I met Shabir on a packed 747 jet, flying from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to London. A Tanzanian national and Shiite Moslem, the 40-year-old ethnic Indian businessman now calls Houston, Texas, his home. 

Despite this transglobal lifestyle across two hemispheres, Shabir was every bit the East African Indian that he was born. Family and business formed Shabir's founding bedrocks, as they did for thousands of East African Indians claiming dual lives in England, Canada, and the United States.

Shabir said he still runs a mercantile store in Dar es Salaam with his nephews, even though he makes more money as a laborer in the United States, where he has lived for seven years and now holds a green card.

Shabir's U.S. employer, a glass-making plant, pays him $10 an hour plus time and a half for overtime, he said proudly. He sweeps floors and does odd jobs at the facility. His brothers and sisters fare even better in South Carolina and Los Angeles, running glass shops themselves. But, a businessman at heart, he enjoys yearly visits to his mother country to check up on his family business.

A nervous, short man with glasses, Shabir complained repeatedly about American divorce law once he learned I was American. "The man loses everything. This is no good," he told me, voicing a conservative African and Indian custom placing the man in charge of the all-important economic unit — the family.

Shabir, however, did not complain about his new-found prosperity. He would become a U.S. citizen when he returned to the United States because he loved America. He loved the opportunity to make money and to escape persecution, which ethnic Indian Tanzanians had experienced in the late 1960s when many left the then-socialist country. Still, he said, he would retain his family/business ties in Africa.

On this newly started Alliance Airlines flight to London, three of four passengers could trace ancestors from modern-day India and Pakistan — Sikhs, Moslems, Hindus alike. But today, they resided in East Africa, as well as England and North America.

Indians from Uganda living in Canada. Indians from Kenya living in London. Indians born in Tanzania and living in the United States.

Shabir was one of the many Indians I encountered at every point on my East African trip. The security guard at the Vancouver, Canada, airport who checked my hand luggage claimed Uganda as his familial home. My safari company in Arusha, Tanzania, called Roy Safaris, was run by an Indian Sikh family. The woman travel agent for Alliance Airline's Dar es Salaam office was a Hindu Indian. The owners of my hotel in Zanzibar's old stone city were Moslem Indian. My money changer in Kigali, Rwanda, still another ethnic Indian. Even one of my bus drivers in rural northeast Uganda, a short, bearded man—cocky enough to yell in Swahili at a truck filled with beer-guzzling Ugandan soldiers—was Indian.

Though Indians pervade every facet of East African commercial life, their presence in this region remains far less known in America compared to the much romanticized — and fictionalized — legacy of the East Africa's white settlers who imported the Indians as coolie laborers in the late 1800s to build the Uganda-Kenya railway.

Of the original 32,000 contracted laborers, about 6,700 stayed on to work as "dukawallas," the artisans, traders, clerks, and, finally, small administrators. Excluded from colonial government and farming, they straddled the middle economic ground above the native blacks. Some even became doctors and lawyers.

Despite animosity from native Africans and restrictions by colonial whites, Africa still provided more opportunities than crowded, caste-rigid colonial India. East Africa became America for Indians in the first half of the 20th century, and their resourcefulness cannot be understated or discounted.

It was the dukawalla, not white settlers, who first moved into new colonial areas, laying the groundwork for the colonialist economy based on cash for food and goods. And even before the dukawallas, Indian traders had followed the Arab trading routes inland on the coast of modern-day Kenya and Tanzania. Indians had a virtual lock on Zanzibar's lucrative trade in the 19th century, working as the Sultan's exclusive agents.

Between the building of the railways and the end of World War II, the number of Indians in East Africa swelled to 320,000. By the 1940s, some colonial areas had already passed laws restricting the flow of immigrants, as did white-ruled Rhodesia in 1924. But by then, the Indians had firmly established control of commercial trade — some 80 to 90 percent in Kenya and Uganda — plus sections of industrial development. In 1948, all but 12 of Uganda's 195 cotton ginneries were Indian run.

The lives of the Mhindi (Swahili for Indian) were first fictionalized for a Western mass audience in V.S. Naipul's "A Bend in the River." The West Indies author's 1979 book remains the best-known literary work in English addressing the Indian experience in East and Central Africa.

Though recently "A Bend" enjoyed a resurgence of critical acclaim for its dead-on portrayal of post-colonial African life in the former Zaire (renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo), the novel also lifted the curtain on an ethnic group who had become central to East Africa's life in the later half of the 20th century.

