Thirty years after his overthrow, nation comes to grips with Amin’s grim legacy
Trying to beat the traffic after the funeral of the former Ugandan president Milton Obote in October 2005, we left Apac immediately the service was over.
We were crossing the ferry over the Nile at Masindi Port when I saw him walk out of his double-cabin pick-up to stand at the prow.
Crossing from the east to the west bank, the sun was directly in our face, glittering on the surface of the mile-wide river.
Beyond that was the immense flatness of Bunyoro-Kitara. Still, he had his family’s characteristic build, and I knew him – Jaffar Amin, son of Idi Amin, another former president of Uganda who had died two years before.
Looking more thoughtful than we ever saw his father do in public he stood there, staring into the churning water.
Back in Akokoro, Obote’s home town, the master of ceremonies at the funeral had introduced him to the mourners.
Words were said about forgiveness and reconciliation and, as he acknowledged the applause, it was as if a tension accumulated over the 34 years since the 1971 coup had dissipated in a deep sigh of relief.
I thought of walking over to him, but the questions that came into my mind did not sound right.
I then thought to tip off the international journalists I was travelling with.
But I held my tongue. Being welcomed to Obote’s compound would have done things to Jaffar’s mind; he must want to be alone.
As a Ugandan you are brought up to instinctively revile Amin.
But, standing on that ferry, a strong sense of protectiveness towards Jaffar overcame me.
Anyone sticking a microphone in his face would only feed the gluttonous Amin media mill.
The terse lines on the website of the Al Amin Foundation, quoting Jaffar on that event, do not capture the expression I saw on his face that afternoon:
“My presence at Obote’s funeral in Akokoro as one of many of the children of the late Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada was to show respect and convey my personal condolences to the bereaved family of the late Dr Apollo Milton Obote,” he says.
Now another landmark connected to his father is upon us: For the whole of last week, the BBC radio programme Network Africa reported on the crossing of another divide, with Jaffar reaching out to the family of another man his father fought – the late Tanzanian president Mwalimu Julius Nyerere – to mark the passing, on April 11, of 30 years since the fall of Amin.
Thirty years is a long time. The principal actors from that age – Obote, General Tito Okello Lutwa, Major-General David Oyite Ojok and Amin himself are long dead. A sizeable cotingent of the Ugandan Asian community whom Amin expelled in 1971 have returned.
Since 1979 Uganda has never stopped fighting: hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered, and mayhem beyond what even Amin dared commit has come to pass.
While they were still alive there was always the anxiety – ridiculous, yes – that these men might somehow return to rule the country. With the death of Obote in 2005, the past finaly retreated harmlessly into the shadows.
Idi Amin’s death in 2003 sparked off soul searching in Uganda.
Some called him the common man’s hero, whose 1972 economic war made it possible for ordinary Ugandans to enter business.
Others, among them those who fled the country or lost relatives in the wanton killings that marked his nine-year rule, swore that even his body would not be buried in Uganda.
The first group’s claim, fuelled by hatred of the colonial economy and anti-Asian sentiments, amounted to saying he brought light to the country by setting it on fire.
The second group, which included President Yoweri Museveni, was powerful enough to prevent the return of Amin’s body home for burial. And so, like an accursed man banished into the desert, Amin lies buried in Saudi Arabia.
The Amin family, led by Jaffar, has been on a campaign to rehabilitate the patriarch’s image and bring to an end the four-decade opprobrium surrounding his legacy.
It is building the Al-Amin Foundation, initially to promote a “social justice agenda for Uganda that will transcend the tribalism, racism and classism that has wreaked havoc on Uganda”.
The BBC Swahili Service organised the meeting between Jaffar Amin and Madaraka Nyerere.
But what Amin was and what happened on April 11 all those years ago touched every Ugandan family.
While this was a priceless public relations exercise for the Amin family, the BBC was simply exploiting the shock attraction of the name.
And it is an immense attraction: out of the nine presidents who have ruled the country, only Amin has had not one but three big films made about him.
Amin had in excess the qualities that spark a story to life – part bully, part clown, his personality made for suspenseful transformation at each turn.
He had an actor’s capacity to be what he needed to be.
Like the multifaceted reading of reality in a post-modern interpretation of things, he did not keep one face constant for too long.
The Last King of Scotland itself differed from previous movie depictions of Amin by presenting him as harmless; Forest Whitaker’s dictator was a stuffed bear – still looking big and menacing, but a harmless lover of jokes, a victim of sorts.
In reality, Amin left Uganda quite unrecognisable; his destruction of its moral fibre has set a permanent seal on the country.
You only have to move beyond its borders to see that what there seems normal – war and impermanence – is a sad syndrome of a society traumatised en masse.
His image is now softening in Uganda. But like any reading of history, this is not a reading of the man per se but a criticism of the present: when Ugandans see the current tinkering with constitutions to extend presidential term limits, they remember that Amin was devoid of personal ambition. When they see the shameless corruption of our rulers, they recall that Amin never really stole public money and had those accused of doing so executed.
One can only imagine what it was like growing up as Amin’s son, amid the constant condemnation of your father, the reviling of your name....
To hear Idi Amin’s children’s voices is to see the past differently. Now Amin looks human, closer.
The past becomes confusing, the present less clear. It is what happens when the personal crosses the public.
In this confusion is a thick layering of history – of the oppressive colonial administration responsible for moulding Amin during the suppression of Mau Mau in Kenya. It begs questions of how a country should be run and what becomes of it when the military takes over.
In Uganda, the military is still in charge.
This year, then, is the beginning of the final stretch of years, beginning in 1979, in which Amin’s shadow will hang over Uganda.
Time is driving out the leaders who formed extreme opinions during his rule – who are finding out that it is harder now to evoke his name to whip the masses into line.
Aspects of what Amin was will remain beyond redemption: the spectacle of human degradation, of men stripped naked, blindfolded and shot in public, and the grabbing of property and businesses in 1972 from Ugandan Asians must not be recast in any way.
Source:TheEastAfrican
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