The Idi Amin Dada in us
Weekly Trust
Saturday, August 30, 2003
http://www.mtrustonline.com/amin30082003.htm
At a speech for marking the 50th anniversary of Cuba’s revolution President Fidel Castro uttered these words of rebuke, defiance and arrogance: "Cuba does not need the help of the European Union to survive. The European Union is a group of colonial powers historically responsible for slave trafficking, looting and even the extermination of entire peoples." That verdict is one that Idi Amin Dada as President of Uganda (1971-1979) both agreed with, learnt, and internalised as his own guide for his diplomatic relations with Europe and use of power at home. His people, the Nubians, had served as mercenaries for Captain Frederick Lugard’s war against the armies of an expansionist Bunyoro-Kitara Kingdom in western Uganda. Omuikoma Kabarega’s resort to guerrilla warfare earned his people scotched-earth reprisals from Lugard. The experience became part of the collective memory of Idi Amin’s ancestors, and is what lured him into the King’s African Rifles, the colonial army in Ugand
a.
Idi Amin is was reported by the last colonial governor of the Uganda protectorate, to have exhibited traits of this brutality while fighting for the British against Mau Mau freedom fighters in Kenya (1952-56). According to the Governor, as a means of spreading terror and demoralising the Gikuyu militants, Amin would cut off the sexual organs of those captured and send them back to their people as live exhibits. In Uganda’s history, Kabaka Mufesa (ruler of Buganda Kingdom), reportedly had heads of his subjects cut off in routine royal court sessions. He burnt alive at least 21 local spies of European Christian missionaries and traders. In 1967 the Pope of Rome came to Uganda to honour them as Catholic Saints . Among them was the 12-year-old Kizito. In Ankole Kingdom, aristocrats used male servants to hold up each leg of the women as they had sex with them and, in holy fury, cut off the genital tool of any servant who indulged himself by waving an erection. Idi Amin grew up
within
these ecologies of political power and governance as an opportunity for rulers to routinely consume easy brutality.
On coming to power, Amin Dada slaughtered thousands of soldiers from suspect ethnic groups as a ready preventive measure against a counter-coup. Prior to his coup of 25th January 1971, he had (as President Milton Obote’s head of the military), watched agonising negotiations with British diplomats for Britain to allow its Asian citizens in Uganda to relocate to Britain. They were furiously bleeding the economy by transferring foreign exchange to Britain and blocking internal investment and job-creation for kids coming out of Uganda’s schools. He obviously grew impatient and contemptuous of Obote’s diplomatic niceties. His immediate expulsion of hundreds of thousands of all Asians, was matched in its ruthlessness by the Mau Mau war, and by their previous expulsion from their ancestral lands by European farmers. As an army sergeant in the colonial army, Idi Amin was encouraged to play rugby and boxing.
After each game of rugby his white teammates would drive to a club to enjoy jugs of beer, while he sat alone at the back of a truck, since blackmen were not allowed into European clubs. Each subsequent rugby game was an opportunity to hit back at these humiliations by bashing whitemen’s faces or ribs with ruby tackles. Violence was his language or dialogue. It was the only way he received a Briton’s recognition and grudging bitter respect. When he announced the expulsion of the Asians out of Uganda, he was giving the British government a diplomatic rugby tackle.
One does not learn the intellectual footwork, which goes into drawing and constructing the architecture of an imperial economy from bouts of rugby and boxing. While Idi Amin could punch, he could not plant and farm an economic empire the way his British adversaries had learnt to do for several centuries. Unwilling or unable to learn these skills, he went into Tanzania to play war-rugby and was totally unprepared for the combined brawn and intellectual counter-tackle from Mwalimu Nyerere and his army. A "Field Marshall and Conqueror of the British Empire" ran, and ran; and never returned to fight another day. In the while, Uganda’s economy was in ruins.
The educated "middle-class" in Uganda rushed under Idi Amin’s violence umbrella and murdered hundreds of rivals in the struggle for jobs and commercial business enterprises left behind by the departed Asians. The lesson was clear. This was an educated class, which was obviously only an alphabet away from Amin’s illiterate soldiers savagery. They were yet to become nation-builders. Uganda is yet to reach that frontier two decades after Idi Amin’s exit.
Idi Amin Dada conquered the British propaganda empire. Not for him polite, servile whimpers when talking to imperialism. He mocked President Richard Nixon by wishing him a "quick recovery from the Water Gate" scandal. He told the British to send aircrafts to fly potatoes and beans from western Uganda as food relief for hungry people in Britain. He advised Queen Elizabeth, the British monarch, on how to keep her underpants clean. He used an international media he did not own to propagate photographs of white European businessmen in Kampala carrying him on their shoulders as he sat regally on a chair. He was playing back an insult British colonial rulers had repeatedly subjected numerous Africans to. His arrogant and acidic insults appealed to millions of African peoples across the continent, and in the diaspora, who wanted their pride and manhood or womanhood asserted and broadcast by their apparent cowed-down three-piece-suited and neck-tie choking western educated rulers.
The
subsequent explosions of pro-democracy agitations by the masses of Africans against dictatorships (in the wake of his strutting across the international stage), may well be part of his impact on their political consciousness.