The Last King of Scotland (1998)

by Giles Foden

  The journalist glanced anxiously up at his cameraman to see if he had got this. And he had, hunched over the matt-plastic sucker of his eyepiece – like part of a sea creature, I’d thought, when they were setting up – recording for posterity Idi Amin in full flood: legs akimbo, arms a windmill.

  “And the British?” asked the Mirror man.

  “They are my friends, they just forget sometimes. Long live the Queen! Yes, I love them very much, until recently, when they have been attacking me. Nor do I want to see them kill the Irish Catholics, because, as a former colonial of Britain myself, I feel embarrassed. Regrettable developments in Ulster call for Britain’s true friends to come to her assistance. The leaders of Ireland, Catholic and Protestant and English and Irish, should come to Uganda and negotiate peace – far away from the site of battle and antagonism.”

  He sighed and spread his enormous hands out wide, like a pair of oars before they hit the water.

  “I don’t know. What is to be done about Britain? I am the greatest politician in the world, I have shaken the British so much I deserve a degree in philosophy. But…when members of the same family quarrel, they are always ready to forgive and forget. I have many Irish, Scottish and Welsh friends, also. I like the Scots best, because they are the best fighters in Britain and do not practise discrimination. The English are the most hopeless. I really don’t understand why Scotland does not decide to become independent and leave the English to suffer.”

  “When are you going to hand back power to a civilian government?” asked a woman with her hair in a bandanna.

  “I am not quite able at this moment to hand back the reins of government to politicians because corruption is still rampant among civilians. Let me remind you that it is only through my efforts that we have undone the effects of many centuries of underdogism in Uganda. Uganda is a paradise in Africa. If you have a shirt and trousers, you can live in Uganda for years – even without working. I am the hero of Africa because of this.”

  “So why is everyone afraid of you?” she said, bravely I thought.

  Amin beamed. “It is my brilliance that frightens them. And perhaps also I am not liked because I am not a puppet leader. The Europeans carried me on their backs on a litter into my reception. Why did they do that? Because they considered me a brilliant, tough African leader who has done much to help create better understanding between Europeans and Africans.”

  “But what about atrocities committed by your soldiers?” The woman said this with emphasis, and an air of uneasiness fell over the room.

  “There have been a few mistakes,” Amin replied, quietly. “It is only true that a few badly trained soldiers have misbehaved. And some criminals pretending to act on my orders have been killing drivers and then stealing their cars. I have told them, if you are not happy with me, then kill me or make me resign – but don’t disturb the people of Uganda at night by running about shooting. Uganda is going at supersonic speed and the people should not be made unnecessarily to panic.”

  “If it is just mistakes,” she persisted, “why are there so many stories within Uganda about soldiers killing people?”

  Amin replied with a question, and a curious look. “Are you married?”

  There was laughter from one or two quarters.

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Because if you are, I am sure your husband finds you very difficult to deal with. He should divorce you.”

  More nervous laughter. And then silence.

  “What about the killings?” she said, emphasizing her syllables again.

  The atmosphere in the room was piercingly apprehensive.

  “Let me repeat. We are a government of action. If we have evidence that an army officer is guilty of kidnapping and murder, then he will face justice. But there is no evidence to back up your allegations. You should not suggest these things about the Uganda Army. I have served with the British, Italian and Indian Armies, even with the US Army in Korea, and I can tell you, Uganda forces are up to international standard.”

  He stood up abruptly then and looked at his big gold watch – a present from King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, he had once told me. Then he approached the woman, wagging his fat finger in front of her face.

  “My dear,” he said, “don’t forget that no one can run faster than a bullet. You people are very bad. You ask me so many questions. How much do you need to know? By Allah, do you want me to pull down my trousers so you can see my behind?”

  He walked up and down in front of them in the orange suit, and then pointed at a reporter with a BBC badge on his lapel.

