Idi Amin: An Attempt At Yet Another Vilification

“Amin was a cannibal!” was one of the statements that built up into a whole questionable story that I heard when I was growing up. Many Ugandans heard the same story. The horrific tale was iced up by a 1981 film, Amin, The Rise and Fall where in a scene, he cuts off a piece of flesh from the dead Benedicto Kiwanuka’s body and eats it! This and more fallacies is what the world has come to know of the third president of Uganda.

During his eight-year rule, Uganda’s former president Idi Amin Dada is said to have been the subject of thousands of photographs.He loved the limelight and was a certified showman. However, for decades it seemed Amin’s photographs had been destroyed during the tumult of the early 1980s or misplaced during the subsequent relocation of the archives of the Ministry Information’s and were probably lost to future generations of Ugandans.

However, in 2015 researchers and archivists at the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC) uncovered a filing cabinet full of thousands of photographic negatives. Each envelope was carefully labelled with information about the date and subject of the photograph. In January 2018, UBC launched a project to digitize the important collection.

‘Black Americans meet H.E.’ 11 August 1975, The delegation included Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. UBC 4867-011.
With funding from the University of Michigan, USA, the University of Western Australia and Makerere University, the dedicated team of archivists has digitized 25,000 images to date.

‘The Unseen Archive of Amin’ consists of 200 photographs drawn from the much larger collection held by UBC and is on display at the Uganda National Museum. The exhibition is curated by Nelson Abiti (ethnographer, Uganda Museum), Dr. Derek R. Peterson (professor of history and African studies, University of Michigan, USA), Edgar C. Taylor and associate professor Richard Vokes, of the University of Western Australia.
There are 70,000 negatives but the exhibition presents us with just 200 photographs. This leaves us with questions like; what criteria was used to select which photographs to show the public?

 

The exhibition gives a timeline of Uganda’s pre- and post-colonial political times, but concentrates on Amin’s leadership and lifestyle from the 1960s-1980s. “It traces the former Ugandan president’s extraordinary life, looking at Amin as a family man and the politician (president),” Dr. Peterson explained. But, there are no pictures of piled up dead bodies. The curators believe that the photographs were taken to mask the gruesome atrocities that were taking place in the background during those times. When you walk into the exhibition, you will surely give the organizers thumbs up for curating the show. The photographs are well placed, grouped according to time and events, right from pre-colonial protectorate years to the early Museveni times, from the economic war period to sports, and are nicely captioned. However, if one engages more critically with the exhibition, and for a Ugandan like me who is well aware of the many sides to the Amin story, I discovered that the curators were biased with the narrative created around this collection; a narrative we have all heard about the despot before. Although it might seem subtle or easily felt according to the kind of viewer, the curators surely try to direct and perhaps tell an opposite story from what the photographs portray. Whereas these photographs are mostly about merry-making and the beautiful moments, the curators are hell-bent on reminding you of the “300,000” people who were murdered by the dictator! In every section of the photographs where there is a good amount of joy and celebration, it ends with a line jogging your memory, that behind all this, there was violence and murder.  In my opinion it’s clear that the curators came to the project with preconceived notions and intentions, to continue from where the film The Last King of Scotland stopped.

‘H.E. meets India delegation on compensation of Indian Nationals’, 20 November 1975. UBC 5026-010.

Dr. Derek R. Peterson and Richard Vokes wrote in qz.com, “But when designing the Uganda Museum exhibition, we agonized over the absence of images that reveal suffering and death as facts of life in the 1970s”. The curators ignore all the positivity in the images and choose to cover it with soot! For example, in one of the images, Amin was photographed with African-American civil rights persons, a delegation that included the Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan. The curators don’t mention that Idi Amin championed the struggle against apartheid and gave African liberation all the support he could. This is why the members of the Nation of Islam where interested in meeting him. As the Chairman of the African Union in 1975-76, Amin lobbied tirelessly for a fund by African countries to support fighters, providing arms and medicine to the different liberation struggles that were taking place in southern Africa. President Amin supported boycotting the 1976 Montreal Olympics and the subsequent Commonwealth Games of 1978.The boycott resulted in Uganda and 25 other African countries all withdrawing from the games under what came to be known as “The African Boycott”. The boycott was a protest against apartheid in South Africa.

In video footage in the exhibition, an interviewer asks traders and common people on the streets after the economic war about their situation. They all answer excitedly about how they are benefiting from the expulsion of Asians which the curators must have ignored or missed because the interviews are conducted in Luganda and Kiswahili. The curators appear to follow a similar line that demonisers of Amin tow, which ignore the reaction of everyday Ugandans to the  expulsion of Asians. For starters, Amin principally expelled British Asians who held British passports because he considered them part of colonialism. Uganda’s economic structure then was still colonial and exploitative. I recall my grandfather telling me when he walked down the streets of Kampala, it felt like you were in Bombay. The government also compensated the expelled Asians.. Pictures that are evidence of this reality were exhibited however they are pinned in a corner and could easily be missed. After the expulsion, there was a rise of the famous mafutamingi which was a class of successful indigenous businessmen – such as  Gordon Wavamuno and Nasser Ntege Ssebagala.A photograph worth noting is one titled: “Discussion of languages” which is mounted in the room where the video footage is showing. It shows a meeting which was convened by President Amin to discuss and choose a language that could become Uganda’s official vernacular. Unlike most East African countries which have Swahili as a national language, one of the factors hindering nationalism and perhaps patriotism is the lack of a binding national language in Uganda. This goes to show Amin’s efforts to bind and unite the country as one.

