He’s a prehistoric monster.
President Richard Nixon on President Idi Amin, September 1972
Few winners of the Eurovision Song Contest go on to conquer the world, but from the moment ABBA belted out ‘Waterloo’ on the evening of 6 April 1974 there was no stopping them. They were Sweden’s biggest exports since Volvo, and to many chroniclers of Seventies culture they have now become synonymous with the decade.* None of these historians mentions, even in a footnote, the global reverberations of another Eurovision entry that year, ‘E Depois do Adeus’ (And After the Goodbye), sung by a wide-lapelled Portuguese smoothie named Paulo de Carvalho who looked and sounded like an Iberian Engelbert Humperdinck.
The Eurovision judges didn’t think much of Carvalho’s crooning: he came equal last, with just three votes. However, the millions watching the live broadcast that night included a group of young Portuguese army officers who were planning to overthrow their country’s authoritarian regime, the oldest dictatorship in Europe; and they liked what they heard. When this Armed Forces Movement mounted its coup, less than three weeks later, the playing of ‘E Depois do Adeus’ on Radio Renascenca shortly before midnight was the agreed signal to fellow plotters that tonight was the night. Within a few hours it was all over. A convoy of armoured cars drove into Lisbon and forced the surrender of President Marcello Caetano; thousands of jubilant citizens ran into the streets to kiss and hug the soldiers, stuffing carnations into the barrels of their rifles.
It was that rarest of occurrences, a left-wing military coup – more specifically an anti-colonialist coup, for what goaded the young officers into action was Caetano’s insistence on propping up his African empire, at appalling cost, while ignoring problems closer to home. About nine thousand young Portuguese soldiers had died, and more than twenty-five thousand been badly wounded, in the struggle against pro-independence guerrillas in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. It was Portugal’s Vietnam: the hurling of yet more doomed conscripts into a faraway war that could not be won. General António Spínola, deputy chief of the general staff and a veteran of the African wars, said so in his book Portugal and the Future, published two months before the Carnation Revolution. He sent a copy to the President. ‘I did not put the book down until the last page, when it was already dawn,’ Caetano said later. ‘As I closed it I understood that a coup d’état, the approach of which I had felt for months, was now inevitable.’ Of the ‘three Ds’ advocated by the Armed Forces Movement – democracy, development and decolonisation – the last seemed the most urgently necessary. ‘We, Portuguese military troops, who were sent to a war that we did not understand or support, have in our hands a unique opportunity to repair the crimes of fascism and colonialism,’ supporters of the Armed Forces Movement in Guinea-Bissau announced. By the end of 1975, all Portugal’s African colonies had their independence.
Repairing the crimes of colonialism would not be so easy: this final European retreat brought neither peace nor an end to foreign interference. As soon as the new Portuguese government announced its intention of withdrawing from Angola, what had previously been an anti-colonial war mutated into a civil war, and then a world war by proxy when cold warriors in Moscow and Washington and Beijing, unable to confront one another directly without risking nuclear annihilation, decided that the global ‘balance of power’ was best maintained by getting Africans to do it on their behalf. China backed Holden Roberto’s FNLA; the Soviet Union armed Agostinho Neto’s MPLA; the United States hedged its bets by financing both the FNLA and Jonas Savimbi’s Unita. Although none of the superpowers had taken the slightest notice of Angola before 1974, now they maintained that the security of the planet depended on their chosen faction winning this tripartite battle in a country which few if any of their citizens could reliably identify while riffling through a world atlas. Fidel Castro sent two thousand Cuban troops to beef up the Marxist MPLA; the CIA provided Holden Roberto with battalions of French and Portuguese mercenaries.
This sudden surge of international interest owed less to Angola than to Vietnam. The United States wanted to reassert its prowess after the defeat in Indo-China; Russia and China wanted to give the Americans another bloody nose before the last one healed. Henry Kissinger admitted as much: ‘Our concern in Angola is not the economic wealth or the naval base. It has to do with the USSR operating 8,000 miles from home … I don’t care about the oil or the base, but I do care about the African reaction when they see the Soviets pull it off and we don’t do anything.’
Why did African nations become adventure playgrounds for foreign gunslingers and paranoid tyrants so soon after escaping from colonial dominion or dictatorship? Why did independence bring such dependence? One answer is that many of them weren’t nations at all but arbitrary and incoherent entities dreamed up by diplomatic draughtsmen during the scramble for Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, when the great powers of Europe carved up the continent between them. Look at the national borders on a map of Africa and the artificiality is comically obvious, as the historian Martin Meredith notes:
When marking out the boundaries of their new territories, European negotiators frequently resorted to drawing straight lines on the map, taking little or no account of the myriad of traditional monarchies, chiefdoms and other African societies that existed on the ground. Nearly one half of the new frontiers imposed on Africa were geometric lines, lines of latitude and longitude, other straight lines or arcs of circles. In some cases, African societies were rent apart: the Bakongo were partitioned between French Congo, Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola … In other cases, Europe’s new colonial territories enclosed hundreds of diverse and independent groups, with no common history, culture, language or religion.
