Real Dictators - Idi Amin Part 5: Husband, Father, Movie Star

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

We delve into Amin’s private life, taking in his many marriages, mistresses and children. The President makes a triumphant return to the boxing ring, seemingly in his element. He participates in a barely believable film about his own life. But, away from the limelight, the Ugandan people have had enough. A Noiser production, written by Jeff Dawson. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

By the mid-1970s, the world recoils at the increasingly evident barbarity of Idi Amin's regime. But many ordinary Ugandans, often oblivious to the wholesale killings, still marvel at their new leader, new dictator, their self-styled Big Daddy. New dictator? Their self-styled Big Daddy. Out in the villages, the winning of the recent war against the mighty Tanzania, a conflict fought on home turf, is seen as a tangible success, a national victory. At the same time, Amin has successfully scapegoated the recently evicted Asian population for Uganda's economic woes. Any discontent is overshadowed, for now at least, by a commitment to Africanisation.

Reshaping the economy may be painful, but at least the Asians are gone, so the thinking goes. In just a few short years, Amin will be ousted unceremoniously. But right now, to suggest that his days in power are numbered would seem fanciful in the extreme. Meanwhile, the entertainment at Idi Amin's home is said to be quite something. He's certainly a bon vivant. If the Ugandan leader can be accused of massacring anything, it's dance tunes, which he does with characteristic enthusiasm on his piano accordion, playing it as his favorite pastime. He loves nothing more than sitting in with the house musicians at his presidential spread. They perform under the name the Suicide Revolutionary Jazz Band.

Young couples are often invited to dances where they shuffle nervously around the floor, while Amin, working up a gargantuan sweat, pounds the ivories, rehashing the only two tunes he knows. At home and in the office, the Teflon-coated president is in his element. This is part five of the Idi Amin story. And this is Real Dictators. In 1974, aged at least 46, Idi Amin even makes a return to the boxing ring.

He steps onto the canvas to take on Peter Seruwagi, Ugandan national coach. There's a reason for this. Revenge. In 1958, Seruwagi floored Amin, one of the few people ever to do so. Before an ecstatic crowd, Amin doesn't even bother to change out of his suit and tie. He simply goes through a routine of jabs and blows, while Sarawagi offers no resistance. How can he, with the ring surrounded by Amin's security heavies? The referee stops the fight in the second round. Idi Amin wins on a technical knockout. The voice of Uganda

newspaper proclaims, Big Daddy, Boxer of the Year. But there is a world of difference between Amin's public persona and the reality of his leadership on the ground. More and more people are becoming personally acquainted with his state-sponsored tyranny. The death of Langhi and Acholi soldiers, regarded as agents of exiled ex-president Milton Abote, seem to be accepted with almost a shrug. seem to be accepted with almost a shrug. But there are rumours that possibly twice as many of their tribal kinsmen, civilians, have also been killed. Bloated bodies are washing up in the rivers, not least in the Nile itself.

They appear overnight in the ditches at the sides of roads. Forty or fifty bodies are found bobbing on the shores of Lake Victoria every morning. These are not boating accidents. Something deeply unpleasant is going on. Dr Tom Lohman. So I think one of the pivotal moments in our means rule is what we call the failed September invasion of 1972, which is a campaign by

pro-Aboti exiles to reinvade across the Tanzanian border. It is after this that much more open use of violence against civilians in particular kicks off. Up until this point, violence has largely been contained within the army and has largely been about consolidating his grip on the army itself. But in the panic and aftermath of the September invasion, civilian administrators are targeted on a much wider scale. And it's in the wake of this as well that Amin's civilian cabinet basically breaks down and is ultimately disbanded. He ceases listening to his civilian administrators anymore as well. Whilst the actual attack itself is nothing to write home about, it prompts that final shift into the only people we can trust is ourselves.

prompts that final shift into the only people we can trust is ourselves. In terms of the identities of the disappeared, Big Daddy seems to be broadening his prospectus. Tribal rivals, anyone who stands in opposition to him, anyone who seems intent on throwing a light on the injustices, journalists, judges, lawyers, students, intellectuals, bankers, playwrights. There are a number of former Obote ministers to add to the roster. By early 1973, it's quite possible

that as many as 150,000 people have been murdered. Professor Nakanyike Musisi. Our farm, you pass through the forest, which is a large tropical forest. Professor Nakanyike Musisi. If there is international concern, Amin is not bothered. also a victim because they would not want you to see what they have done. If there is international concern, Amin is not bothered. I must make it absolutely clear, he says, you must teach people to love their leader. Much of Idi Amin's dirty work is done by his secret police, the innocently named State Research Bureau. is done by his secret police, the innocently named State Research Bureau.

