Posted on 07/26/2003 6:00:18 PM PDT by Pokey78
Profile: Idi Amin
For Idi Amin, in defiance of Sir Donald Wolfit, comedy is easy but dying is all but impossible. A week ago, he was in a coma and not expected to make it to the end of the month, and newspapers were dusting off their 1970s obituaries and hoping they'd got all his titles and honorifics in the right order: His Excellency Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Conqueror of the British Empire and King of Scotland. But the King isn't dead, the Conqueror hasn't conked. On Friday, the old monster emerged from his coma presumably to resume what, by the standards of most ex-Presidents-for-Life, is a remarkably long retirement.
It's amazing how far a sense of humour will take a dictator, at least in the eyes of the West. No one remembers Milton Obote, the dour LSE Marxist Amin deposed and who subsequently deposed him. The Obotes were 10 a penny in that first generation of British-educated Afro-Marxist economic illiterates. But Idi had style. The defining image of him is a 1975 photograph of his arrival at a reception for ministers from the Organisation for African Unity: as the band plays Colonel Bogey, His Excellency is borne aloft in a sedan chair balanced with some difficulty on the shoulders of four spindly Englishmen from Kampala's business community, while another humbled honky walks behind holding the parasol. It's the precise negative of 1,000 colonial daguerreotypes from Victorian illustrated weeklies. When it came to the white man's burden, the British could talk the talk. But that night the 300 lb Amin made them walk the walk.
"Well-disposed to Britain," the diplomatic cables back to Whitehall had reported. Well, up to a point. The mother country never quite succeeded in imparting to Idi the value of representative government or the rule of law, but he'd got the hang of the dressing up. Amin's neighbour and nemesis Julius Nyerere kept a copy of Waugh's Black Mischief on his bedside table. But Idi didn't read it, he lived it. If you can overlook the corpses - which was hard to do when they were bobbing down the Nile by the dozen - Amin remains the best of the post-colonial jokes.
Today, grievance-mongering African professors like to talk of the lingering "psychic damage" of colonialism, not a concept many of us have much time for after four decades of Afro-kleptocracy. But, with hindsight, Idi seems genuinely to have suffered psychic damage from colonialism. He was born, circa 1925, near the Sudanese border: his dad, a Kakwa, skipped town; his mum, a Lugbara, became a groupie of the King's African Rifles. Young Idi joined the regiment as soon as he was old enough and, under the patronage of several Scots who'd taken a shine to him, rose to become one of Uganda's first black officers - though the phrase doesn't seem quite right for a man who'd lived in a British milieu almost his entire life. Even today, he's said to sleep with a favourite portrait of a kilted George VI - "my old commander-in-chief" - over his bed.
The problem for Idi was that by that stage his late Majesty's daughter and her woeful mid-reign Prime Ministers - Heath, Wilson, Callaghan - had no inclination to command anybody. Instead the Queen was out on the road night after night in ramshackle outposts giving speeches on how one-party states demonstrated the rich diversity of the Commonwealth. Idi was the perfect post-imperial parody, the mediocre colonial corporal who'd somehow wound up with the keys to the officers' mess, the British subject still seeking approval from the mother country even as he trampled its legacy. The details were exquisite, right down to the head of his secret police, the not-quite-pukka "Major Bob" Astles.
All the wise old Africa hands in the Commonwealth Office thought Idi was the coming man. Much better than that ghastly Obote. So, in a cautionary tale on the limitations of expertise, they quietly approved his 1971 coup, British intelligence fretting only that he might be too obviously pro-British. What they don't seem to have noticed is that he was bonkers. Or, if they did, it didn't bother them.
George W Bush, campaigning on inner-city schools, liked to talk about the "soft bigotry of low expectations". That's what Uganda got from London. Good heavens, this is Africa, old man. After Obote the doctrinaire ideologue, Amin was an Idi-ologue, in it strictly for himself. Much more our cup of tea. Publicly, he was sold as the "gentle giant". Privately, the High Commission considered him "benevolent but tough". The more condescending diplomats regarded him as an "idiot savant", though he was mostly heavy on the "idiot" and the "savant" moments were rare, if choice: one of his last acts as dictator was to warn the Prince of Wales not to marry Lady Diana. "You will live to regret this," he wrote.
