By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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A group of 51 Afghanis fleeing the Taliban seizure of power as the US and its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies run for the hills after 20 years arrived in Uganda on Wednesday. Up to 2,000 Afghanis will be given temporary asylum in the country.

On Tuesday, it was confirmed that at least 250 schoolgirls, teachers and staff of Afghanistan’s only boarding school for girls will be evacuated to Rwanda.

The Taliban are not fans of women’s education, so much so that Shabana Basij-Rasikh, the founder of the private school, said she was burning her students’ education records in an effort “to protect them and their families”.

The arrival of the Afghanis has put a new complexion on refugees in Africa. Until now, refugees in Africa have mostly been Africans, mostly from neighbouring countries.

The first major modern-day shift in the cultural make-up of refugees on the continent came with the Saudi-led war on Yemen.

Thousands of Yemenis fled across the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden to Djibouti and Somalia, often crossing paths with Somalis, Ethiopians, Eritreans and Djiboutians going in the opposite direction, taking their chances to go and cross Yemen to get to the Gulf states.

In Djibouti, a country of fewer than one million people, the Yemeni impact is unmissable, although the emigration there predates the war.

The capital Djibouti spots many Yemeni shops, restaurants and prostitutes. In a few years, they could remake the face of Djibouti. Some of the Yemeni bourgeoisie also fled to Djibouti, and you can smell their money in the place.

There are complications that result from hosting refugees, but the Djibouti case suggests that in a region, and continent, where ethnic rivalry and animosity has often led to deadly wars, genocides, and have undermined efforts to build relatively liberal and representative democracies, we could use many strangers coming between us.

Because refugees in East Africa mostly come from neighbouring countries, they are not diverse enough.

In fact, they are often relatives or fellows from the same community across the border. They don’t disrupt anything, leaving local political lines and cultures undisturbed, and locked in reactionary prejudices.

An Afghani refugee or, say, Rohingya from Myanmar, is a totally different kettle of fish. They don’t look like anyone else in the country; speak a language you can’t comprehend; have no relatives across the border; and find everything about you, except your compassion, equally strange.

Assume two million Afghani refugees arrived in Uganda and a million in Rwanda.

It could all go sideways, of course, but imagine it didn’t and they became integrated, married local men and women, fanned out to all corners of national life, and also got the vote.

In a generation, they could dilute and re-arrange our tribal thing, and produce citizens crafted from very new social and cultural realities, not rooted in the blood of the ancestors.

A child between my Japadhola people and an Afghani would probably be called a Japafghani. And she would not cast your typical tribal vote.

Africa needs more refugees, not fewer. And we need more diversity. Of course, I realise it is easy to write this because I am never going to stand for elective office.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3