Through this creative cartography ten thousand distinct polities became a patchwork of forty colonies or protectorates, which may have seemed rational for the purposes of imperial administration but were incompatible with the African tradition of strong personal leadership – as quickly became apparent once that tradition reasserted itself after independence.
Patrick Marnham, a British journalist who travelled widely in Africa during the 1970s, detected two fundamental weaknesses in this style of government. First, it made an orderly transfer of power from one ruler to his successor very difficult to arrange: since some of the ‘potency of personality’ survived loss of office, the undisgraced existence of old leaders diminished the status of new ones. The fallen leader therefore had to be killed, exiled or at least jailed. Secondly, African leadership ‘depends on the exercise of absolute power; but little real power can be exercised, and this encourages tyranny. The leaders cannot really unite the divided tribes or bring the improvements in material conditions which they constantly promise. They are not in truth the fathers that they would wish to be … Were it not for the support of the former colonial powers, the pretences of many of the independent leaderships to government would have long since been abandoned.’ Maintaining this pretence drove some leaders crazy. Only a few, such as President Félix Houphouët-Boigny – whose Ivory Coast was one of the most prosperous states in Africa, and one of the most dependent – were willing to acknowledge the truth. Rebuked by other heads of state at an African summit for his close ties with France, he replied with a sly grin: ‘It is true, dear colleagues, that there are forty thousand Frenchmen in my country and that this is more than there were before independence. But in ten years I hope the position will be different. I hope that there will be 100,000 Frenchmen here. And I would like at that time for us all to meet again and compare the economic strength of your countries with mine. But I fear, dear colleagues, that few of you will be in a position to attend.’
Ted Heath made a similar point, though with none of the feline grace, at a Commonwealth conference in January 1971, held in Singapore. After being harangued for hours by President Milton Obote of Uganda and other black leaders for resuming arms sales to South Africa in defiance of a UN resolution, the British Prime Minister lost his temper. ‘I wonder,’ he spluttered, ‘how many of you will be allowed to return to your own countries from this conference.’ Sure enough, before Obote could fly home from Singapore the head of the Ugandan armed forces had launched a military coup by driving a tank to the front door of Entebbe international airport and firing a shell at the President’s portrait on the far wall. (Three waiting passengers, including two Canadian priests, were killed by shrapnel.) After a few hours of fighting it was all over: Radio Uganda marked the change of regime in chirpy style by playing ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now’ and then introducing listeners to Obote’s successor – Major General Idi Amin, the former heavyweight boxing champion of Uganda and army chief of staff since 1966.*
There were celebrations in the streets of Kampala, whose citizens resented Obote’s preferential treatment of his kinsmen from the northern Langi tribe – and in Downing Street and Fleet Street, where Obote had been regarded as a pest in need of extermination even before he stung Ted Heath at the Commonwealth conference, mainly because of his threats to nationalise British-owned businesses in Uganda. The Daily Telegraph informed its readers that Amin was ‘a welcome contrast to other African leaders and a staunch friend of Britain’. While serving in the King’s African Rifles before independence he had been trained to jump to attention on the word of command from a member of the British officer class, and it was assumed that this habit of obedience would endure. True, he appeared rather dim-witted, but that would make him all the more biddable.
Or so his former colonial superiors reasoned; and, having kept an eye on his career since independence in 1962, they thought they understood him pretty well. When Obote appointed the then Lt. Col. Amin as deputy commander of the army in 1964, Mr O.G. Griffith of the Dominions Office in London sent a briefing to his Whitehall colleagues: ‘Amin is a splendid man by any standards and is held in great respect and affection by his British colleagues. He is tough and fearless and in the judgment of everybody … completely reliable. Against this he is not very bright and will probably find difficulty in dealing with the administrative side of command.’ Another official added that Amin was ‘a splendid type and a good rugger player’ but ‘virtually bone from the neck up, and needs things explained in words of one letter’. His eight-year reign in Uganda, a grand guignol pantomime of horror and slapstick, would disprove most of these condescending assessments.
