Ideas - How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Idi Amin's Uganda

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

After seizing power in a 1971 coup, Ugandan military commander Idi Amin promised a return to democracy — but he delivered a brutal dictatorship. Known for his erratic and sadistic behaviour, Amin’s reign was defined by ethnic purges, forced expulsions and total economic collapse. We continue our four-part series, How to Defeat Authoritarianism, exploring the legacy of Idi Amin and the conflation of personality with totalitarian politics.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled. After all the awkwardness, disasters, and family drama, Mark Critch, is finally graduating. Maybe it's about not settling for the way things are, but making your own way. No, it's both jobs. And to move forward, he must hold on to what matters most. Don't give up on your dreams. Say goodbye to a Canadian comedy we've grown up with. Son of a Critch, the final season.

Stream now on CBC Jam. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. And welcome to the second in our five-part series, How to Defeet, Authoritarianism. It's a series of conversations recorded at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in summer 2026, each exploring the rise and fall of a pivotal authoritarian regime from recent history. The new man in charge of the Uganda government is 45-year-old Major General Idi Amin, commander of the Uganda Armed Forces.

Today, we look for lessons from the dictatorial rule of Uganda's Edie Amin. He is not a man who has had any great intellectual training. Here is how the CBC introduced listeners to Amin in 1972, with Anthony Hughes, editor of Africa magazine. He's not a statesman. He is a bluff, hearty army sergeant major. And he's not used to dealing with the complexities of political affairs and of diplomatic affairs. Idi Amin ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979.

He began his career in the British colonial army when Uganda was a protectorate of the United Kingdom. After independence, Amin rose through the ranks, eventually becoming commander of the new Ugandan army. Earlier today, heavy fighting was reported in and around Kampala and there were some casualties, but tonight the fighting's over and the crowds are celebrating. In 1971, he seized power in a military coup, declaring himself president and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Those weren't the only titles he'd adopted. He would go on to name himself His Excellency, President for Life, Lord of all the beasts of the earth and fishes of the seas,

and conqueror of the British Empire. To others, he was known as the butcher of Uganda. He ruled by decree, abolishing Parliament, and stripping away parts of the Constitution. In 1972, Amin ordered the expulsion of tens of thousands of people of Asian, descent from the country, seizing their businesses and property. Asians in Uganda are lining up at travel agencies, hoping to get out before the three-month time limit expires. General Amin has imposed severe restrictions on how much money the Asians can

take with them. As his rule continued, his security forces carried out arbitrary arrests, torture, abductions, and killings. By the time Amin was overthrown in 1979, at least 100,000 people, according to Amnesty International, had been killed by his security forces. After he was deposed, he lived in exile in Saudi Arabia until his death in 2003. Our topic of discussion this year is how to defeat authoritarianism. Three panelists join me on the Stratford Festival stage to discuss Ediamine's authoritarian rule and ultimate fall. When I first received a call to be on this panel, I was quite nervous because fear is something that has shaped my whole life. The first panelist you'll hear is Nam Kiwanuka, an award-winning Ugandan Canadian journalist host and producer with TVO.

So I will say that I think that's something that's carried on from Ediamine to present. when you are born in Uganda and living under all those different wars that happen in such a short period of time and witnessing what Edia mean began, it just lives in your body, that fear. And I see that fear too back home. And also the fact that when I was a small child, my father would, I was his travel companion. and he would have to disappear from time to time because people were looking for him. And he would take me and we would walk back and forth to Kenya

and we would spend the nights walking and the days we would spend it in the bush. And some people might hear that story and think that's extremely irresponsible for our father to do, but it was actually my father's. I was his life jacket because people were less likely to do it. him harm when they saw that I, he had a child. And it also, I think, helped that I was a child

that looked white because of my mixed race heritage. And so people disappearing back in those days was very common. And from what I'm reading that's going on in Uganda, that's something that's happening again. Nakhineke, what's the image that comes to your mind when you think about Idi Amiens' authoritarian legacy. Same. Nakaniki Musisi is Professor of African History

at the University of Toronto and internationally recognized scholar of African gender, political and social history. Disappearance, abductions, those are the images that come to me when I think about that regime.