Not even attempting to conceal themselves in their snazzy street apparel, the agents of the Bureau are there on every corner, waiting, watching. People can be snatched from the street, bundled into a car at any moment. From the few who do exit the Bureau's infamous headquarters in the Kampala district of Nakasero, tales of barbarism become notorious, of throwing people in boiling water,

forcing them to fight to the death with hammers, of eating salt till they die of dehydration. Much of the slaughter is overseen by one of Amin's key enforcers, the head of his so-called VIP protection unit, and a fellow Kakwa. His name is Isaac Maliamungu, known notoriously as Amin's hangman. The jails are so full that underground storerooms, even the tunnels that connect government buildings, are used as additional overflow prisons. Professor Alicia Decker.

One of them, for example, was named Singapore. And if you were sent to the Singapore chambers, then basically, in essence, you would never return because that's what happened to Abote. He went to a conference in Singapore and he never returned to power. And so these were places of great violence. And certainly some of the violence that occurred there was highly sexualized. They would have different kinds of clamps

put on their testicles and weights that would pull them down. And they would be forced to hop around with bricks tied to their testicles or women would have electrodes placed on their nipples and they would be electrocuted in different ways. If we look at how this torture was carried out, I would argue that it wasn't just, you know,

an unfortunate side effect of the violence, but it was a deliberate ruling strategy. Every once in a while, somebody would be allowed to escape. You can't escape from the State Research Bureau, but certain people were allowed to escape from time to time. And my argument is that this was done so that there would be this aura of fear that was associated with state research. Not only could you hear the screams that were coming from inside, but there would always be a few people left to spread the rumors and say, if you cross XYZ state official, this is what's going to happen to you.

After a while, the killing is no longer done in secret. After a while, the killing is no longer done in secret, for in Uganda there is a new facet of village life, reintroduced after a 75-year absence, the public execution. Up and down the land, as a weekly cautionary tale, truckloads of young men, wrists and ankles bound, are dumped in the villages,

to be lashed to a tree, blindfolded and shot by firing squad often live on TV. People turn out in droves to watch. Even petty criminals are now dispatched on the trumped up basis that they are a risk to national security. But in the new Uganda, that's okay. To Idi Amin, anyone can be offed on the basis that they are a terrorist. Everybody in Uganda, members of the armed forces, police and the public, they are responsible for my security, Amin reminds his people. Professor Derek Peterson.

The first resignation from the Uganda government cabinet happens shortly after these public executions. It's a man named Edward Rugumayo, who was deputy minister of education, who famously resigned and issued a public letter in which he decried the increasing violence and militarization of public life in Uganda. Thereafter, Idi Amin's brother-in-law, Wanume Kibedi, also resigns from cabinet. He had been Uganda's foreign minister. And it's around this time too that exile communities in London, in Dar es Salaam, and in Nairobi begin to get increasingly organized and issue statements decrying the Amin government's iniquities. I think it's important to say though that while exiles were keen to emphasize the viciousness of life in the mid-70s, the Amin government also was successful in commanding the allegiance of a great many people. In April 1975, there is yet another man

facing execution. His name is Dennis Hills. Only counter to the norm, Dennis Hills is both white and British. Resident in Uganda since 1963, Hills works as an English lecturer at Makaruri University. Aged 60, he's also something of a war hero. A senior officer in the 8th Army during the North Africa campaign as well as a lauded intelligence official. His crime? He's now an author too. He's written a book called The White Pumpkin.

Though not yet published, word has sneaked out that his manuscript is not shy of criticising the current Ugandan regime. In it, Hills describes Idi Amin as a black Nero and a village tyrant. This transgression comes with the ultimate penalty, a death sentence. In the British Foreign Office there are tense meetings, frantic calls, urgent cables. With the firing squad looming in mere days, the Queen herself appeals to Amin personally for clemency. Her plea is rejected. Any British citizen who is here and is against me or the people of Uganda, he will face the law of the country, Amin declares. That law, of course, residing in himself.