  “Yes, instead of rectifying colonial wrongs of her own making, Britain has found fit to wage a dirty press war on Uganda. Certainly we cannot help thinking that racism is the motivating factor in this situation.”

  Then he turned to one of the thuggish aides, and said, angrily: “Get these people out of here, clear them all out the way.”

  ‘He’s Mad – Official’ was the headline in the Mirror the following day, citing the opinion of some famous psychiatrist, and that night five journalists, including the woman, were detained at Nakasero. When they were released and finally made their way back to Europe, the stories about their imprisonment incensed Amin still further.

  “The Western press,” he said to me one afternoon shortly afterwards, when I was seeing to his gut problems again, “has the habit of exaggerating everything. These magazines and newspapers select the worst photos, which show me like an overfed monkey. Whether or not they agree, my face is the most beautiful face in the world. That’s what my wives and mother say, and they are surely right. Eh?”

  “Yes, Your Excellency,” I replied wearily, and turned him upside down on the steel trellis to which I had strapped him. I was in the process of administering a barium enema. The process involves pressing in the barium sulphate from a bag with a rubber nozzle – like a cake-maker’s icing piper. It was a curious sight – the naked President of Uganda turned on his head so that the white radioactive paste would flow through his bowels while I took the X-rays.

  There was nothing much wrong, except mild colitis, though he complained about it mischievously for months afterwards.

  “You made me do white in the toilet for many days,” he said. “I think it may very well be an imperialist plot. You know, I have my suspicions, Doctor Nicholas, that you are trying to retard development and turn me into a child once again.”

  26

  My sister, Moira, has asked me: how did you let yourself get so close to such a man? How could you not see? I couldn’t really explain. It wasn’t like that at first. As I said, life went on as normal with these little bizarre interventions butting up in between. Like those telegrams. There was one to Mrs Thatcher, when she defeated Heath in the Conservative Party leadership contest. “What do you think of this?” Idi said to me, and read it out:

  Dear Margaret, it was on Tuesday when I happened to look at your photograph which was published in one of the East African papers. You were depicted laughing at Mr Edward Heath whom you have defeated at the party leadership elections. From the photograph you appeared very charming, happy, fresh, intelligent and confident. Long may you remain so. Yours faithfully, Idi Amin.

  “I don’t think you should send it,” I said.

  “Oh, I will,” he said. “I most definitely will. It is very important.”

  Shortly afterwards, President Gaddafi of Libya came to open the new airport at Entebbe. I attended the ceremony. Amin greeted the Libyan leader warmly: “You are the only revolutionary leader who speaks what is on your mind and one who believes all the people in the world must lead equal lives. You are not in the pockets of any superpower and I want to assure you that we in Uganda are not controlled by any superpower. That is why when I learned of your policies, I became your best friend.”

  It was following Gaddafi’s visit that they opened the Libyan Arab Development bank in Kampala, and we began to see a lot of Libyan soldiers and PLO troopers in the city.
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  The week of the opening ceremony, Amin sent a telegram to President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, with whom he was having one of his periodic tiffs about the Kagera Salient, a disputed border area of Tanzania which – a triangulation mistake on the colonial map, Mr Malumba had told me – stuck into Uganda like a sore thumb.

  “With these few words,” went the missive, “I want to assure you that I love you and if you had been a woman, I would have considered marrying you, although your head is full of grey hairs, but, as you are a man, that possibility doesn’t arise.”

  “Why do you send these telegrams?” I asked Amin.

  “It is simple,” he replied. “They are based on the truth. I mean to advise the leaders when I realize they are doing wrong. I am a messenger from the god.”

  Sometimes, though, these messages were nothing short of repellent. “Hitler was right about the Jews, because the Israelis are not working in the interests of the people of the world, and that is why they burned the Israelis alive with gas in the soil of Germany,” he fulminated in one telex to the UN Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim.