But at the same time, life continuing as usual. People are still not like having sex. They still give birth structures work, some structures work. So those are the images that I have that continue today. I don't have a one image because the image that I have both black and white, oppressive and at the same time, you know, like there's still some

people who are thriving under Ida Amin. And Derek, what comes to your mind when you think about the legacy? What snapshot? I think I would emphasize how different Uganda's memory of the 1970s is from place to place and region to region. Derek Peterson teaches African history at the University of Michigan and is the author of a popular history of Ediamine's Uganda. In 2019, 2020, myself and some colleagues put on an exhibition at the Uganda Museum. in Kampala featuring photographs that we had digitized from the Ministry of Information

Photographic Archive. It was a massive photographic archive. We digitized about 50,000 photographic negatives and then put on a show in Kampala at the National Museum featuring about 200 of them. The catalog, the catalog, the exhibition catalog, was published later under the title The Unseen Archive of Edie Amin, which is this book here. In Kampala, the reception of the exhibition was to. decidedly dire. People came with tears in their eyes to look for photographs of folks that they had known who had died or who had disappeared.

We put on a panel to open the exhibition at the museum featuring folks who had lost loved ones in the 1970s. Among others, there was the daughter of the Archbishop, Janani Le Mouin, who was murdered by Amin's men in the late 70s. And she recounted her personal trauma with great clarity and with great personal dignity. describing what had happened to her dead. It was the first time that the National Museum had attempted to reckon with the legacies of the 1970s. There are no public installations or no memorials to the dead of the 70s.

So for us in the National Museum, this was an important moment of kind of personal reconciliation. In the north, however, so we took the exhibition down from Kampala and up to Arrua, which is the capital city in West Nile, Amin's home district. there folks were extraordinarily enthusiastic about Amin

and came to the exhibition with great anticipation and pride for them Amin remains a favorite son and it's worth saying as I argued in the book that that was just mentioned at the start of this session Amin was for good reasons popular for a good part of the 1970s his popularity endures in his home district where people today regard him as a hero of African liberation and who

look upon him as a kind of a legatee of their identity, their culture, and of their political interests in many ways. What a stark image and again speaks to the complicated picture that you had signaled to Nakaniki. I want to begin by talking about what made authoritarianism possible in the first instance in Uganda back in his time, in the Ediamian's time. So Nakaniki, you describe yourself as a historian of power, gender, and the state. A historian of Uganda's pre-colonial and colonial history. And I wondered if you could explain in the simplest possible terms how you think that colonial history set the stage for authoritarianism to take root in Uganda. That's a good question. Thank you. Ida mean did not just appear on the same.

Ida mean and his regime outcome of a long history. Colonialism didn't build democratic institutions. Colonialism built institutions the military, the police, the army, schools, hospitals, but the most important

institution, democratic institutions were never built. We are handed over independence without any history of how we participate in democratic elections. So the Bagaanda, who for centuries have had their monarchy, they only think about the king to rule them, to have their king in power. We should explain perhaps at the start before we go further into this. the kingdom is different from Uganda, the colony. Buganda is an ancestral kingdom whose history goes back to the distant myths of time.

It was favored as a political society under British rule. The British adopted Buganda as a kind of model, what do we call it, agent of British colonialism in the 1900s. Bhaganda became very well educated. They were largely Protestant Christians, and they were sent around the rest of Uganda, the colony, to govern on behalf of the British Crown. So when independence came in 1962, as Nakhineke was pointing out, Buganda, the kingdom, sought to retain its political privileges under an independent Ugandan government.

And that was really the core tension that defined Uganda in the 1960s. At the same time, the Baganda are given administrative roles. The education, Western education, administrative roles around in the process of indirect rule. And then the military, the police, the prisons, they are recruited from other areas. And Idamin is, Ida mean's ethnic group, is one of the groups that they recruit from.

And he actually serves in the Army. In the colonial time. His father, too. His father also served in the colonial police. And he serves. But they are not given enough education. You know, like, And so like in a way, colonialism participates in bringing up, you know, like this individual who is not educated, who uses repression.

And so like we cannot only say colonialism, but so many factors came together for us to have a Dhamin regime. Nam, when you think back to the stories you've heard, perhaps recollections of elders in your family, what do you know, what did you learn about that period, that early period of Edia Means Rise, of what it was like for ordinary people to live? I think about what was happening with my father, because we often hear about the Edia means of the world, the people with the power, the people who are not doing all of this in a vacuum, who have the foundational blocks that have been built as support from the international community. And then we rarely hear about how it impacts people.

