Mark Leopold - Idi Amin: The Story of Africas Icon of Evil

IDI AMIN

Copyright 2020 Mark Leopold

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020942589

ISBN 978-0-300-15439-9

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CONTENTS

PLATES

PREFACE

Idi Amin was no ordinary man, and this is not a conventional biography. Its origins lie in the ethnographic research I conducted in Amins home area of Uganda, known as West Nile, in the 1990s. I went to investigate how the local people most of whom had become refugees following Amins overthrow were rebuilding their society after returning from exile. However, by the time I got there, other conflicts had broken out, and the focus of my research became the prevalence of violence in the regions history, and how each generation, in turn, had been viewed by outsiders as tainted by this history as somehow intrinsically violent. West Nile had been fought over by Africans, Arabs and Europeans since the nineteenth century, and it now lies at the intersection of three troubled countries: Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan. Idi Amin was West Niles most famous son, but the districts association with violence long pre-dated his birth. When I was living in the district capital, Arua, in 199597, I found that his presence haunted the place, and his deeds hung over its population as a permanent cloud. He came to haunt me, too.

I have written elsewhere about the wider history; here my aim is to focus on the individual, and ask the biographers usual questions: who was this man, what did he do, and why? That is where the problems arise, because Amin both during his life and since has been turned into a figure of myth, an evil monster rather than a human being. He has become an almost supernatural icon of intrinsic evil: a sadist, torturer, murderer, racist, fascist, cannibal ... the list of accusations goes on, and so do the numerous books, articles, films and online material about the former Ugandan president. In Uganda itself, his rule is invoked whenever people want to criticise the government.

I was aware of these problems when I started the book. My intention at that time was to try to bring together what we actually know about the man, and contrast this with the multiple myths that have grown up around him. Each chapter, I thought, would try to disentangle these things as the book progressed through his life, leaving the reader with a fairly clear picture of what in the story of Idi Amin is true, and what is fantasy. In the course of writing, however, I came to realise that this was an impossible task. The nature of both the primary and secondary historical evidence is too contested, contradictory and infected with myth to allow a simple, disinterested search for the truth to work. I began by interviewing people in Uganda and the UK but I found that, although they all knew for sure the truth about Amin, they tended either to contradict each other, or to repeat the same stories that were in the popular books. When questioned, their accounts were almost always based on what they had heard from others, rather than actually seen.

By far the biggest primary source on Amins life is to be found in the UK National Archives. However, the messages and memos of British diplomats are as full of myths and misconceptions, tied up in racial assumptions, and keen to focus on amusing anecdotes, as many of the published works. Some of the popular contemporary accounts of Amins life were written by his political enemies, others by journalists with an eye for a good story rather than the truth. Some contain wholly invented tales, which found their way into contemporary human rights reports, and later into serious academic histories of Uganda. Like the people I interviewed, contemporary written accounts contradict each other even on basic issues of fact (such as dates and places), and many even contradict themselves. The situation is further complicated by Amins own penchant for propagating legends about his life. I found it increasingly impossible to pick apart the reality from the myth, and it became more and more clear to me that much of what had been accepted as the truth was in fact a farrago of myth and supposition.

It seemed that, because of the myths, the subject ought to be the representations of Idi Amin, rather than the facts. The easy way out would have been to abandon any hope of writing history, and instead to look at what has been published about the dictator, without worrying too much about the truth of it. That would have been a radically relativistic approach, which perhaps fitted the dubious nature of much of the material, but did not fit at all with my experiences of meeting and working with real Ugandan people who had been affected by Amin himself, by the consequences of his rule, or by the ways his life has been represented. The people of West Nile, in particular, suffered a good deal due to their association with the former president, and I felt they deserved an attempt to assess the historical evidence. My approach, though, had to shift from a relatively straightforward historical biography, to one that developed the account of Amins life alongside a careful assessment of where the information came from, and its reliability. The story became one that brought together, rather than picking apart, the truth and the fiction, and that sought to bring out the important elements of the myth, however speculative or even supernatural they appeared.

An amazing series of fantastic stories and surprising twists and turns emerged, as did a critique of the accepted historical truth about Amin, and the sources it is based on. Widely held assumptions, about questions such as who was behind Amins coup, his responsibility for expelling Ugandas Asians, and how many people he killed, were shown to be false or, more often, unknowable. Instead of two carefully distinguished piles of true and false statements, I uncovered a complex web of myth making, deliberate or accidental obfuscation, and plain lying. In working through all this, the book develops a kind of ethnography of historical knowledge, an investigation, through a very particular and unusual case study, of how what we know about the past is produced.

This required an unusual approach to writing the book. One anonymous reader of an early draft commented that Frankly, no historian would even consider doing it this way. I am no historian; I am an anthropologist, and I have chosen to deal with the complexities of the evidence by being open about the dubious nature of much of it, and by using a polyphonic approach. Each chapter outlines and assesses contesting views of what happened, bringing together archival material, popular journalistic accounts, contemporary memoirs, and serious historical work by Ugandans as well as Westerners. In this way, I aim to show the multiple contexts and agendas through which postcolonial politics has been described and through which postcolonial history can be written. In consequence, the book has a far higher proportion of direct quotation than most historical writing, allowing the reader to see the flaws and contradictions in the sources and to judge them by their own words. My voice, and my conclusions about the sources, are always there, but they sit alongside other accounts and interpretations of the truth. Perhaps this approach could be called a