in the 1970s when 80,000 people of Asian heritage were expelled by Idi Amin in neighbouring Uganda.

In Tanzania, anti-Asian feelings spurred the programme of nationalisation in 1980, and in Kenya, Asian homes and shops were looted during the unsuccessful coup attempt of 1982.

This prejudice against them has been inadvertently reinforced by the Asian community itself, with its custom of holding itself culturally and economically apart.

They tend to live separately, be educated separately, shop separately and rarely mix or marry outside their own groups.

They are perceived as a homogenous and exclusive community, despite the fact that the differences between the different religious and cultural groups within the Asian community - between Hindus and Moslems, between Goans and Punjabis - can be as deeply divisive and mutually exclusive as those dividing Asians from their African neighbours.

NAIROBI-They are known by their nutmeg skin, their relative wealth

and their custom of holding themselves apart in a society where they were

conspicuous already. After more than a century in Africa, ethnic Indians

are still universally known here as "Asians."

In Kenya, where the Asian

 community accounts for much, if not most, of the merchant class, there is

 open resentment and anger from a black African majority mired in poverty.

Asians in East Africa know the anger and resentment only too well. In Idi

 Amin's Uganda, it led to the expulsion of 80,000 people of Asian heritage.

 In Tanzania, it fueled the 1980 nationalization of Asian-owned businesses.

 In Kenya, Asian-owned shops and homes were looted and Asian women

 were raped in the chaos that followed an unsuccessful coup attempt in

 1982.

Immigration laws in Kenya are becoming increasingly draconian. Foreigners can only hold a job until a Kenyan national can be found to replace them: and more and more cities, including Nairobi, are demanding that the government bans non-Kenyans from owning a shop or trading in municipal markets.