What Africans Can Learn From The Indians
By Seun Sylvester | Strategy | May 30, 2026
What Africans Can Learn From the Indians
We whisper about it. It’s time we studied it.
Fairly long piece and you may not agree with everything written here and that’s ok.
You have heard the conversation.
It happens in hushed tones. In car parks after church. In WhatsApp groups. Over jollof rice at someone’s house on a Saturday evening.
“These Indians are taking over everywhere.”
“Every business you enter, it’s Indians running it.”
“They’re in parliament now. They’re in cabinet. They’re everywhere.”
The conversation always carries a mixture of admiration and unease. Sometimes resentment. Occasionally genuine bewilderment.
But here is what almost never follows that conversation.
The question.
How?
Not “why them and not us”, that is the wrong question and it leads nowhere productive. But the strategic, honest, learnable question:
What exactly are they doing?
In what sequence did they do it?
And what can we deliberately adopt?
Because the Indian community in Canada did not stumble into influence. They built it. Deliberately. Collectively. Over more than a century. And the blueprint is sitting in plain sight for anyone willing to study it rather than simply resent it.
This article is that study.
Let Us Be Honest About What We Are Actually Seeing
The Indian, and more specifically the Punjabi Sikh community is the most instructive case study in immigrant collective advancement that Canada has ever produced.
They arrived with nothing. They faced racism that was written into law. They were underpaid, overworked, excluded from entire professions, and at one point nearly expelled entirely.
Today they hold federal cabinet positions. Provincial premierships. Municipal offices across the country. Their businesses span real estate, logistics, agriculture, technology, and retail. Their community organizations are funded, staffed, and structurally sound.
And the African professional community, equally educated, equally hardworking, present in Canada in significant numbers is watching this from the outside and whispering about it in hushed tones instead of sitting down and reverse-engineering it.
That needs to change.
The Sequence Nobody Talks About
Here is the first and most important thing to understand.
The Indian community did not build political power first.
They built economic power first. Collectively. Over decades. And political influence was the natural byproduct of that foundation, not the starting point.
This matters enormously because many African professionals in Canada are doing it in reverse. Reaching for political representation before the economic infrastructure exists to sustain and leverage it. Wanting the seat at the table before the community has built the table.
The Indians understood something instinctively that we need to understand deliberately.
Economic collective power creates political inevitability. Not the other way around.
Phase One: They Came and They Laboured — Together
The first Punjabi Sikh immigrants arrived in Canada around 1903 and 1904. They were mostly soldiers and farmers who had served across the British Empire and heard about opportunities in British Columbia’s booming resource industries.
They did not arrive into comfort. They arrived into hostility.
They were given the worst jobs in the lumber mills. Paid less than white workers for identical work. The first to be dismissed when times were hard. Local politicians denounced them openly. Newspapers ran headlines calling for them to be expelled. In 1907 a mob of several hundred men attacked Sikh lumber workers in Bellingham, Washington, beat them in the streets, and drove them out of town. The violence crossed the border into Vancouver days later.
By 1908 the Canadian government had effectively banned Sikh immigration entirely.
This is where many communities break. Where the narrative of victimhood takes permanent root and individual survival becomes the only operating framework.
The Sikhs did not break.
They stayed. And they stayed together.
Phase Two: The Move That Changed Everything
This is the phase that deserves the most attention.
While hundreds of discouraged Indian men were leaving Canada in the early 1900s, a small group of entrepreneurs made a different decision.
They formed syndicates.
Groups of men, usually from the same village or the same caste background, pooled their collective labour as capital.
When lumber mill values were low and owners were willing to sell, these syndicates moved in and acquired ownership stakes.
They were not waiting for individual wealth to accumulate. They were combining what each person had to acquire what none of them could afford alone. Instructive.
By 1922, while racial discrimination was still written into Canadian law, a survey of British Columbia showed six lumber companies, seven logging camps, two shingle mills, twenty-five farms and fifty firewood outlets owned and operated by Sikh, Hindu and Muslim South Asians.
They were building ownership under oppression.
The mechanism was simple and it is replicable. Men from the same community, pooling resources, backing each other into ownership positions, circulating capital within the network before spending it outside it.
That is not a cultural secret. That is a decision.
Phase Three: The Gurdwara Was Their Infrastructure
This is the piece that most people completely miss when they observe Indian community power.
The Gurdwara, the Sikh place of worship was established in Vancouver in 1908. The same year the government banned Sikh immigration.
It was not built merely as a place of prayer.
It functioned simultaneously as a community bank, an employment agency, a housing support system, a legal defense fund, and a political organizing center. When a new immigrant arrived with nothing, the Gurdwara had a network ready. Housing. Work leads. Community connections. Someone who had been here longer and would show them how things worked.
The institution carried the community through its most hostile seasons.
Now consider this.
The African community in Canada has the church. Large, attended, resourced, respected churches in every major city. Pastors with significant community influence. Congregations of hundreds and sometimes thousands of educated, employed, capable professionals.
And in most cases that institution is being used exclusively for spiritual purposes.
The building that should also be functioning as an economic organizing center, a place where professionals connect, where capital is pooled, where business referrals circulate, where the new immigrant is absorbed into an established network, is being used for Sunday service and mid-week Bible study. Nothing wrong with that.
The infrastructure exists. The decision to activate it has not yet been made.
Phase Four: Political Power Came Last — And It Came Naturally
Decades after the economic foundation was laid, after the community organizations were established, after the capital pooling mechanisms were running, after the Gurdwaras had become genuine community infrastructure, political power arrived.
And when it arrived, it was not accidental.