  I heard Willy Brandt, the West German Chancellor, attack the statement on the World Service as ‘an expression of mental derangement’. I agreed with him, obviously, and yet there I was in the middle of it. My life had already fallen into a pattern that concentrated on Amin. The closer I got to him, the fewer my illusions about him- and still I stayed, more fascinated than frightened.

  Until one fateful month when everything seemed to happen at once. By then, Wife Number Five had come on the scene. Just nineteen, she was a soldier (a member of one of the Revolutionary Suicide Mechanized Units) and had been Idi’s co-driver in the Organization of African Unity rally. I didn’t attend that ceremony, though I heard from Wasswa that there had been a large cake – three tiers high – and that Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader, had been best man. The bride was called Sarah, which of course made me think of another one, without an ‘h’, and what she would have thought of Mr Arafat.

  Anyway, between Medina’s wedding (Number Four) and this one, I had seen various women coming in and out of Amin’s quarters on the rare occasions when he stayed at State House. His bodyguards would usher these mistresses (some unwillingly – it was not unusual to hear screams in the darkness on those nights) into his bedchamber. He also reportedly kept several concubines in towns around the country, for when he was on tour. The three wives up to Medina, I had gathered, were bored.

  It was presumably this boredom which led to an episode that I wince to recall – medically, ethically, in just about every way possible, it was extremely disturbing. I still don’t know if I did the right thing.

  One night, during a severe storm, there was a knock at the door of the bungalow. I was just going to bed. It was Peter Mbalu-Mukasa, my colleague at Mulago – the one with whom I’d had the drink when we ran into Swanepoel. He looked awful, drenched to the bone and shivering; but also something else.

  “Come in,” I said, stepping aside. “What’s up?”

  “Close the door,” he said, breathlessly. “I had difficulty persuading the guards to let me into the compound. I had to tell them it was Mulago business.”

  “Well, what is it?” I asked, perplexed.

  He didn’t answer, pushing past me into the living-room.

  I followed him through. “Calm down,” I said. “Look, do you want a brandy or something?”

  “No!”

  He sat down abruptly on a chair in front of me. His head was in his hands, dripping water over the wooden floor.

  “Nicholas,” he said, his voice muffled, “I’m in trouble, real trouble.”

  “What is it?” The stains spread on the dry wood.

  There was a pause before he lifted his head and began to speak. “For almost a year now, Kay Amin has been my lover. It is stupid, I know, but we love each other very much.”

  “My God…But you’ve got a wife,” I said, stupidly.

  “That’s not the point. The fact is, Kay is pregnant, and she’s going to have to have an abortion. I want you to help me perform the operation. Amin hasn’t slept with her in years, and if he finds out she’s going to have a baby, we will be killed.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said, appalled. “I think you are better off fleeing the country – you could get to the Kenya border by morning if you left now.”

  “I’ve thought of that. They would arrest us in any case; they’d be bound to recognize her. Please help me. I was going to do it on my own earlier this evening but…I became scared. She asked for you. We have to go now…”

  Against my better judgement, I finally agreed to come and see her – but only that. I drove off with him into the night. We took my van. He hadn’t got a vehicle, having come by taxi – an expensive journey, all the way from Kampala to Entebbe. You are being foolish, I told myself, as the lights of cars and houses skated by. Oily dollops of rain burst on the windscreen as I followed his directions to a flat in the suburbs of the city.

  Kay Amin was lying on a sheet on the living-room floor, her cardigan tight on the globe of her belly. She wasn’t aware of us coming in. I was aghast to see that Peter had spread the instruments for the operation on the dining table. They were gleaming in the lamplight, like the cutlery at some demonic supper party. He had obviously been just about to start. There was even a bowl of water.

  It was a ghoulish and, I knew immediately, untenable situation. I had never conducted an abortion, and I wasn’t going to start like this. Kay was in no state for such an operation – not to mention the Amin connection, the lack of hygiene of a domestic lounge, still less the question of abortion itself.