Amin has great fun playing it out, toying with the British authorities, making a list of demands to be fulfilled before he will entertain a pardon. The Brits sent off high-level delegations to Kampala to plead for the life of Dennis Hills. So among others, Sir Chandos Blair goes off to Kampala. A cameraman followed Chandos Blair around for several days as a mean kept him in Kampala doing vaguely ridiculous things for the Uganda television. So General Blair, a very distinguished man wearing his military uniform, is obliged to go to the Uganda museum where dancers who are kind of marginally clothed

perform in front of him. And there's a whole bunch of occasions that the Amin government organized to embarrass General Blair. In a classic piece of Idi Amin theatre, the British diplomats are summoned to meet the leader at a tribal hut in his home patch, the West Nile. Afterwards, as they struggle to exit onto the low thatched roof, it appears as if they are crawling away from the almighty Ugandan ruler. Idi Amin's there in this house in Arua, wearing for some reason a sombrero. I don't know why he's wearing a sombrero, but he was wearing a sombrero. And they have a kind of jolly conversation together.

Amin plays a kind of little guitar for him and then gives him the guitar. The cameras are still rolling. The general's plainly perplexed by this whole thing. Anyway, General Blair ended up leaving Kampala without winning the life of Dennis Hills. It's only when British Foreign Secretary James Callaghan flies to Kampala to throw himself on Amin's mercy that Big Daddy finally relents, though not without a great deal of posturing before the media. Because of my respect for the Queen, I have decided to postpone the execution, he says, pointing to her portrait on the wall. Behind the scenes, Britain agrees to chip in some foreign aid and some military spare parts. Only then, after 102 days behind bars, can Hills return home. 102 days behind bars, can hills return home? As cringeworthy as their public meeting is, complete with a grovelling apology by the

author himself, an international incident has been avoided. Amin doesn't let up with the humiliation of his old colonial masters. With the UK economy sinking into a deep recession, he starts a Save Britain Fund and publicly donates £600 from his own wallet. He also makes himself available to broker peace in Northern Ireland. The British are now in chaos, as you know. Their economy is in chaos completely. I am very far away from London, but I am helping them, I am collecting, I am appealing for

everybody in the world to assist the British. He then summons senior British dignitaries and, in the photo op of all photo ops, makes them issue a pledge of allegiance to him on his front lawn, quite literally on bended knee. So in the ascendant is Amin now that in June 1976 his defense counsel anoints him president for life. He camps up the victory even further. He awards himself a CBE, conqueror of the British Empire. He grants himself a law doctorate as well as a military cross, the Distinguished Service Order, and the Victoria Cross, which he calls the Victorious Cross, for copyright reasons. President for Life, Field Marshal, Al-Hajji, Dr. Idi Amin Dada looking for an audience.

He commanded attention in part by recruiting visitors really of any stripe or kind into state functions in which he invited them as an audience to kind of sit with him while he made his performances, read out telegrams that he'd sent to Nixon or whomever performed for the cameras. So for instance, over the course of the mid-1970s, there were several delegations of African-American visitors who came to Kampala, finding in Amin, they thought, a kind of hero in whom they could invest. Amin welcomed these African-American delegates. He sort of threw open Kampala to them. He gave some of them citizenship. Likewise, whenever sort of a stray student showed up in Uganda on a sort of assignment, people who are plainly there on sort of study abroad trips find themselves with an audience and the president who talks to them about the Middle Eastern theater or about the war in Vietnam or about other very consequential matters in international affairs.

For Amin, really, any audience was an opportunity, really, to offer his thoughts. In 1976, the International Commission of Jurists reviews its figures. It has sold itself a little short. It now estimates that the number of those massacred under Amin has reached a colossal 300,000. By the end of his rule, Amnesty International will go even higher, setting his death-o-meter at half a million, one in twenty Ugandans. At Owen Falls on the River Nile, there is a full-time boatman employed to corral the floating bodies, an estimated 40,000 washing up there by 1977, with a further 10,000 eaten by crocodiles.

