Adventures With Idi Amin

By: DThompson | in: Movies |

A recent release about General Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, ex-Olympic heavyweight boxing champ and all around murderous nutcase had me thinking of an earlier documentary by Barbet Schroeder made while Amin was still in power, but before the Israeli raid on Entebee airport that was the beginning of the end for his rule. The 2006 film, The Last King Of Scotland, looks at Amin through the eyes of a very callow Scottish doctor who ended up, after shooting a cow and splinting Amin’s hand, becoming one of the unstable dictator’s inner circle. The documentary, dating from 1974 two years before Amin’s statements supporting the Black Brigade came home to roost in the form of a plane and 250 hostages, is simply called General Idi Amin Dada.

The Last King Of Scotland takes place from Amin’s 1971 coup d’etat, happening as young doctor Nicholas Garrigan arrives in Uganda, to the hostage event at Entebee. General was shot in 1973 and 1974 before Amin had begun to slaughter hundreds of thousands of his own citizens. Tellingly, After Amin has gone on a lengthy, rambling, anti-Israeli rant, Schroeder asks him if he would welcome Palestinian terrorists in Uganda and Amin says yes. This documentary was seen all over the world and you have to wonder if it didn’t cause the event which precipitated Idi Amin’s ultimate downfall.

It’s too bad it came out a few years after Nicholas, desperate to escape his controlling father, literally spun a globe to end up in Uganda. Too bad since he obviously hasn’t a clue what he’s getting in to. Life is still in dorm room, all-night-party mode for Garrigan who claims that he wants “to have his fun, adventure, oh, and make a difference, sure.” It’s clear from the outset what order his priorites are in. For Nicholas, immature and gullible, it’s the party that matters. Of course, for anyone who knows better this kid’s foolishness is readily apparent. In fact, he’s so stupid about his own peril, the film could easily have been titled The Young Scottish Idiot. Amin, however, is crazy like a fox and plays the kid for his own gain using the doctor as a kind of pet Westerner. Forrest Whitaker deserves special congratulations for his excellent portrayal of General Amin, claiming to be a man of the people while surrounded by bristling gun toting soldiers.Whitaker’s smile, usually so friendly is simply menacing here and makes Nicholas’ empty-headed grin all the more worrisome. As we watch this well-educated child playing a very dangerous very adult game you can’t help but give in to the tension the film generates. It seems like this kid, smart enough to be a doctor but not exactly worldly wise has no conception of the almost god-like power of life or death the general wields.

If anything the real Amin is even scarier, a good-natured exterior hiding a Stalin-esque paranoia and a willingness to kill everyone around him. His empty eyes gaze across the landscape as he indulges himself in long, rambling, delusional monolouges about how the animals know what he’s saying to them (Doctor Idi Amin Dolittle Dada), and all of Africa has asked him for the “freedom” he’s given Ugandans, and all of his people desperately love him. Yet everywhere he goes it’s guns, guns and more guns.

Well the people did love him, at first. The British, former colonial overlords who Amin justifiably hated, had imported thousands of Asians into Uganda. Amin declared a very Hitler / Stalin-like “Economic War” which basically meant goodbye Asians but not goodbye Asian businesses or property holdings which were redistributed to Ugandans. The same “War” saw the exile en masse of Uganda’s Israeli population, while presumably leaving their worldly goods to the Ugandans as well. Amin at different times professes a belief in the fake anti-Jewish tome The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, claims Israelis wanted to poison the Nile, and repeats that he speaks in the voice of God. It’s ego run utterly rampant and very much what Last King portrays as well.

Though the fictional film completely ignores the Economic War as well as the many, many assassinations and executions it is reasonable because we’re seeing Uganda through Nicholas’ eyes and he never realizes the indescribable danger he’s in until the last third of the film. At the end Amin grabs Nicholas saying “You thought you’d come down to Africa to play the white man, Africa is real.” Thus forcing Nick to come to terms not only with his own foolishness but also with his own smugly immature , and vaguely racist, response to an entire continent.
Both films are very much worth your time. General Idi Amin Dada has a tendency to drag as Amin’s self-congratulatory line gets old after a while. It’s probably best viewed after Last King Of Scotland which, for all it’s putting down of Nick’s desire for adventure is really, in the end, all about a young Scottish lad’s adventure with a real-life monster named General Idi Amin Dada.
VERDICT: Last King first, General Idi for background.

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Posted on May 23, 2007

Comments

10 Responses to “Adventures With Idi Amin”

lynn on May 23rd, 2007 1:31 pm

This should be good!

Adventures With Idi Amin « Veronica’s Lore on May 23rd, 2007 4:29 pm

[…] Get the whole story… […]

DThompson on May 23rd, 2007 8:28 pm

lynn, Last King Of Scotland IS good, in fact it’s GREAT, and as a double bill with Schroeder’s documentary it’s just fantastic.
Veronica’s Lore I’m not sure I understand your comment. If you’re implying that this film, coupled with the 1973 documentary do not present a realistic picture of who Idi Amin really was, I disagree. Schroeder got Amin on camera by convincing him that the documentary was to be a self-portrait, and in many ways it is. Short of time traveling back to actually hang out with the General I don’t see how you could possibly get more of the whole story.

Peety on May 23rd, 2007 10:19 pm

The Last King Of Scotland is a wonderful film…
I saw it for the first time a few days ago and it captivated me from beginning to end..