It's always like an asterisk. He killed all these people, but all those people had loved ones. All those people were part of communities. All those people were part of families. And having been born during the Civil War, I can actually say with the greatest certainty that it is something that has destroyed my family. And your earlier question of what it carried, that carried it,

and I don't think my family is unique because that kind of trauma carries through generations. We often hear about intergenerational trauma, and then we also hear often about how children are resilient. And I do think that how I think, how I feel, how I see the world was certainly changed from experiencing trauma at a very young age. I actually do think, though, because I was a child, there is a little bit of a privilege that I don't remember as much. Or I didn't have as many responsibilities. My father had the responsibility of keeping his children alive. I do remember a lot. I remember walking down streets and dead bodies on the streets, waking up in the middle of the night to the sounds of ratat-tat-tat,

waking up to the sound of bombing or that sound, the siren, that I'm sure if you've been in civil unrest, you've heard that sound. Could you give us a little snapshot of what it would have been like for someone his age and his background to be with children trying to save their lives during that time and make sure that they're safe? I think one of the interesting things about seeing things happen

at a very young age, is that you stop crying for yourself. I rarely cry for myself. I cry for everybody, but I rarely cry for myself. My father was, he was an exceptional individual, being someone who already is not, he doesn't belong, he stands out, and he has all of these children, and then I turned out to have blue eyes, but he did everything that he could to keep us alive. It changed him, and I am grateful, but I always want people to keep in mind that behind all these stories, there are people and there are people without that power. And Nakanika said, life still continues. When we were in the refugee camp, we had birthday parties. We had good times. Babies were born. You don't stop living when you're under these conditions because I think that is part of the human spirit, right? Because you want, you're fighting for that next day, that better day.

Thank you very much, Nam, for really giving us a sense of just one family's experience through those terrible years. Nakenika, I wonder if you could pick up, and I know you lived, you were a teenager during that time, and explain to us or give us a sense of what it would have been like, how fear entered everyday life in those times? Fear was with us all the time. Fear enters your life when you wake up and there is a man carrying a gun. And there are those military tracks. And they are both like my father had a farm in one of the tropical forests, Mabirah forest.

They used to dump bodies there. We would be going to our farm, but then you smell the dead bodies. Those are, that's every day. You would walk by there every day. You have to, if you are going to the farm, they have dumped bodies in the forest. Some of them, people used to look for their abducted people. But some people did not find their abducted people. So then the bodies will rot and they will smell.

The other way, how we experienced fear on a daily basis, was, you know, like when you go to hospital and you don't know whether you are going to be abducted or you are not going to be, you are going to come back, or you are going to get medicine or you are not going to get medicine. That's fear of your life. If you are pregnant and you are walking and you don't know whether you are going to deliver on the street or you are going to get to the clinic to deliver. So all of those were experiences in a daily basis.

Daily, also, when you be, I was, as I said, I was a teenager, my high school and university, all of it was spent under. I don't know what teenage life is like. The teachers, you don't know whether your teacher is going to be abducted. I was in a hall of residence, a girls, women's hall of residence, and we can say, you know, like the metron was abducted and never to, and never, she never appeared. And we have to be there.

It's terrifying for a student trying to learn. and for anyone, really. And teachers could be abducted. The university, like the vice chancellor, is abducted and killed. And we never see them. So all the institutions and daily life were impacted by fear. But what is important is still with that fear, we lived. I mean, it's really hard to imagine.

It's hard to imagine. And we're only getting a small glimpse here of all of this. A key part of this story, Derek, and the myth of Edie Amin and the story of Yid Amin was his ability to persuade the masses of, you know, to follow his lead effectively. How does he manage to do that? By positioning himself as an advocate, the champion of African liberation. In 1972, Amin expelled the Israelis who had established a very substantial presence in East Africa, especially in Uganda. that was in March. In August 1972, he expelled the South Asian community.

In both instances, the expulsion of these minorities was framed by the Amin government as an act of liberation. It was about black Ugandans reclaiming the heights of politics and economy for the benefit of the black population of the country. South Asians were generally, although not entirely, British protected subjects, commonwealth citizens, as it were, who after Indian independence had retained, attachments to Britain. Amin cast them as a British legacy that it effectively imposed an outsider