But what he really was was a psychopath. In eight years, more than 300,000 Ugandans were killed. He enjoyed personally decapitating his enemies, and on one occasion he and a few family friends passed a pleasant farewell dinner with the severed heads of two opponents propped up at their places round the table. He had the second of his five wives murdered and dismembered, and then ordered the pieces retrieved from a burlap sack and stitched together so he could show her off to their children. The expatriate community he regarded as mainly a source of potential hostages, such as the adventurer and writer Denis Hills, whom he arrested and sentenced to death. After being advised to do so by God, he expelled all the Asians and destroyed his country's economy. Then he decided to invade Tanzania, and that was the end.
A convert to Islam, he escaped to Saudi Arabia, where he's been on "pilgrimage" ever since, living on a stipend from the royal family. At least in this instance, unlike their more recent subventions, the House of Saud began giving money to a mass murderer after he'd stopped killing. He is apparently a devout Muslim, Allah providing the slap of firm discipline the King's African Rifles, the Queen and Ted Heath never quite had the stomach for. In Britain, where Private Eye used to issue comedy singles in his name, he might as well have been in a coma for 20 years rather than the last week: he's the one Seventies act who's never been revived, except for odd once-a-decade stories when one of his wives turns out to be serving stewed goat and cow hoof in gravy at a caff in West Ham. (It was "Suicide Sarah", who met Amin when she was a teenage go-go dancer with the band of the Ugandan Army's Revolutionary Suicide Mechanised Regiment.)
It seems strange to think of Idi among the Wahhabis. He's not the King of Scotland in Jeddah, just "Dr Jaffa", an affectionate title deriving from his consumption of oranges, the cannibal having turned fruitarian. One wonders whether Idi looks at the Saudis' export of their toxic ideology to Pakistan, Indonesia, Chechnya, Amsterdam, San Diego and marvels at what he might have accomplished if he'd been a little less entertaining. He never had a plan, he never had a point. So hundreds of thousands of Ugandans died for no particular reason, except that in the 1970s we were reluctant to do anything about anything in case a little local difficulty escalated into a proxy war between the big powers. And Amin's never been called to account for his bloody reign because he was shrewd enough to flee to the one rogue state no western nation ever puts any pressure on, even today.
Asked about his cannibal appetites, he liked to complain that human flesh was a little too salty. Hard to believe he'd have said that if he'd eaten bland, insipid Mr Callaghan instead of just metaphorically chewing him up and spitting him out on Sunny Jim's pitiful Kampala kowtow to get Denis Hills off the hook. Even in that pre-Thatcher, pre-Falklands era when anybody could cock a snook at the toothless British lion, the rise of Idi Amin remains a particularly extreme symbol of a great nation's paralysis. He came out of his coma a lot quicker than post-war Britain did.
What a wordsmith he is.
Leni
I don't think so, I think he's among friends:
But what he really was was a psychopath. In eight years, more than 300,000 Ugandans were killed. He enjoyed personally decapitating his enemies, and on one occasion he and a few family friends passed a pleasant farewell dinner with the severed heads of two opponents propped up at their places round the table. He had the second of his five wives murdered and dismembered, and then ordered the pieces retrieved from a burlap sack and stitched together so he could show her off to their children. The expatriate community he regarded as mainly a source of potential hostages, such as the adventurer and writer Denis Hills, whom he arrested and sentenced to death. After being advised to do so by God, he expelled all the Asians and destroyed his country's economy. Then he decided to invade Tanzania, and that was the end.
Aperently, he was somehow invited to the Macroom 'mountain dew' festival in Cork, but he was not allowed. As we had no airforce to speak of at the time (still don't), the only way they could stop the plane from landing was to park all the fire brigades on the runway. Thankfully, it worked!
Steyn bttt for later read . . .
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