"A Bend" concerns Salim, a Moslem Indian shopkeeper born in an unnamed East African country (presumably Tanzania) who opens a small shop in another unnamed country (Zaire), in an unnamed river town (Kisangani), during the late 1960s. Salim is Naipul's everyman dukawalla, trading in bric-a-brac, making a profit by turning, as Naipul says, two into four. In Salim's words, his store "had bolts of cloth and oilcloth on the shelves, but most of the stock was spread out on the concrete floor. I sat on a desk in the middle of my concrete barn, facing the door, with a concrete pillar next to the desk give me some feeling of being anchored in that sea of junk... ."

With clarity, Naipul details Salim's precarious life under ex-Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. In Salim's narrative, Naipul also brings to life the African Indians, the widely scattered commercial class you still see in every East African city, many running shops that today are more upscale than Salim's.

"A Bend" also portrays the more successful dukawalla, Nazruddin, Salim's benefactor who moves from Zaire, to Uganda, to London, to Canada, and back to London again. Though the book was published 18 years ago, Naipul's Nazruddin closely resembles many modern-day entrepreneurs sitting around me on the jumbo jet, with their family investments in Africa and abroad: "He still had interests in his old country — a shop, a few agencies," writes Naipul of Nazruddin. "He had thought it prudent to keep the shop on, while he was transferring his assets out of the country, to prevent people looking at his affairs to closely."

Faced with the nationalization of all "foreign" businesses by "the big man," Salim ultimately leaves the town by the river. Though Naipul never says it, it's presumed the once-and-future trader will join Nazruddin again in England and marry Kareisha, Nazruddin's daughter. That union, Naipul makes clear, is as much a business deal as it is a family one.

Family is also at the heart of the 1991 film "Mississippi Masala." Directed by Indian-born Mira Nair, the story concerns a Ugandan Indian family living in Mississippi whose adult daughter (Sarita Choudhury) becomes romantically involved with a Southern black man (Denzel Washington). The relationship potentially threatens to undo the family's ethnic solidarity and its economic vitality. The affair also ignites old racial fears of the woman's father, who experiences flashbacks to his Uganda youth and his family's sudden and violent exile in August 1972.

At that time, Uganda's then-infamous dictator, Idi Amin, gave the nearly 75,000 Ugandans of Asian descent 90 days to pack their bags and leave the country. These descendants of the dukawallas and Indian coolies then comprised about 2 percent of the population. In Uganda I talked with numerous Ugandan-born Indians who said their families left with just "the shirt on their backs." Their businesses were "Africanized" and given to Amin's cohorts, only to be plundered and ruined. The country lost a valuable class of professionals, sliding into a chaos that would eventually claim up to 750,000 Ugandan lives.

Some 27,000 Ugandan Indians moved to Britain, another 6,100 to Canada, 1,100 to the United States, while the rest scattered to other Asian and European countries.

Today, however, many of these same ethnic Indians have returned. In 1992, under pressure from aid donors and Western governments, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni simplified a then 10-year-old law letting Asians reacquire lost property.

While many black Ugandans have learned the art of business during their Asian brethren's absence, Indians today still run many shops, hotels, and factories in Kampala, the capital, as do ethnic Indians in Kenyan and Tanzanian cities. Temples, such as the Sikh and Hindu temples in Kampala, figure prominently in the urban East African urban landscape. And some extended families — the backbone of the Indian ethnic group — are prospering under Uganda's new openness. Two extended Indian families, the Mehtas and Madhvanis, have built multimillion dollar empires in Uganda since the 1980s.

The average visitor to Uganda will likely meet prosperous Indians just about anywhere. My companion on the Entebbe flight, an Indian woman from London whose parents were born in Uganda, was met at the Entebbe airport by her cousin, whose family drove a new Toyota sedan. She told me they were planning a safari holiday for her. A day later I saw a new 1997 Mercedes Benz coup with Uganda plates driven by two Indian men at the Rwandan border. According to the Ugandan border policemen who knew them, they were returning to Kampala after a business trip to research starting a factory in Kigali.

An elderly man with glasses, a large facial wart, and a cigarette forever dangling from his lips, Ravish is not pretty. The retired Canadian civil servant from Toronto, however, is prosperous, as a tour of his modest hotel apartment showed. He took pride pointing to his new appliances: refrigerator, stove, television, stereo. His youthful days long gone, Ravish was entering his twilight years as a comfortable African businessman, firmly straddling his Canadian and Ugandan worlds.