minority over Uganda's economy and public life. In 1973, 1975, and in 1977, Amin suppressed dissident religious movements, the Baha'is, the Salvation Army, dissident Protestant sects, and a whole range of other religious movements were likewise rendered illegal, their property was seized by the state. again, this was cast as an act of political liberation, religious liberation, meant to help free Uganda from the control of outsider minorities. Also economic. Am I right about that? That's right. So the expulsion of the Asians in 1972 was described as an economic war. It was an act of economic liberation. And through the 1970s, the mean set up a whole series of campaigns and initiatives that were meant to effectively claim the heights of the economy for the benefit of like Ugandans. There was an economic crimes tribunal set up in 1975, which tried Ugandans before a military court who were accused of having overcharged. If they were operating a shop, if you overcharged for a pack of cigarettes, you could be hauled before a military tribunal,

and if you were convicted, you were sentenced to death. Military justice, in other words, was the framework in which this war of liberation was carried on. What I want to stress, though, is that this was, for many people, tremendously popular. I think that NAM and Nakhineke have given us a picture of what fear looked like in the 1970s, but I would also say that inspiration and optimism were as much part of the fabric of the 70s as was fear and human degradation. Yes, lots of people ended up in Namanvese forest and Mabira forest, as Nakeira forest, as Nakei described.

But lots of people also found a sense of political vocation and opportunity. This is the thing about authoritarianism in Uganda as elsewhere. It's not solely about rule by the gun. It's also about trafficking with ideas that help people see themselves as actors in a story that's bigger than them. And for Uganda's in the 70s, there was a kind of field of opportunity that suddenly opened up and that made even trivial aspects of life appear to be contributions toward a global struggle for justice.

So that's the kind of framework politically in which the Amiens. government operated. Did you want to add something, Nicky? The thing that I remember very well, contribute to Derek's point, was pride in being black. I remember 18, maybe 16,

I had a big watch of Muhammad Ali. You know, like, so as we are suffering, as we don't have sugar, As we don't have soap, because of the economic war, because there was an embargo on Uganda, as much as we don't have all of that.

But the same, the national spirit, is really very high. And I just want to add how similar that is to what's happening around the world. You look at the states, people are voting for people who actually are not benefiting. they're not meeting their wants and needs, but they feel like they're a part of something. As somebody who was other, I understood it. I actually, as I've gotten older, I understand that. I understand that need for the pride

and for people to own, like, I'm Ugandan. We're in the midst of a conversation about authoritarianism, as exemplified by the regime of Ediamine in Uganda. It's the second of a foreign. five-part series titled How to Defeet Authoritarianism, recorded in July at the 26th Stratford Festival in Ontario. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayen. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled. After all the awkwardness, disasters, and family drama, Mark Critch is finally graduating. Maybe it's about not settling

for the way things are, but making your own way. No, it's both jobs. And to move forward, he must hold on to what matters most. Don't give up on your dreams. Say goodbye to a Canadian comedy we've grown up with. Son of a critch, the final season. Stream now on CBC Jam. In 1972, Amin expelled thousands of Asian people from the country,

many of whom came to Canada. Here's CBC journalist Margaret Patchou, from her documentary on a South Asian family who left Uganda and came here. Amin claimed that the Indian and Pakistani residents of Uganda were parasites who lived off the sweat of the native African tribes. He believed it his duty to rid his country of these foreigners. A few months after he took power in August 1972,

he gave the Asians 90 days to pack their bags or suffer the grim consequences. The Asians fled for their lives. They abandoned their possessions and their friends and generations of building a home. They would have to start their lives over. I thought, well, all right, he's making all these noises. In the end, the citizens cannot be thrown out of their own country.

So I'll return to Uganda anyway. I then took off intending to return. I never thought I wouldn't return to Uganda. And that didn't take anything with me. And I had decided to leave my wife and children in England because my wife was a British subject and they wouldn't let her stay in Uganda although she was my dependent

although she had applied for citizenship which hadn't been given to her she was entitled to it but they wouldn't give it to her and I thought I'd leave my children and wife in England and I would return in three weeks I had an excursion ticket but by the time I reached England I heard the announcement he had asked

even the citizen Asians to leave they were also under expulsion at that stage and then things started really getting messy and I was advised by every everyone from Uganda not to step into that country, particularly in my case, because I had had two brushes, close brushes with Amin personally in my career as a lawyer. There was a risk of my losing my life. At the same time, I was regarded as a very wealthy man.

I had a lot of properties. And the Africans by this time were those who were following Amin. They were after the properties of the departing Asians. When the exodus of Asians from Uganda was completed, the capital city Kampala resembled a ghost town. The shops were closed. Signs, proclaiming mass liquidation sales, still plastered the dirt splotched windows, but the cashier stand was empty.