How long can the world stand by and do nothing? It seems only a matter of time before someone makes a move to bring Amin down. Milton Obote, the previous president, whom Amin ousted in a coup, is sitting pretty in Tanzania, biding his time in exile, gathering an army of Ugandan refugees. He failed miserably in his first attempt to retake the country in 1972, but his forces have grown considerably stronger since. They're better organized, and the large Tanzanian army is now likely to throw its might behind them.

With the everyday slaughter in Amin's Uganda now too prosaic to trouble the headline writers of the West, they begin to latch instead onto the sensational. There is talk of cannibalism, sensational. There is talk of cannibalism, a rumour that Amin killed and ate the liver of his own son Moses, word of heads kept in freezers, of night-time visits to the morgue to taunt his dead enemies, of hand-feeding victims to crocodiles. Much of this, it must be said, remains entirely unsubstantiated. Certainly cannibalism is one thing that never has been evidenced. The stories seem to extend from Amin's tribal background. Amongst his people, the Caqua, there was an old practice whereby a victorious warrior would remove a slice of flesh from the dead to subdue his spirit. Other rumours originate from an offhand remark by Amin detailing how a soldier in the bush, deprived of supplies,

is legitimately allowed to eat meat from the buttocks of the dead as means of survival. But no matter. The stories are continually crafted to support a narrative. The Western media of the 1970s is in the throes of a fascination with black culture, films, fashion, literature, pop music. Amin's purported antics seem more in keeping with a baddie in a blaxploitation movie, or the Bond villain from Live and Let Die. All that's missing is the voodoo. So I asked the butler who was Amin's chef about the story that Idi Amin kept

heads in the freezer. And the butler was emphatic that nothing like that had ever happened on his watch, that the freezer was full of good things to eat, but not of human heads. I have to say that I think he's probably telling the truth. Headlines generated in the Western press at the time are certainly embarrassing. The accompanying cartoons are nothing other than gross caricature. On the front cover of Time magazine he is called the Wild Man of Africa. In Britain, on his hit television show, Benny Hill plays an idiotic Amin in blackface. The satirical magazine Punch runs a regular column in which Amin addresses the readers

in pidgin English. In the United States, he's lampooned in the comedy show Saturday Night Live as a spokesman against venereal disease. Elsewhere, Richard Pryor does a skit in which he dons Amin's military uniform. I love American people.

I want to say I had two for lunch. During the first years of his rule, Amin seemed quite happy to run with the sensational stories. The scarier the better. Fear is a powerful commodity. He even joked that human flesh was a little too salty for his liking.

His western detractors assigned him an image from the get-go, that of the African savage. Amin threw that back in their faces. But whereas once Amin laughed it off, now he's taking it personally. The President is fast becoming a figure of macabre fun, and he's an egomaniac. Someone who most definitely reads his own reviews.

The way he's being portrayed, the perception abroad, it's getting under his skin. They should not continue with the propaganda because today I can control the British myself. Aware of his diminishing international image, Idi Amin goes on a PR drive. In a bold move, he enlists acclaimed director

Barbet Schroeder to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about him. It's titled General Idi Amin, A Self-Portrait. This French-produced film will present his human face,

the softer side. Idi Amin takes the camera crew on a boat trip through a wildlife park, pointing out the elephants, the crocodiles, the hippos. In his delightfully floral back garden, he introduces his young children. He is the very picture of a family man. The movie also features Amin speaking to camera, expounding his international philosophies. He claims to believe in the conspiracy theory book, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and lavishes praise on the terrorist group Black September, perpetrators of the Munich Olympic massacre.

In one scene he leads his army on a chaotic training exercise in the Ugandan scrub as they prepare to evict the Israelis from the Golan Heights. In something bordering on a Keystone Cops routine, his elite parachute regiment are shown going about their airborne drills by coming down a children's slide. The film also captures meetings of Amin's cabinet. Here there is no mistaking the power Amin exerts over his ministers. In one particular session he upbraids them, warning them of the dangers of lurking CIA spies, and tells them not to behave like weak women.

One of those scolded is Foreign Minister Michael Ondoga. His body is found floating in the Nile a couple of weeks later. Claiming to be the real director of the film, the one with final cut, Idi Amin orders a re-edited version of the documentary, minus the controversial footage. It's shown to great public acclaim in Uganda. The unexpurgated international version is, however, released in 1974. Complete with filmed executions and abundant dead bodies, it does little to enhance Amin's image abroad.