Great post!!!

skeletal_206bones on May 24th, 2007 1:36 am

Saw The Last King of Scotland last night. Here is what I thought: it is a good, serious movie. Yet its artistic richness cannot overcome the story’s hollowness.

The movies uses a fictional character to paint a picture of Idi Amin who, perhaps more than anyone else, defines the term “African dictator”. Although the movie raises several good points, such as the peril of blind liberal allegiance with the downtrodden, or how terrible Ami was as a ruler (especially for the younger generation who have never heard of him before), I was struck by how Euro-centric the movie is–”not there is anything wrong with it”, but that is what I mean “hollow”.
The whole story was told by the young doctor from Scotland, who escaped from a bourgeois future to seek excitement and adventure. He was soon secuded by power, statue and charisma and became a unwilling servant of Idi Amin. It is really odd to look at Idi Amin this way because he meant so much more to his people, his neighbors and to history than he could ever have been to a lone Westerner.

In the movie, Amin, played by Whitaker, invoked his tribe, his agenda against colonialism, Libya and the PLO during conversations. Those names, each saturated with historical significance, matters a lot to everyone else except the young Scot who was engaged in a passionate affair with one of Amin’s wives. Therefore, the enormity of Amin’s crimes came to the young Scot’s–and us viewers’–consciousness only through the terrors he cast upon the two adulterers. I thought this arrangement errorneously aggrandized western individualism (I doubt even Satre would object to an Ugandan dictator torturing a green-eyed hunk for screwing his wife behind his back. If so, then what Amin did wrong?) but trivialized the suffering of the victims–after all, hundreds of kids starved to death before they are old enough to play Paolo and Francesca!

Another issue I have with this movie, and the portrait of African politics in the West in general, is that the picture is too simplistic: it is either “he’s his people’s savior” or “he will turn the country into his personal checkings account”–as if there is no shade of grey in between. After all, nationalism was invented in the West, when Amin keeps saying, “my country”, what exactly does he mean? Does he equates a head of state to a chief of a tribe? If so, where is the evidence? If not, where are the nuances? It is always the subtlety that tells a more complete story. Unfortunately, all the subtlety The Last King of Scotland has is the flirtacious eye contacts between the young Scot and his black beauty. What a waste of time!

HMTKSteve on May 24th, 2007 9:35 am

does anyone remember the Idi Amin song from the 80’s? It got a good amount of airplay on Dr. Demento.

The song started out with a man singing with backup singers. Over the course of the song he would sing about how great he was and gradually kill all those around him.

Lee H. on May 25th, 2007 2:26 pm

I think The Last King of Scotland was well done but the problem I have with it is that Idi was a real person, Nicholas Garrigan was not. He was added to create drama in the film which in my opinion was unnecessary. Idi Amins life was filled with more than enough drama to stand on it’s own. Idi’s second (not his third) wife did in fact have an affair and she WAS dismembered and sewn back together. It wasn’t with a white man and her arms and legs were not reversed like in the movie but it did happen. Nicholas having an affair with her was just a way of adding drama. ( and yes I did notice that his third wife in the movie was slightly more “European” looking that his other wives. Coincidence?) Regardless, I think the whole cast did a great job. It was a good movie but it would have been a more IMPORTANT movie had it used more fact instead of fictional stories. God forbid we learn something about the history of Uganda.

DThompson on May 29th, 2007 1:03 pm

Hmmm, just because Nicholas Garrigan is a fictional construct does not mean that the Uganda, or the Amin presented in Last King Of Scotland is incorrectly portrayed, nor does it mean that by watching the movie you will “learn nothing” about Uganda.
Last King is, after all, a movie, not a documentary or a course in Ugandan History or 20th Century African Political Science.
If you wish to learn of the REAL Idi Amin, as told in his own words, then I can can only re-suggest that you rent and view Barbet Schroeder’s documentary “General Idi Amin Dada”. Both films put together should give you at least a working knowledge of the rule of Amin. If you are still wanting for knowledge I’ll have to roll out the cliche’d but true recommendation that you find a good book. Books are still where truly deep knowledge is to be acquired. Even the best movie or documentary rarely does more than scratch the surface.
Anyway, to say a film is no good because one of it’s characters is fictional seems like a dismissive cop out to me. As Stephen King has said “Fiction is the truth within the lie”.

DThompson on May 29th, 2007 1:13 pm

And HMTK Steve, I am so very sorry it took me this long to get back to you. The site nofear.org has an embedded .mp3 of the song “Amazin’ Man” by John Bird (singing as Idi Amin). It’s here.
http://www.nofear.org/Archives/Media/2003/08/idi-amin.mp3

Lee H. on June 1st, 2007 12:17 pm

I never said the move was “no good.” In fact my exact words were “It was a good movie.”

Though I’m far from an expert I have a working knowledge of a handful of African countries, Uganda included and I’ve seen “General Idi Amin Dada.” My problem with the movie was not that I felt Idi wasn’t portrayed truthfully because I think he was. My problem was that I feel that Nicholas was added to the movie (and the book that it was based on) to either spice it up or either give the audience someone to relate to. In either case I think the addition was unnecessary. In my humble opinion, Idi Amin’s story doesn’t need any propping up. Just my opinion though.