A few lonely products were gathering dust on the near empty shelves, but a bleakness pervaded the stuffy air inside the shops. The streets seemed haunted as former black employees congregated languorously on the sidewalks. Their jobs were gone as they waited anxiously for new owners to take over the shops. Traffic slowed to a trickle. Black market hustlers were on the prowl, trying to exchange their rapidly devaluing currency for hard U.S. dollars. Fear stalked the streets, and the once-friendly, gregarious Ugandan blacks were terrified to speak to foreigners. I want to start our conversation now about how the regime is removed.

I want to ask you, Derek, about despite the fact that this myth and this story resonates with certain segments of society, and despite the fear that, or maybe because of the fear, that pervades society, what kind of resistance was possible during that time? One of the chapters of the book that I've written, Popular History of Edia Means Uganda, is about the only successful resistance movement that managed to keep itself within Uganda's borders over the course of the second. There were a whole number of resistance parties outside the country, many of them based in London or in Tanzania or in Nairobi. But within Uganda, it was only this group of kind of kuki separatists called the Rurunzudu, who founded an independent kingdom in 1962 on the mountains between Uganda and the Congo, and who over the course of the time between 1962 and 1982 managed to maintain their independence,

in part by developing their own media economy. They, that is, developed a kind of way of communicating between themselves that stressed local history, local trial, local identity, local culture, in a way that set them apart from the rest of Uganda. This separatist movement had its own king, its own parliament, its own legal structure, its own army armed with sticks and stones, not with firearms. Nonetheless, they were able to maintain their independence,

in part out of a set of, of habits of mind, as I described in the book, that they cultivated, that is a refusal to listen with credulity to Uganda's radio station, which was the vehicle of Edie Amin's dictatorship. And out of a sort of habit of mind, which regarded local history as preeminent, over the kind of inflated claims

about racial and political liberation that the Amin government propounded. I think that what the Burundu-Doodoo movement does, for me as a historian, is offering a set of examples, a set of practices and habits that Ugandans cultivated, some Ugandans cultivated in the 1970s, which were the ground on which resistance to this particular dictatorship could subsist. It's such an obscure episode in history, but it is so crucial. I found it so interesting because it spoke to the effort, even by a tiny group of people, to fight disinformation. Because maybe you can

tell us about this. A key part of Edia Amin's power was his use of radio. What was the role of Uganda radio and maybe fold in how this tiny little group of people managed to fight disinformation and resist Ediamine by using other means? Radio played a role not unlike Twitter played in the United States in the late 2010. Or other social media. Or other social media. That is, it was a means by which a newly empowered authoritarian government could give orders to people off in the provinces about what exactly they ought to do. So not listening to Radio Uganda, finding other media to attend to was for dissidents like the Rwenzu-Du separatists I was talking about. Not listening to it was for them a means of defending a particular localized conception of

homeland that set them apart from the rest of the country. Can we make a general statement about the importance of how. that dedicated channel for authoritarian to entrench and continue the rule. Are there some conclusions we can draw from the use of authoritarians of this kind of thing, that kind of way of communicating directly to the people? Nakhineki?

My contribution will be how we subverted that. Okay. And I don't know whether in your research you go to this, like at university. You know, like how you have a piece of paper? And in those days, we used to have fountain, you know, like pens.

But instead of ink, would squeeze lemon juice. Okay? Then put lemon juice in our pen and then we write. So we communicated information. So it would be invisible. It is invisible. Yeah.

Because if you are going out of that country, to the airport, you had to open your luggage, and they had to look through everything. So then they'll ask you, where are you going? I'm going for a conference. And then they look through all your things. And you have a piece of paper like this, but it is empty. And the only way that the receiver could read what is in the letter, who has been abducted, where they have been, and so on, they have to put this letter over the light.

ingenious. You know, and so we're innovative in so many different ways. Yeah, Nam, please. I just wanted to, I think that's genius. I just wanted to kind of draw the connections between, like with EDME, radio, Uganda, Milton Obote, to what's happening in Uganda. You mean today? Today, because with social media, I have a love-hate relationship with social media because