Looking out from the third-story terrace of his hotel over the 40,000-person city of Mbale, in eastern Uganda, Ravish describes the town of his birth. "Mbale used to be the cleanest city in East Africa," said Ravish, who returned in 1996 to reclaim his downtown properties seized during the Amin years. "Now look at it."

A commercial center at the base of the 4,300-meter dormant volcano Mt. Elgon, Mbale is filled with concrete buildings dating from the 1930s. They wear an Asian architectural style common throughout East African cities. Today, the paint is chipping on most Mbale buildings, while dark, black stains scar the crumbling concrete exteriors. Ravish said every building in Uganda, Kenya, and what is now Tanzania used to be owned by Indian families.

Ravish said he has restored his building, which houses his hotel, shops, and a Moslem restaurant, to its former state. (It was the nicest building I saw in Mbale). He was negotiating for the return of his other downtown building in order to open a nightclub. But difficulties had arisen, as in other cities, because the Ugandans who had seized property from their Indian neighbors had since sold their old property and now would lose everything if they left the confiscated holdings.

Like Ravish, Salim had prospered under Uganda's new openness. I met Salim, a Canadian businessman, on the same Alliance Airlines flight that had originated in Dar es Salaam and had picked up passengers in Entebbe before heading to London. He, and primarily other ethnic Indians, had boarded in Entebbe.

Salim said he spent the last year in Kampala helping run his family's mercantile business. Born in Dar es, Salim now holds a navy-blue Canadian passport and calls Vancouver, British Columbia, home. In British Columbia, his family runs two hotels and was thinking about opening a nursing home. Good profits and a stable investment, he said.

Uganda, however, was more risky, despite its free-market capitalism and successful debt repayments that led the IMF and the World Bank to cancel Uganda's outstanding debt to foreign donors in April. In Salim's eyes, Uganda's one-party rule by the National Resistance Council was not so open or business friendly. He said excessive value-added tariffs made some business ventures impossible. Even regular Ugandans despised government taxation, despite the government's efforts to ease some restrictions.

A mob attack in Mbale against the Ugandan Revenue Authority in mid-June left three officials wounded by machetes, provoking a police crackdown the following week. I saw roadblocks up on all exits and well-armed police making morning sweeps of the local bus station days after the anti-taxation violence.

A young, mustached man in his 30s, interested exclusively in business, Salim said Indian families in Uganda believed the country's current calm could change overnight. "All it would take is one bullet in Museveni's head," he said. Ugandan Indian families he knows all have emergency plans ready. They have provisions and currency hidden for such a disaster. Those with dual citizenship are registered with the Canadian embassy, he said. "All they need is a plane ticket," he said. And, if necessary, they would leave the country overnight by vehicle.

Salim described this unease matter-of-factly. He made it sound like an entire business class, a pillar in the East African economy, is prepared for economic and political chaos.

Continued fighting in western Uganda between hundreds of rebels and troops in June and politically motivated ethnic violence in Mombasa, Kenya, that claimed more than 40 lives in August gave credence to these concerns.

But the Indians I met would survive. They had learned their lessons under Amin. They would prevail through proven institutions: strong families and marriage alliances kept within the Indian circle.

You see that in the large Indian families walking the streets together in Dar es, in Arusha, in Kampala, the woman dressed in elegant saris or salvaar kameez, children in hand. In the event of chaos, they would join existing family operations in the New World, in Canada, and even the U.S. Meanwhile, they would comfortably continue straddling both hemispheres.

I shook Salim's hand goodbye at the baggage-claim carousel of Vancouver's international airport. It was a cold grip, not a warm, three-part African handshake extended by many black African men and women I had met in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. As an African, Salim knew the meaning of this shorter shake, and knew that I did I too. He was a businessman, and I was not a part of a business deal requiring a meaningful grasp.

Watching Salim walk off to meet his business partner, his father, I recalled my conversation with Shabir. He said Indians from Africa or Canada or the United Kingdom could never relate to Indians from India.

I believed him, that the ethnic Indians from Africa could not mix with native Indians. I believed him that Indian caste traditions led tens of thousands of Indians to originally leave their homeland and settle in East Africa be reborn as a business class. I was less sure African Indians had shed their "Indian-ness" during their diaspora in Africa.

When I returned to Seattle, I called a retired minister friend who had lived a quarter century in Tamil Nadu, India. He had never spent time in Africa, though his long ship voyages from India that passed by Africa were filled with Indian businessmen owning African investments. When I described the number of Indians I had met on my recent journey, he laughed outright. "Indians, ohhh," he said, "they're the best businessmen in the world."