President Amin embarked on major development projects in Uganda including transport (mainly Uganda Railways and Uganda Airlines), satellite telecommunications for global reception of international media and telephony. This is seen with the presence and discovery of this archive. He worked towards the revamping of the banking sector with the countrywide expansion of Uganda Commercial Bank. He focused on the tourism industry and during his reign, the Miss Tourism pageant was born. Part of the exhibition has pictures of this pageantry. He invited international press and film makers to document the tourism sector. These footages with him touring national parks are still present at film libraries or people’s homes.

Women’s emancipation occurred during Amin Presidency. He deliberately gave women senior and mid-level positions in public administration. By expelling the Asian population in late 1972, Amin opened up an economic space for Ugandan women. In 2013, a gender researcher, Alicia C. Deckers, wrote “one of the most curious outcomes of Idi Amin’s military dictatorship [was the] ‘accidental liberation’ of Ugandan women” Whether they engaged in trade or opened up shops abandoned by the departed Asians, Decker writes numerous women fondly remembered Amin as the one who ‘taught us to work’ and man gained access, for the first time, to economic resources and decision-making power. This is all showed in the video footage from UBC which plays in the exhibition. Present day Ugandans are just waking up to the alternative narratives of Idi Amin and when these are compared with the ruling Government today are provocative. This was recently made apparent in a recent meme comparing the airlines from Amin’s rule and that of the current regime. Idi Amin Dada was a man of the people, a publicist and a sociable character who mingled with ordinary Ugandans. The photographs on show illustrate this very well as he is seen at one time playing an accordion for a crowd, swimming at Lake Albert and dancing with Larakaraka dance performers from northern Uganda. It is said that he once rode a bicycle from Entebbe to Kampala alone, no bodyguards or motorcade, often stopping on the way and greeting people and asking about their welfare. Mohinder Dhillon, an Indian from Kenya who was his chief photographer and appears on the poster of the exhibition says that he felt very safe around Amin.

‘President Amin meets Ugandan Women’s organization officials at State House Entebbe’, September 1976. UBC 5389-005.

President Amin’s government however was not one made from heaven and therefore flawed on a couple of fronts. In the later years of his tenure, he grew paranoid and suspicious of those around him because the Uganda National Liberation Front and Tanzanian forces had plans of invading and removing his Government. He acted erratically and started imprisoning and murdering anyone connected to the rebels.  His Government’s attempt to curate the Ugandan economy in 1973 by setting up state-approved prices for commodities was an abhorring move.

The concluding section of the exhibition shows photos of the State Research Bureau in 1980 which were clearly taken after Amin was driven out of the country. These photos represent events during the Yusuf Lule/Binaisa times which, were characterised by a lot of political confusion.

Whereas it is true that persons disappeared and fell prey to Idi Amin’s henchmen in the 70s, for example Kay Amin whose body was discovered in pieces in the early 70s, Erinayo Wilson Oryema, father of the late musician Geoffrey Oryema and then Inspector General of Police, Archibishop Janani Luwum and many others but the number might have never reached 300,000 or even 500,000 like some sources allege. So the real question would be –why does the West paint Idi Amin reign as one of total failure? I suggest the answer is simple. It is because leaders like him, together with Thomas Sankara, Muammar Gadaffi and now Paul Kagame chose to oppose western imperialism, oppression and plunder of African resources.  Western media bestowed the title, “the Butcher of Uganda” on the despot but what would they call Hitler, King Leopold II for murdering 10 million Congolese or Winston Churchill for causing the death of five million Indians in 1943.

‘Discussion of languages’, June 1973. This meeting—convened at President Amin’s direction—was meant to choose a language that could become Uganda’s official vernacular. UBC 3567-003

 Since the photographs in this exhibition show a different Amin than the world has gotten to know, it would be more understandable to follow the tone of the photographs. It doesn’t make sense for the curators to build an opposing narrative from what the photographs are portraying.

It is clearly a game of presentation and representation. The winner gets to tell the story or the one with a better mouth gets to talk.

Photo credits: Uganda Broadcasting Corporation

This article was first published in Edition 4 of Nairobi Contemporary, a contemporary art magazine based in Nairobi.

Matt Kayem is a contemporary artist, art critic and writer living and working in Kampala, Uganda. He can be reached via email, mattkayem@gmail.com.

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