I do think it's a place for people to push against authoritarianism. But it's also now easier for those same people to spread their message wider and also to target people. So if you can't, in the past, when you use social media to push back, but now if they're also using it to target people. And there's been lots of stories of people being targeted in Uganda. No shorter examples. And there's been lots of stories from Uganda where people have, they might say something on. and I don't think it's just Uganda. Someone might say something on social media

criticizing how the president looks, and then that person ends up being taken to court and maybe disappeared. Initially, when I became a voting age, I was very nervous about voting. And I think this is something that a lot of people who grew up in countries like Canada, where you have the privilege of being able to vote

and cash a vote, without worrying that if I do that, is it going to come back to haunt me? And I have to admit that for the first few years of me being eligible to vote, I didn't for that very same reason. Because I'm like, how can it be that I can actually vote for somebody and I can make my voice heard and not it come back to harm me on my family? And it's the reason why many people don't vote at home, right? It's the same reason out of fear.

Yeah, it's a really, really good point. Yeah. But it's also a place for people to vote. to push back to find community, but again, it makes them more vulnerable to be targeted. Moving to the part where Idi Amin's regime falls or disappears or is thrown out, in our previous panel on Benito Mussolini,

we discussed how his defeat in war helped weaken his hold on power and began to influence how the regime was perceived by Italians. And I wondered how that, that kind of dynamic played out under Amin's rule. Derek. Well, so more or less by mistake in November 1978, Edie Amin invaded Tanzania.

It wasn't particularly... How did you invade by mistake? Well, in the sense that President Amin didn't expect there to be an invasion. There had long been a kind of antagonism between himself and Julius Niederre, who was the president of neighboring Tanzania. But the invasion of November 1978,

of the Kigara Saly, and it was carried off by a local provincial battalion that went across the border pursuing smugglers and happened thereafter to keep going. Once they crossed the Kigera River and taken most of Kagera, Amin baptized the invasion and credited Uganda with having defeated the Tanzania military. The Ugandan occupation of Kagira was a disaster for the people who lived there. Lots of Tanzanians, perhaps numbering in the thousands, were killed by Ugandan soldiers during the weeks that the Ugandans were there. I mean, quite quickly pulled the army back, and thereafter, Julius Nidere said about mobilizing a new army that could successfully go to war against Uganda. So the Tanzanians crossed the border into, first of all, they took

the rest of Kigera crossed the border in early 1979 and more or less kept going slowly by slowly advancing. The Ugandan army didn't turn out to be particularly good at fighting a war. They were good at oppressing people such as Nahn and Nakan Nika have described, but they weren't good at fighting a foreign adversary. So quite quickly the Tanzanians took Barada, then Masaka, where they stopped for some time, waiting for Ugandan civilian politicians to catch up. Niedere hosted a conference in March 1979 to try to constitute a new government. This group of exiles constituted a government, elected a president. His name was Yusufu Lule, who was formerly the vice chancellor of McKedadee University, a man with very little political skill

and little political attachment to ordinary Ugandans, who became the new president in April 1979 after the Tanzanians drove Amin out of power. Uganda's government, Amin's government, did not fall as the result of a popular uprising. It fell as the result of a foreign adversary's invasion, which brought it into Amin's dictatorship in April 1979. Yeah, and he fled the country. He did. Were you about to nuance that?

Well, he did. He stayed around for a few weeks. He went to West Nile. his generals carried on a war of a slow war of resistance, but eventually he went to Libya. He was supported by Muammar Gaddafi's government. The last opposition to the Tanzanian military was actually Libyan soldiers who were kind of marooned in the country, who put up a kind of futile resistance. They didn't know their way around the country.

They were poorly supplied. But nonetheless, Gaddafi soldiers turned out to be the last prop for Amin's government. They defended Kampala for some time and then eventually flared. along with the rest of the remnants of the regime. There were, let me just say, there were sincere efforts in 1979 and 1980 to create alternatives. The new government that was inaugurated

was called the Uganda National Liberation Front. I imagine you were out of the country by then, Nakedeka, or had you... Yeah. I mean, the UNLF government was made up of sincere, educated university people, mostly with ideas, and for a time they tried to create something

more like a responsible local democracy, but as Nakhadiki was describing that the structures of military government turned out to be more enduring than democratic experiments could be by the end of 1980 military government had come back to Uganda in the form of a new regime

headed by Milton Ovote who came back to power after an election of 1980, December 1980 that returned him as the result of a popular vote. My understanding is that Edie Amin died of natural causes in 2003 as a guest of Saudi Arabia. What does that say about how the world views authoritarian leaders