The men in Whitehall weren’t so much wrong as myopic. Having had little formal education as a boy, Amin might well seem ‘not very bright’ to London mandarins with their Latin tags and Oxbridge degrees, as he did to the Westernised Ugandan elite. ‘He read very badly and clearly had a hard time just signing prepared documents,’ Amin’s colleague Henry Kyemba complained. ‘As his first Principal Private Secretary, I never ever received a handwritten note from him. Amin had no idea how governments were run.’ But who needs basic literacy when armed with absolute power? Even constitutional monarchs seemed able to get by without professional or academic qualifications. Look at Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, who had never passed an exam in her life: all she had to do to win the respect of her people was smile winningly and preside at the Trooping of the Colour. Amin knew how to grin and organise parades – and, unlike the Queen of England (‘dear Liz’, as he addressed her), he wasn’t cramped by the imperative to avoid doing or saying anything that might raise eyebrows. He could be as impulsive, vicious or frolicsome as he liked, playful as a kitten or lethal as a lion. If he looked reliable to London civil servants, it was only because he’d never had the opportunity to be anything else. Heavyweight boxers may be no great shakes at algebra or irregular verbs, but their artful intelligence shouldn’t be underestimated: they know how to evade and then pulverise an opponent, and how to make the spectators gasp with either pleasure or fear.
Besides Britain, the country that applauded Amin’s seizure of power most loudly was Israel, whose military attaché in Kampala had helped engineer the coup. Its alliance with a Muslim general might seem strange, but Israel needed a base from which to supply military assistance to black secessionist guerrillas in the southern Sudan, just across the border: so long as Sudanese troops were kept busy fighting the separatists they couldn’t be dispatched to the Sinai peninsula or the Suez Canal to join the Arabs’ war against the Jewish state. As Amin joked, ‘the Israeli border is far away from Khartoum’. Israel repaid his hospitality with $25 million in aid and credits, military advisers to train his army and air force, and a presidential private jet.
Like the British, the Israelis mistook a marriage of convenience for a pledge of lifelong fidelity, but they soon learned how fickle their partner could be. On a visit to Tel Aviv just over a year after seizing power, Amin dined with the Israeli foreign minister, Abba Eban, and the defence minister, Moshe Dayan. According to Eban the conversation went like this:
Amin: I would like twenty-four Phantom aeroplanes.
Dayan: Why?
Amin: I need them to bomb Tanzania.
Dayan (in Hebrew to Eban): This guy is crazy. Get him out of here.
Eban (in Hebrew to Dayan): I agree, but let’s be polite.
Dayan: We would need US clearance to give you Phantoms.
Amin: You are causing me trouble.
Dayan (in Hebrew to Eban): This conversation is not for me.*
Amin exited in a huff, boarded his Israeli-provided jet and flew straight to Tripoli to woo Colonel Gaddafi instead. In return for a promise of $26 million from the Libyan leader he switched his allegiance overnight, closing Israel’s Embassy in Kampala (which he then handed over to the Palestinians) and ordering all 470 Israelis in his country to leave at once. Israel’s self-styled ‘best friend’ in black Africa now became its most flamboyantly hysterical scourge – urging Arab states to ‘train kamikaze pilots’ to attack the country, spicing up his rants about a world Jewish conspiracy with quotations from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A few months after the disastrous dinner in Tel Aviv he sent a cable to the UN Secretary General, Kurt Waldheim: ‘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.’
Jew-baiting may have played well with some of Amin’s new Arab friends, but it had little resonance in Uganda. Fortunately for him there was a scapegoat closer to home. Asian immigrants had come to East Africa at the turn of the century to build the railways; by the 1970s their descendants were the dominant business caste, running four-fifths of Ugandan companies and controlling the coffee and cotton industries. In August 1972 the President issued a wild-eyed proclamation ordering most of these ‘economic saboteurs’ – principally the fifty thousand from the Indian subcontinent who had chosen British rather than Ugandan citizenship at the time of independence – to quit the country within ninety days. ‘They only milked the cow, they did not feed it,’ he said, adding menacingly that any who outstayed the deadline would be ‘sitting in the fire’. At the same time he declared ‘economic war’ on Britain, which he accused of planning a ‘land, sea and air invasion’ of Uganda – despite the fact that Uganda is miles from any ocean. The country’s seven thousand British residents, warned by Amin that they were all now under surveillance, began to wonder if they too should get out before he rounded them up as enemy aliens.
Leaders of neighbouring states concluded that Amin was not only out of his depth but out of his mind: Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia denounced him as a madman and a buffoon. Amin laughed off the condemnations. ‘I want to assure you,’ he wrote in a telegram to his fiercest critic, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, ‘that I love you very much 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 does not arise.’
