Adjustment to new lives

It is important to address the impact of the developments highlighted earlier on Asian family and community life. In the main, East African Asian migration to the new countries resulted in a high level of adaptation. Their success in bringing about this change is not fully recognised. In addition to finding suitable employment, they invested heavily in their childrens' education.

Asian community groups were also founded and many community organisations that were based largely within the religious temples and mosques also began to deal with more accurate provision of support. The temples and mosques played a major role in developing community cohesion and gave birth to new expectations. Many Asians took full advantage of these developments and worked hard on adjusting to their new environments. Their success, in terms of developing a new community order, was far greater than what has ever been researched and recorded.

There is a view ( also not substantiated by proper research) that the relatively high incidence of alcoholism amongst the East African Sikhs, for example, is explained by low levels of self esteem resulting from their inability to find jobs that they would have considered to be worthwhile. It is a credit to hundreds of Sikhs who came to the UK from Kenya in 1968 that they were willing to work in relatively lower level jobs compared to their previous positions in Kenya. There is anecdotal evidence that they all felt under-utilised by the UK job market. It only valued paper qualifications obtained in the UK. Others reported that these jobs also kept them apart - many of the East African Asians did not have the communication and social skills that were valued by British employers. There were articulate and well educated East African Sikhs who were driven to work in factories. What they seemed to lack was the experience of learning to survive and learning to learn in an industrial and commercial economy.