and their effect on the lecturates for him to have finished out his days in that way? I think from what I've read, Derek, correct me from wrong, but he was living a pretty nice life. So that infuriates me. There is a lack of justice, and then there is a lack of, precedence, it sets, because if anyone who's an aspiring dictator, because again, I don't know, do you aspire to become a dictator, or do you, does power corrupt? But if anyone sees that happening, and there's no accountability, he has supporters with a lot of power and money,

and he essentially gets away with it. Look, I mean, was popular not only in your Uganda, but in the United States, in Britain, among black activists across the world, really. The Congress of Racial Equality, which was an American social justice, racial justice organization, regarded President Amin as a kind of champion of black liberation. The expulsion of the Asians in 1972 was seen among many black activists as a kind of foundational moment in black liberation, because here for the first time was a black government taking control of the economy from expatriates. But what about the people that he killed?

The people he's supposed to take care of. How about all those people that were killed in that fight? I would say that for expatriate black, Ugandan blacks across the country, for black people across the world, the violence of the 1970s was less visible than the political, what do we call it, energy that Amin seemed to command.

It wasn't really until the Archbishop murder in 1977 that the violence of Amin's regime became so widely known that his name was anathema. Until that time, most of the people who were murdered disappeared. There were public executions, perhaps Nakunyika remembers this. In the early years of Amin's regime, there were firing squads where school children were brought to public areas to watch enemies of the state executed in numbers by Amin's soldiers. But those public executions were cast as being of a peace with a larger struggle to punish people who worked against the common interest. They were cast, that is, as being about these were people who were smugglers, who were self-interested, who were overcharging, black Ugandans, who were working against the immune governments.

In that sense, it was morally justified to bring about their execution. So yes, violence was visible, but it wasn't particularly at the center of international understandings of Amin's government until the later 1970s. For many black activists worldwide, including people who we would today regard as examples of moral and ethical models of racial justice. Stokely Carmichael, for example, regarded Edie Amin as a champion of black liberation and took Ugandan citizenship from. from his hand when he visited Uganda, as he did on several occasions. Miriam McCabe, the great black South African musician, was likewise, gave a whole series of concerts around Uganda in 1974, 75.

The Organization of African Unity convened in Kampala in 1975. And Amin was again showered with praise by a whole range of folks across the world who saw him as building a model black republic. So violence, on the one hand, and political idealism went hand in hand in those days for a great many people. Nakenika, just to finish off here, I wonder if you could tell us what you want all of us to take away. What kind of picture you want us to take away of Edie Amin and the time that he served as the leader of Uganda? Maybe I can only say that history teaches us that there is no one single society that is remembered by its problematic past or difficult past.

Uganda is not an exception. Uganda's history surpasses the Idamin regime. It's a history of resilience, of intellectual life, of continuation. And as historians, we have, or as people interested in these kinds of regimes, is to understand why they come and how we can contribute to dealing with group or community trauma. it's our responsibility. As a final thought from both of you, very short, and then we'll go to audience questions.

What is the most important lesson that you think that EDMEA's rule offers us, either in general or but particularly how to combat contemporary authoritarianism? Maybe Derek first? The book that I published last year was written with Donald Trump's government in mind. I was trying to,

trying to understand that is how dictatorships work and why they work as they do, why people find demagogues that is to be attractive and worth supporting. I think the thing that, you know, today I'm not sure what the tenor of government politics here is in Canada, but, you know, among university-educated folks, there's a tendency to kind of look down our noses at Donald Trump's supporters and to regard them as being, you know, diluted in some sense. I think it's more, we have to be more we, that is, in the sense, talking about the class of people that I in some way represent. America's educated folks need to more fully understand why it is that demagoguery works as it does. Very often demagogues,

like Amin, command, and Trump command support because people feel themselves to have been oppressed and to find in the demagogues claims to be liberating them, a sort of source of inspiration and vocation. They can animate self-sacrifice, they can animate enthusiasm, they can animate political loyalty. In other words, people have good reasons for supporting demagogues, whether in the United States in the 2020s or in Uganda in the 1970s. And understanding that to be true has to be the first place

from which kind of resistance to demagoguery must come. Thank you for that. Now one final word before we go to audience questions. I don't know how to follow that. We can go straight through audience questions if you like. I do think that understanding where people are coming from is incredibly important. But I also, in all of these situations with these dictators, people always push back and they fight back and the people are resilient.

