Idi Amin by Mark Leopold

Idi Amin: The Story of Africa’s Icon of Evil
By Mark Leopold
Yale University Press, 2021

The brief, terrifying reign of murderous Ugandan dictator Idi Amin from 1971 to 1979 is only partially the subject of Mark Leopold’s new book, Idi Amin: The Story of Africa’s Icon of Evil. The rest of the subject is implied in that subtitle: “icon of evil,” which when used by an academic (Leopold is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex) in the 21st century will only ever signify disapproval and even irony - never literal truth. 

This bodes ominously for a book about murderous Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, since by any conceivable measurement, he was, in fact, an icon of evil. During the relatively brief span from his successful coup against Ugandan President Milton Obote to the successful coup against himself in 1979, hundreds of thousands of Ugandans were pauperized, brutalized, murdered, or “disappeared” either on Amin’s orders or at the hands of the military he encouraged to rampage out of all control. 

This is plain fact, put most directly by Amin’s own former foreign minister and brother-in-law in a letter submitted to the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) empaneled to investigate but addressed directly to Amin himself:

I want to personally confirm here and now that indeed you are personally responsible for the liquidation of all the people who have ‘disappeared’ in Uganda ever since you came to power. People have ‘disappeared’ either because you have specifically ordered their liquidation as individuals or as a group, or because they have fallen victim to the murderous ravages of lawless elements who have thrived in our country as a result of your deliberate refusal to restrain the criminal activities of such elements, or to place any sort of discipline over them. You have in effect placed such thugs completely over the law, since they know that they can kill, maim and loot with impunity.

Leopold approaches his subject in a way that’s even more intriguing than it is maddening: by assuming nothing and sifting through an enormous amount of documentation (the list of his book’s references will surely be a deep quarry for all future researchers), intent not so much on producing a big, definitive book about who Idi Amin was or wasn’t but rather on producing a smaller, more insightful book about why historians have written about him the things they have. Leopold’s digging around, his quest to separate fact from fiction on the subject, is the book’s most riveting narrative line. 

In the course of drawing his own conclusions about the murderous Ugandan dictator, Leopold finds many unexpected modern resonances, particularly around Amin’s canny, often intuitive use of both Ugandan media and the international press in order to keep the spotlight firmly planted on himself at all times. Amin made preposterous claims and boasts on a regular basis, indulging in cartoonish posturing abroad while the aforementioned thousands of Ugandans were robbed or murdered back at home. In this sense Leopold goes so far as to suggest he might be “the father of modern populism” - and to invoke inevitable modern parallels. “[Amin] saw the need to dominate the news by all means necessary, even if it meant saying and doing ridiculous but dramatic things,” Leopold writes. “In this, Amin was way ahead of his time; some of his utterances which seemed inexplicable at the time sound commonplace in today’s Trumpian/Johnsonian era.”

After a while reading Leopold’s book, it’s not so much the spectre of Trumpism as the spectre of the Black Lives Matter movement that becomes more noticeable. Our author is certain that no white person at the time ever saw Amin clearly, for instance. “The British (and the Western-educated southern Ugandan elite) failed to see what he was doing, were confused by his lifelong performance of buffoonery and stupidity, and simply didn’t understand him.” 

The book never seriously entertains the possibility that the stupidity might have been genuine, even though it’s stupidity that shines forth most prominently in the book written about Amin by his son Jaffar, and in most first-hand reports of people meeting Amin. Leopold dwells more than he probably should on how formative Amin’s time serving in the British King’s African Rifles (KAR) - certainly Amin himself, during the two decades after his downfall when he was a well-financed guest of Saudi Arabia, waxed nostalgic about his time in the service of the British Empire. But the implications of the book notwithstanding, no other KAR Warrant Officer went on to rape and desecrate an entire country. Mean, evil colonialism didn’t make Idi Amin a murderous Ugandan dictator, and it isn’t in the slightest bit a colonialist caricature to call him that. 

Leopold’s soft-footing around such concerns is his hard-working book’s only major flaw. His distrust of the way so many primary and secondary sources seem eager to demonize Amin as some cartoonishly evil figure out of Heart of Darkness (Conrad first comes up right there on Page 1) sometimes prompts Leopold to see grey areas where none exist. He’s probably read more first-hand accounts of Amin’s atrocities than anybody in the world, but he can still write an astonishing paragraph like this one:

Perhaps, as head of state, Amin was guilty in law of everything done by government agents, on or off duty, but I am no lawyer and am interested here in moral culpability rather than legal responsibility. I suggest there is a real ethical distinction between someone who consciously plans and carries out atrocious acts, and someone whose incompetence and carelessness about the consequences enables others to get away with such actions.

When you’re writing a book about the murderous Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and you reach a point where you’re referring to his “carelessness,” you have stared too long into the abyss. Idi Amin glorified the military; he carefully maintained (and jealousy guarded) a very personal relationship with his army commanders; until the very end of his reign, a single word from him would have brought those “atrocious acts’ to a halt. Leopold might find it difficult to assign “moral culpability” in such a scenario, but let’s hope most of his readers don’t. 

Even so, Idi Amin: The Story of Africa’s Icon of Evil makes for consistently fascinating reading. And the questions it asks so doggedly - how do we know what happened? Whose accounts do we trust, and why? - are all the more dramatic when you remember that the events under examination here happened within living memory, not in ancient Rome or Persia. Idi Amin, the murderous Ugandan dictator, doesn’t in any way deserve even the tiny drips of nuanced understanding he gets in Leopold’s book - but the deeper questions Leopold asks are always worth asking.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The National. He writes regularly for The Vineyard Gazette, the Daily Star and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.