Amin even holds 200 French citizens in Uganda hostage, until Schroeder makes further sympathetic tweaks to bring the film more in line with his personal vision. Nonetheless, with General Idi Amin a self-portrait, he holds a unique distinction. As the documentary's star, unofficial producer, and with a listing in the credits, music by Idi Amin Dada. He is the only mass-murdering dictator, thus far, to have his work screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Up to this point, we haven't talked much about Idi Amin and his domestic arrangements. Certainly he had a reputation as a ladies' man and he loved to be photographed and seen with lots of women around him, European women, African women fawning over

him. He kind of loved that stereotype. He had great charisma and I have no doubt, knowing everything that I think I know about Amin and his state, that I as an individual probably would have been drawn to him at that time. Because even knowing everything I know, he was affable. He was funny. He was sexy. There was something about him. And so even people who know better were still drawn to him. An avowed polygamist, Amin gets married at least six times.

If you throw in his extramarital love affairs, his mistresses and other relationships, it's hard to keep track of Big Daddy Love Machine. He's reported to keep a harem of about 30 women at his disposal at any one time. And there is another story, an intriguing one, purported by singer Marianne Faithfull. According to her, a man, an art dealer, old Etonian and former officer in the King's African Rifles, claims to have had an affair with Amin during his posting to Uganda in the 1950s.

I've never seen any evidence of that, but I'm totally ready to be proven wrong. Amin sold at the time. Sex sells, stories about Amin sell, and if you can write a bestseller about Amin, at the time. Sex sells, stories about Amine sell. And if you can write a bestseller about Amine, you're going to do it and you're going to try to make it as juicy as possible. And so there are literally dozens of books about Amine that are out there that you have to kind of sift through. And well, it's a real fun puzzle to try to figure out what's right

and what's wrong. The official wives are, for the record, Malyamu, Kay, Nora, Nalongo Medina, Sarah, and Mama Achumaru. Some of the jilted ones, like Malyamu and Kay, go on to become close friends, fellow victims. His first wife, she met him when she was really young. She was working at a sewing machine factory in Jinja, and she met him when she was really young she was working at a sewing machine factory in Jinja and she saw him he was a young army guy and she talks about how they caught eyes across the room and he wooed her and he was lovely he was gentle he was funny and they fell in love and in a few months they decided to get married unfortunately within a few short months of

their being married I believe it was in, he started to demonstrate very abusive physical behavior. They had some children, and so she decided to stay with him shortly after she discovered that he was having an affair with the woman who turned out to be Kay Adroa, later became Kay Amin. Amin eventually married her. She also experienced physical abuse from him. Amin got involved with a third woman named Nora, and it just kind of grew from there. There was like one woman after another, and you know, they kind of became at first adversaries, but then allies to keep each other safe. But all the evidence that I've looked at suggests that at first, like many abusive personalities, he was kind, gentle, loving.

But then his other personality came out. These women served an important function in terms of bolstering the state. They served as the mothers of the nation. But then there was also the party side of Mumin, who is a ladies' man who loved to have affairs. There's estimates that he had just dozens and dozens and dozens of children, and who knows? It's all kind of hard to tell. Conservative estimates put the number of Amin offspring at around 35, though many accounts push the figure north of 60. The oldest, a son, Taban, is born in 1955. Amin's last known child, a daughter, Iman, will be born in 1992, when Amin is in his late 60s.

Amin's private lust is certainly not reflected in his official position on women. He becomes an advocate of strict Islamic dress codes, banning miniskirts and issuing decrees about the acceptable lengths of women's hemlines. The state has a right to stop you and measure your skirt. Has a right to say you can't wear lipstick. During Eid al-Mins, yes, we had to wear long maxis, you know, like long dresses. My sister was working in a high court, was secretary to the judge, and she had gone for lunch. And on coming back at the high court, they stopped her, they measured her skirt, she had high heels, and so they took her, they locked her up for six hours.

The judge went and pleaded for her, and after that, she had to wear maxis. As he's kind of moving more closely towards his allies in the Arab world, he decides that it would be to his benefit to try and curb immorality, appeasing his Arab benefactors. He's trying to demonstrate that he too can be this patriarch, this moral authority figure. And so he's going to whip these young kids into line. So he's going to ban miniskirts. He's going to ban hot pants. He's going to ban wigs and all these other imperialist accoutrements. And it worked.