And I think that's also important to center in these discussions when we have them. and resilience of just watching what's going on in Uganda and the courage that people have to push back and say we want change. I think change is something that's been consistent from Edia Mien to now in Uganda and ultimately the power to the people. That's a great place to end. Thank you very much for that. Very quick lightning round of audience questions,

so really short answers if you can. As we look at current world events, are you able to see the fertile soil that can birth authoritarianism? Nakanika? Yeah. Okay. Short and sweet. Okay. The dictatorship is in our eyes.

And we are all closing eyes. Like our eyes, like genocide happened in Rwanda. You know, like people were on the ground. They were seeing what is happening. We are, you know, like global citizens. What is the dictatorship that is emerging in Uganda or in any other countries, you know, like are not only for citizens that are there. The people who continue to fund these governments, you know,

like they are entreating those governments, you know, like to oppress the people, to buy guns to kill, to abduct the citizens, to spread fear. You know, like in the people. So like, yes, the conditions are there, but we are closing our eyes to this condition. Is Amin's leadership, oh, this is to Derek. Is Amin's leadership parallel to the MAGA movement in the U.S.?

Is Trump like Amin more than we think? When Trump first came to power, there was an South African comedian Traver Noah who had a whole production comparing a mean to Trump. So, yeah, Noah was right to some extent. But the more interesting comparison is, as the questioner is asked, to do with how and why MAGA MAGA looks a lot like the folks about whom I wrote in the 1970s. I think, you know, make America great again as an idea parallels in many ways the claims that Amin was seeking to advance in the 70s. He didn't use that language, but he very nearly did. If he had known about Donald Trump, he probably would have admired him. In fact, he was a great fan of Enoch Powell, by the way, who was his own contemporary,

who was trying to limit, as you probably know, immigration into the, United Kingdom from the global south. And, you know, like Powell, Trump, sorry, like Powell, Edie Amin and Donald Trump regarded immigrants as outsiders who had no entitlement to the national welfare who were in some way usurping resources that folks, whether black Ugandans or white Americans ought to, or white British people ought to enjoy. In all these instances, Trump, like Amin, like Enoch Powell, used the apparatus of state to try to disentitle folks who were cast by government as minorities

who enjoyed no particular claim over national resources. So I think there's a lot to say about the way that the 1970s in Uganda can teach us about where we are in America in the 2020. Because you said that, I just want to say that you write in your book that Edia mean's rule was, quote, a premonition of our contemporary times. So the political violence of the 70s is not part of American politics.

I wouldn't want to make that claim. Accept insofar as one, as an immigrant in the United States now finds yourself subject to ICE. If you're following American politics, the lawlessness of our immigration system, particularly through ICE, through ICE, is a source of great concern. These are folks who don't.

identify themselves as federal agents and who feel able to stop people on the street or in traffic and apprehend them. Again, fortunately for Americans our justice system is much more vigorous and empowered than Uganda's justice system was in the 70s. And there are weights and balances and checks that will keep, we hope, lawlessness among federal authorities in hand. but there are nonetheless disturbing parallels in the way that law enforcement in the United States is today working with the way that the military and Uganda worked in the 70s, I'd say that. Can I just add something quickly? I also think there's a way that this stuff is so quiet because I was very shocked to find out that we actually have ICE offices in Ontario. Because sometimes I think we try to distance ourselves from these bigger conversations, but it starts slowly. and if you look at what's happening in South Africa

where black South Africans are turning against other Africans and then xenophobic violence that's happening there. I think it's happening in many different places, but it starts off quietly and then just kind of, before you know it, it's like that person, that thing has moved

into your house. Thank you for adding a bit about South Africa because that was actually one of the audience questions. But sadly, I can't get to the rest. Maybe you'll have a chance to ask the panelists directly, but please join me in thanking our panelists. Derek, Nam, and Nakanike for your insights. Thank you very, very much. Thank you.

Wonderful. Thank you very much. Thank you. That was our conversation on Edie Amiens, Uganda, the second in our five-part series on how to defeat authoritarianism. Our guests were Nam Kiwanuka from TVO, Nakaniki Musisi from the University of Toronto, and Derek Peterson from the University of Michigan.

Thank you to the same. staff at the Stratford Festival, and to Patrick Mooney at the CBC Radio Archives. Pauline Holdsworth is the producer of Ideas at Stratford. Technical production, Harper Charlton and Danielle Duval. Editing, Annie Bender and Matthew Laysen Rider. Lisa Ayuso is Ideas web producer. Senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.