  I looked down at the poor woman. Evidently terrified out of her wits, she had become delirious, mumbling incomprehensibly, her hands rubbing her stomach. She didn’t recognize me. Sick with anxiety, I recalled the competent, reasonably happy-seeming housewife who had greeted me at Prince Charles Drive.

  “This isn’t possible,” I said to Peter. “I’m not having anything to do with this whatsoever.”

  He grasped my arm. “Nicholas…please.”

  “It’s not right. You must try to escape. It’s your only option. Or take her to Mulago in the early hours and chance it.”

  “Don’t be stupid. This is the only way.” He started tugging my shirt. “You must, you must.”

  He pulled me close to him, as if I were a lover, and whispered hoarsely, “Plee-ease. I am not sure I can do it.” His face was dark grey, the colour of cement before it has set.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. A certain sort of grimness came into my voice, as if expediency had now to take over. I pushed him away gently.

  He walked over to the kitchen door, resting his hands on the posts and rocking himself to and fro.

  “For the last time,” he said, “will you help me? If you do not, I will do it on my own.”

  The room fell silent, with the exception of Kay’s anguished mumbling. I hesitated for a second. If the alternative was that Amin would kill them, and probably the baby, too, then surely it would be better to do the operation, however unsatisfactory the conditions. An abortion, after all, was by no means the worst thing a doctor could do, but then…

  “It is better I leave now,” I said, finally. “I can’t be found here. Please…Peter, don’t do this. Take my advice. Find some other way out. I will help you if I can. Ring me.”

  I turned sharply and left the room. I ran out of the block of flats and across to the van, my feet splashing through deep puddles. Driving back to Entebbe at high speed, sliding about on the wet road, I was in a state of panic: fearful of discovery and, at the same time, knowing that simply running away was not the right course of action. But what was I meant to have done? It would have been medically dangerous to operate; yet I couldn’t have turned them over to the authorities – which to all intents and purposes meant Amin.

  Perhaps I should have done. That night was the last time I saw either Peter Mbalu-Mukasa or Kay Amin. The rumours be
gan to go round the hospital during the next week. He had botched the operation and Kay Amin had died of blood loss. Peter committed suicide the next day with an overdose of sleeping pills.

  It was all true. Amin ordered an investigation, during the period of which I was in a constant terror. My secret consumed me – whatever I was doing, wherever I was, my mind returned to that awful scene.

  My own part in it did not come to light, for which I thanked the Lord – though I remained haunted by that possibility for the rest of my time in Uganda. What about the taxi driver who had brought Peter to State House? The guards at the gate? What if someone in the block of flats had seen me – especially noticeable as I was white?

  Nor was the affair over, so far as I was concerned. The following week, I got a call in my office at Mulago. “There is something you must see,” said the mortuary assistant, who knew that Peter and I had been friendly. I joined her in the mortuary.

  Opening one of the refrigerator doors, she slid out a body. It was the corpse of Kay Amin. All four limbs, neatly severed, were lying beside the torso. The head, still attached, was twisted to one side. I turned away, feeling sick, and ran out of the room.

  To this day, I don’t know what really happened to Kay Amin’s body. Some say that Peter cut it up himself- the torso was found in a box in the boot of his car, the arms and legs in a sack on the back seat – others that Amin had done it. He was, I knew, an expert in disjointing animals, a skill he had learned while foraging as a soldier in the bush.

  What happened afterwards was stranger still, and equally disgusting. Amin ordered that the body should be sewn back together. As his physician, I was ordered to be present at a peculiar ceremony once this had been done. Amin had also gathered his other remaining wives, some twenty children (including those by Kay) and various officials.

  Amin waved his hand over the bruised and discoloured body, its limbs spikily attached by means of rushed and amateurish sutures. The wives looked frightened – Medina especially – and the officials solemn, and several of the children were crying as he spoke.