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Overcast From Uganda to Merrick
Businesswoman survives brutal dictatorship to find hope in the U.S.
First of two parts.
Five years ago, Fahmida Aziz spotted a For Rent sign for a small photo studio hung from an office building at Merrick Avenue and Smith Street, across from Chatterton Elementary School in Merrick.
A freelance photographer, the Merokean, 39, decided to take a chance and rent the studio. Clearly, that decision is paying dividends. The Merrick Chamber of Commerce recently named Aziz its 2011 Merchant of the Year. For Aziz, opening a successful business represents the last step in a long journey that has included displacement, exile and prejudice.
Born in Uganda in 1971, she fled the country in 1973 with her mother, father and sister to escape the brutal regime of Idi Amin, the dictator who killed hundreds of thousands of Ugandans during his eight-year reign of terror from 1971 to 1979.
Aziz was 2 years old when she left Uganda, and she said she remembers little of her short time there, but through stories passed down to her by her mother and father, she has pieced together the early stages of her life.
Her father, Murtaza Jaffer, was born in Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania, in East Africa. Jaffer left the island in the 1960s to study business in Uganda, planning to return to Zanzibar after school, but the island was in the midst of a revolution at the time. “So he decided to stay in Uganda,” Aziz said, “and he decided to work, and eventually he opened his own business there.”
In 1966, Jaffer returned briefly to Zanzibar to wed Aziz’s mother, Kulsum, in an arranged marriage, and then he headed back to Uganda and opened a car dealership. “The economic growth was very high at the time,” Aziz said. “There were a lot of economic opportunities.”
Jaffer spent four peaceful years in Uganda with his wife, seeing the birth of his two daughters while maintaining a successful business until 1971, when Amin took over. “Everything just came crashing down in a matter of weeks,” Aziz said.
In 1971, the year she was born, Amin seized power from then president Milton Obute in a military coup. A week later, he declared himself president of Uganda.