And so for a while, he received numerous, numerous letters of support from various women's groups, mother's groups, church groups. Thank you, Father Amin, for restoring morality to the nation. So he's all excited about this. But after a while, the violence and the killings continue, and he starts to see his popularity wane. The Organization of African Unity Summit, hosted in Kampala in July 1975, is quite an event.

hosted in Kampala in July 1975 is quite an event. A scale mock-up of the city of Cape Town is set floating on Lake Victoria. Planes from the Ugandan Air Force home in and conduct a haphazard bombing display. It's evidence of Big Daddy's willingness to sock it to apartheid South Africa. And lastly, the biggest set piece of all,

Amin's marriage to Sarah Kiyolaba, whom he weds in a lavish ceremony. She's a go-go dancer in the Suicide Revolutionary Jazz Band, the house group at presidential headquarters. That's where she got her nickname, Suicide Sarah. Sarah is only 19. Amin is around 50. Not that anyone would dare point out the age difference.

He's so smitten with Sarah, his fifth and favourite spouse, that he's divorced all his previous wives in her honour. He also had her previous live-in boyfriend killed, rumored to have been beheaded. With Africa's heads of state in attendance, a bemused PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, is roped in as Amin's best man. In a few weeks time, the happy couple will even be received personally by the Pope. And there's these photographs of Gaddafi standing there,

and you see Amin, and you see Sarah, and Amin is almost seven feet tall, and Sarah's just this petite little tiny 18, 19-year-old thing, and she looks terrified. She looks absolutely terrified in her wedding photos. And Gaddafi's looking on, and it's just surreal. But it was about the performance. It was about the pageantry.

Sadly, this will be no fairy tale. Marriage to the lord of all beasts will end, as Amin ultimately goes into exile. Suicide Sarah will end up working as a hairdresser in Tottenham, North London, dying of cancer in 2015. At least she avoids the fate of several of Amin's ex-wives. Post-separation, they seem to fit a regular pattern of being arrested on spurious criminal charges, their whereabouts unknown. Though none will meet the same grisly end that befalls wife number two, Kay. In August 1974, her body is discovered dismembered in the boot of a car, belonging to a young doctor, Peter Mbalu Mukasa. Word is put about that she was having an affair behind Amin's back, that she was pregnant too, even though she and Amin are actually divorced by this point. Her subsequent butchery is often held up as

a macabre revenge killing on the part of Amin. In a sick twist to the story, and as an act of humiliation, when her family request a viewing of the body, it's said that Amin orders her mutilated corpse to be sewn back together, though with her arms and legs switched around, presenting her on the slab as some mutant freak of witchcraft. As horrific as Kay's death is, the popular account of her gruesome end seems to be an urban legend as much as anything else. It appears Kay died of blood loss while Dr. Mukasa, her lover, was performing an illegal late-term abortion.

He then panicked and tried to dispose of her body, before committing suicide via a drug overdose. But this, like other stories, is something that is recycled endlessly in books, in films. The best-selling novel and 2006 film adapted from it, The Last King of Scotland, brought the story of Idi Amin to a whole new audience. The title comes from the dictator's own obsession, his reverence for a land thousands of miles from Uganda. Back in the old colonial days, Amin's regiment in the East African Army had a heavy Scottish officer contingent.

Bagpipes were the band's mainstay. Apart from their red fez hats, the African bandsmen were bedecked in full highland regalia, kilts, sashes, sporins, leftover kit from World War I. kilts, sashes, sparrings, leftover kit from World War I. For Idi Amin, this was the beginning of a romantic fixation for a land of which he would later proclaim himself king. His love of Scotland, he says, is precisely because they are not racist,

like the accursed English. If you go to Scotland, you will talk to the people, they will welcome you to their house. If you go to Scotland, you will talk to the people, they will welcome you to their house If you go to where there is English, they don't want to sit near African If they see a black man, they say he's a monkey or a dog Unfortunately, The Last King of Scotland, the movie in particular, would seem to have quite a bit to answer for For as much as actor Forrest Whitaker is in mesmerizing, Oscar-winning form as Idi Amin, it plays fast and loose with the facts. The good thing about the film is that it's shot in Uganda,

