OUR HISTORY IS NOT OUR FUTURE

I was a 14-year-old kid. I didn't know what I was doing.

It was 1995 and my parents had come full circle and returned to Uganda, 23 years after their expulsion by Idi Amin in the great saga of 1972. My father planned to open a trading store again, this time on Kampala Road, the dusty yet charming commercial thoroughfare that bisected the capital city, Kampala, 20 miles north of the muddy banks of Lake Victoria. Running a store was what Dad had done in Uganda before Idi Amin came to power, what his father had done before that and his grandfather before that. He would start again. The difference now was that he and Mum had three children and an infant granddaughter in tow.

Uganda had gone backward in the intervening years. Roads and pavements were potholed and buckled; electricity didn't work; the streets were strewn with garbage. Even the lush tropical green of the city's seven hills seemed to have lost their sheen. There were shortages of everything — bread, milk, sugar, fabric, clothes, household supplies, electrical goods. To buy stock for his shop — blenders, toasters, cookers, clothing irons — my father had to go to Dubai, a seven-hour flight to the east, via Nairobi, Kenya.

It was on one of these trips that Dad bought me a computer. It was a self-assemble no-name-brand 386, with 16 MB RAM and a 512 MB hard drive, but it came with brand-new software: Microsoft Office 95 for Windows. The machine cost him a fortune — US$1,100 — a sum he couldn't actually afford at the time. But I had begged him, and here it was.

I didn't know that much about computers at the time, and I had no money to take classes at the one technical school in Kampala that offered them. In Europe, America and Asia, Office 95 was all the rage, laptops were becoming commonplace, and Apple had developed the Macintosh and the PowerBook 500, but in Uganda computers were still a luxury and hard to come by. Only companies and businesspeople had them.

I learned how to assemble my new machine and install the software by calling a local company that did troubleshooting for businesses. They would send a technician around to fix problems for a small fee. I phoned the company and a bossy Ugandan woman drove over to put it together for me. I watched and learned. A week later I took the computer apart and called her again. She knew something odd was going on and gave me a jaundiced eye, but I must have looked innocent enough, because she put it together for me again. Within a week I could assemble a computer myself and was adept at installing software.

I was soon using Microsoft Paint to make signs, advertisements and flyers for Dad's shop — Exim — and experimenting with different fonts, colors and designs. Math was my best subject at school, and I started using Microsoft Excel to do pricing for Dad's business. He had always done this manually, something he learned at the knee of his father, but I easily convinced him that this would be better for our high-tech times. I was lucky that Dad was open-minded about adopting new technologies. This attitude set the tone for our future working relationship. I was soon doing all the books via spreadsheet: inventory, costs, overheads, import duty, taxes, profit margins, etc.

One evening my father invited a friend over for dinner at our rental house in Kisementi, below Kololo Hills, close to downtown Kampala. The house was nothing like the handsome English colonial home Mum and Dad had owned before they fled Uganda in '72. Indeed, it was smaller even than the one where we lived in Rushey Mead, England, where my sister Ahuti and I were born, and where we and our older sister, Rona, grew up listening to Mum and Dad's exotic tales of East Africa, our ancestral home. Things were different now. There was, in our family, the distinct if unspoken acknowledgment that we had come down in the world, had hit hard times. You get the feeling that neighbors, friends, even relatives pity you, whisper behind your back and nod in agreement that it's a shame the family is so prone to bad luck and poor decision making. "Prateen, why don't you help your parents? Set up a table outside the shop and repair watches." (Prateen is my given name; in May 2000 my spiritual leader, Morari Bapu, changed it to Ashish, meaning "blessing" in Sanskrit.) Was I paranoid? Perhaps, but it is only in recent years that I have come to appreciate what my parents went through those first years after moving back to Africa and what they protected Rona, Ahuti and me from. On the other hand, we were alive. Just barely. We had come so close in Rwanda. For it was to Rwanda, not Uganda, that we had first moved from England, in 1993. Rwanda ... what happened there, what we saw there — that will live with us forever.

On seeing my computer, Dad's friend, who owned a tire shop, told me how much he needed one. You couldn't buy computers in Uganda at the time — or, at least, they were prohibitively expensive. This was the case throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, as I would soon discover.

My response was instant and almost primal (apparently I inherited the trader genes of my ancestors). I told Dad's friend that I had two computers and would happily sell him this one.

"How much?" he asked.

"$1,300."

"Done," he replied.

"I will deliver it to your offices tomorrow," I beamed.

My parents had no idea.

That evening after dinner, I hastily deleted all my personal files, saved the Excel spreadsheets and MS Paint docs on floppy discs, cleaned the screen, and packed it in the same box it had come in. I delivered it the next day to the tire shop and got the money — a $200 markup.

Of course, I then had to tell my father what I had done.

Dad was furious. Not so much that I had sold the machine — like every Thakkar, he understood the family instinct to trade — but for telling his friend I had two computers. My father, Jagdish D. Thakkar, known to the locals of Kampala as Kakooza — aka "the chief" — was back then a big, handsome man with an imperial mien and the slicked-back, silvery mane of a lion. He lives by a strict moral code: truth is paramount. Always tell the truth.

But, eager young cub that I was, I had another idea. I gave Dad the $1,100 the computer had originally cost and asked him to buy me another one on his next trip to Dubai. I would try to sell that one at a profit, too.

The new machine arrived, and every day after school for the next week, I would come home, put on a white-collar...