The Sikh community understood Canadian political mechanics and used them deliberately.
Canadian political parties allow any voter to pay a membership fee and participate in nominating candidates.
The Sikh community mobilized en masse. They paid fees. They showed up. They nominated their people. They voted as a bloc.
By the 2021 federal election, 49 Indo-Canadian candidates were on the ballot across all major parties.
Jagmeet Singh led the federal NDP. Cabinet ministers of Indian origin held senior portfolios. A former premier of British Columbia was of Sikh heritage.
Justin Trudeau famously joked that he had more Sikhs in his cabinet than the Indian Prime Minister.
That is not representation by accident. That is the harvest of a century of deliberate collective investment.
Economic power built first. Community infrastructure built second. Political influence as the third and natural outcome.
What We Are Doing Instead
I want to be honest here. Not harsh. But honest.
Many African professionals in Canada, and I include myself in this examination, are doing this in reverse order or not doing it collectively at all.
- We are reaching for political visibility before the economic infrastructure exists.
- We are celebrating individual appointments without building the community structures that make those appointments sustainable and consequential.
- We are having conversations about representation without first asking whether the community behind the representative is organized, funded, and aligned.
- And economically, many of us are operating as isolated high performers.
- We guard information that should be community currency.
- We treat a fellow African professional’s success and hustle as competition rather than confirmation that the path is possible.
- We do not build referral networks with genuine loyalty.
- We do not pool capital.
- We do not deliberately circulate business within the community before taking it outside.
There are reasons for this. Some of them are historical. In certain environments back home, information was power precisely because it was scarce, and someone else’s rise genuinely could come at your expense.
Scarcity shaped our instincts.
But we are not in that environment anymore.
The scarcity mindset survived the migration. The abundance available here has not yet been met with the collective strategy required to capture it.
The Question the Whispered Conversations Never Ask
When we say “the Indians are taking over” in those hushed tones, what we are really expressing is a mixture of admiration and confusion.
- We see the outcome without understanding the process.
- We see the cabinet ministers without knowing about the 1903 lumber syndicates.
- We see the businesses without understanding the Gurdwara’s role as economic infrastructure.
- We see the political bloc without recognizing that it was built on decades of community economic organization that came first.
The Indians did not get lucky. They did not have advantages we do not have. They were excluded, beaten, legislated against, and nearly expelled.
They survived it through collective economic organization.
And then they thrived.
What This Would Actually Look Like For Us
This is not a call for tribalism. It is a call for intentionality.
It looks like African professionals in Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, and Vancouver building real referral networks and actually using them.
Lawyers referring to African accountants. Accountants referring to African financial advisors. Business owners hiring African contractors first before going outside the community.
It looks like capital pooling. Groups of professionals combining resources to invest in real estate, acquire businesses, or fund each other’s ventures, the way those early Sikh syndicates combined labour to acquire mill ownership.
It looks like the church being activated as economic infrastructure. Not replacing its spiritual purpose, but adding the layer that the Gurdwara has always carried. Business directories. Professional networks. Mentorship pipelines. Community investment vehicles.
It looks like playing the long game. Building something your children step into rather than start from scratch.
It looks like celebrating each other’s wins publicly and loudly because every African professional who succeeds visibly makes the path more credible for the next person.
And political representation? It will come. Naturally. Inevitably. As the harvest of organized economic community power, not as a shortcut taken before the foundation exists.
A Final Honest Word
The conversation in the car park, in the WhatsApp group, over the jollof rice, that conversation is not wrong for happening.
The admiration is warranted. The bewilderment is understandable.
But admiration without study is just spectating.
The blueprint is not hidden. It is historical record. It began with men who had nothing, who chose to pool what little they had rather than compete over it, who built their worship house into their community headquarters, and who understood that collective economic power was the only foundation on which lasting political influence could be built.
We have the education. We have the work ethic. We have the faith. We have the numbers. We have the institution — the church — already standing in every city.
What we need now is the decision.
The decision to stop whispering about what others are building and start building our own.
That decision does not require a committee. It does not require a conference. It does not require waiting for a leader to emerge.
It requires one person to make a different choice this week.
Let it be you.
- Start something small.
- A group chat with three professionals you respect.
- A monthly conversation about money, career, business, and building.
- A commitment to refer the next contract to someone in your community before looking outside it.
- A pooled savings arrangement with two trusted people like ajo.
- A mentorship call with someone five years behind where you are now.
Aligned minds. Pooled resources. Shared vision.
That is how it begins. Not with a summit. Not with a manifesto. With a decision made quietly by one person who looked at what was possible and said, not someday, but now.
The Indians did not start with a cabinet seat. They started with men from the same village pooling their labour to buy a small mill nobody else wanted.
You do not need permission to start. You do not need scale to start. You need one aligned mind beside yours, one resource pooled, one door held open for someone coming behind you.
Build something your children step into.
Build something that outlasts the conversation.
Build.
Amen.
6 responses to “What Africans Can Learn From The Indians”
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Very apt.
Very true.
Conclusion is also correct.
Decision is to start.
Bearing one thing in mind, that this journey is similar to a marathon and not a hundred meters sprint.
Appreciate your feedback sir.
We just have to start.
Wa ti abo ke! Means clap for him. I have read the article. We can learn much from the Indians, we surely can. Instead of resentment, we should be mentees and students of thier progress and success. As for me and my home, we are shedding non productive non strategic strategies.
Happy Sunday!
PMI
Your perspective on this write up is so refreshing andinspiring. Thanks for sharing sir
It was a great read.
Thank you .
Appreciate!!