and they use a lot of Ugandan actors. The film itself, besides being cinematographically beautiful, is very problematic. The scene, for example, where he's shown with Kay in the hospital after she died and her body had been dismembered and her legs had been sewn on the wrong way and all of this stuff, complete fabrication. By reproducing something that you know is a falsehood and putting it into the story, it causes a lot of people to believe that that's actually what happened. And in fact, in 2008, a year or two after the film was released, I went back to do some

follow-up research for the book. And I went to West Nile and I was asking people about their memories about Amin. And I had a number of younger folks, especially, who would say to me, well, have you seen The Last King of Scotland? Just go there. That'll tell you the story. So my frustration was, oh my gosh, this has now become the history. This is now the story. So my frustration was, oh my gosh, this has now become the history. This is now the narrative. And so I think ultimately, as a historical project,

films like The Last King of Scotland do more damage than good. Dr. Mark Leopold. My students, they really found it difficult to get their head around the idea that The Last King of Scotland was purely fiction, that it was based on a novel which was purely fiction. I mean, okay, it was very much based around reported stories about a meme, but it made no pretense to be history. But it was received as history everywhere.

When the truth goes against the legend, print the legend. when the truth goes against the legend, print the legend. The Last King of Scotland is told through the eyes of the fictitious Nicholas Garrigan, a callow Scottish doctor who becomes Idi Amin's confidant. In real life, Amin's chief advisor, someone who's been with him through thick and thin, is a rather wily old Englishman, a man named Bob Astalls. A Battle of Britain veteran with a handlebar moustache, Astalls is quite the character.

Part businessman, part TV executive, part gunrunner, part mercenary, and someone who acts quite as often as a means private pilot. Astels, by popular consensus, is as up to his neck in everything as his boss. His chief value to Amin comes via his ability to turn a blind eye, to keep his mouth shut when required. Astels has never been popular in the white community in Kampala. The expats refer to him as the white rat. Idi Amin does no such thing. The president calls him Major Bob, a partner in crime. His unique skill seems to be that he's the only one of Amin's entourage who can calm him down after one of his frequent rages. In the mid-1960s,

during the Congo smuggling operations, Astels notched up all sorts of capers alongside Amin in his role as his personal pilot, flying in and out of jungle hotspots. At one point, when Astels was captured by Congolese troops, Amin attacked the jail personally and succeeded in breaking him out. Post-Amin, Astels will serve six years in prison. He is, one might suggest, worthy of a film in his own right. He was one of the survivors of Uganda in history, really. Became a kind of jack-of-all-trades in the 1960s.

He had a key role in the creation of Uganda television, used to run the camera and help with production. He helped Milton Abote set up his security services. And when Amin came to power, he became the head of the anti-smuggling unit and a kind of permanent advisor to President Amin. He was an informant for British intelligence. The Brits kept a close eye on him. They weren't convinced that he always told the truth, but he did offer a constant stream of evidence about what was happening in Uganda to the Brits. The two of them became very close over the years, and they had certainly a love-hate relationship. There were a number of times that Amin and Bob had falling outs, and Bob would have to flee the country. He'd flee to Kenya for a number of years and then come back and they'd have this making up period. Bob was loyal to Amin to the end. And when I

interviewed him over the years, he would write about how he thought that Amin was essentially doing the best that he could. And Bob would never admit to any of this to me. But I think that Bob was also very much involved in orchestrating a lot of the violence and creating the structures of power that allowed Amin and his military state to stay in power for so long. The violence, it always comes back to it. Amin is done with fooling around. After the self-aggrandizing documentary, the TV skits and the comedy press conferences, after the faux buffoonery and the womanizing, Idi Amin feels the time has come to be taken seriously as a statesman, a global leader.

And for his next move, Big Daddy, Lord of all Beasts, Lord of all Fishes, will attempt to demonstrate his magnificence upon the world stage. In the next episode of Real Dictators, in the final part of the Idi Amin story, four military planes sweep in low over Lake Victoria. They are blacked out and in complete radio silence. In the passenger hall at Entebbe Airport, 106 international hostages are being held at gunpoint by terrorists.

These aircraft, skimming towards them over the water, are about to conduct one of the most audacious commando raids in military history. A raid that will spark the beginning of the end for Idi Amin. That's next time on Real Dictators.