Buffoon or madman? Outside Uganda, and particularly in Britain, Amin was often depicted as an essentially comic figure. ‘Jus’ one final word to de esteemed critics,’ Alan Coren wrote in the introduction to his Collected Bulletins of Idi Amin (1974), an anthology of columns from Punch magazine. ‘One o’ de most interesting’ aspecks o’ dis masterpiece is de fac’ dat it gittin’ writ by a man wot capable o’shootin’ de bum off a runnin’ ferret at five hunnerd yards, wid either hand. Dat possibly explainin’ why it such a enjoyable read, as all de rave reviews gonna be pointin’ out.’ Whatever the critics said about it (not a lot), the reading public loved Coren’s ventriloquised version of Amin: the Collected Bulletins and the Further Bulletins (1975) sold 750,000 copies. There was also a best-selling LP, with the comedian John Bird declaiming Coren’s columns in a caricature African accent and occasionally bursting into song:
Take Hitler, Stalin, Attila de Nun,
No one got a good word for a single one.
Where these first-class geniuses all goin’ wrong?
They never got de population singing along …
A chorus of ‘Amin’s wives’ takes up the chant:
Idi, Idi, Idi Amin,
Most amazin’ man there’s ever been.
He de General, de President, de King of de Scene,
Idi, Idi, Idi Amin.
To twenty-first-century ears it seems incredible that this passed for entertainment, but in the Seventies stand-up comics still routinely told jokes about darkies, Bill Oddie smeared his face with black shoe-polish to play ‘Rastus Watermelon’ in The Goodies, and (most incredibly of all) The Black and White Minstrel Show was one of the most-watched programmes on British television. When black people – rather than blacked-up whites – did make a rare appearance on TV, it was usually as the butt of racist humour in sitcoms such as Mind Your Language or Love Thy Neighbour. As Alan Coren said of his Amin bulletins, many years later: ‘I wonder myself if I ever found any of it funny, but it was rather different then.’ Nor was it racial sensitivity that eventually persuaded him to kill off the column: ‘After it was published about his monstrousness, I stopped writing about him. I did it when he was a buffoon. As more and more of his crimes became known, I chucked it in.’
This fails to convince: Coren didn’t start the weekly column until February 1973, several months after the eviction of the Ugandan Asians, and the dictator’s penchant for violence was already the crutch on which the joke limped along. Here is a bulletin from April 1973: ‘Pussonally, I doan pay too much attention to de Easter business, bein’ a Muslim, but this year we bin celebratin’ in de traditional way, wid de pubberlic executions.’ Or try this, his end-of-year message that December: ‘Idi Amin still ridin’ high on de hog an’ leadin’ de coon peoples on to de real promised land where de Maseratis zoomin’ aroun’ all day an’ any Asian brudders or white sisters wot steppin’ out o’ line findin’ a T-34 comin’ up de front path wid de one-oh-five millimetre lobbin’ ordnance into de bes’ sittin’-room wid de notorious pinpoint accuracy.’
But why single out Alan Coren? Many other Westerners believed that thuggery was the natural modus operandi of black Africans – ‘de coon peoples’ – if they were left to their own devices, including the President of the United States. On 24 September 1972, soon after Amin gave the Ugandan Asians notice of expulsion, Henry Kissinger rang Richard Nixon at Camp David to advise that ‘we have a problem in Uganda’. The transcript of their conversation, now released under the Freedom of Information Act, is most revealing about the impulses that guided Nixonian foreign policy:
Kissinger: And the problem is this: the British are very worried that there may be a massacre of their seven thousand, ah –
Nixon: British.
Kissinger: British they’ve got there, and they’re scattered all over the country.
Nixon: Of course.
Kissinger: And they’d like to have some secret talks with us about some logistics help.
Nixon: Sure – well, then, have them.
Kissinger: They tried it earlier this week, and [the State Department] has turned them down repeatedly.
Nixon: Screw State! State’s always on the side of the blacks. The hell with them … This goddamn guy – the head of Uganda, Henry – is an ape!
Kissinger: He’s an ape without education.
Nixon: That’s probably no disadvantage. I mean – [Kissinger laughs] You figure that asshole that was the head of Ghana had a brilliant education in the United States. Then, I mean, so let’s face it –
Kissinger [laughing]: That’s right.
Nixon: No, no, what I mean is, he really is, he’s a prehistoric monster.
Not prehistoric at all, actually: Amin was the quintessential post-colonial monster, relishing and exploiting the power shift that had reduced his sometime governors to nervous supplicants. Idi Amin, all twenty stone of him, was now the white man’s burden – literally so at the OAU’s Kampala summit in 1975, when he entered a cocktail party on a sedan chair borne aloft by four sweating British businessmen. Many of his clownish antics looked at first glance like a demeaning revival of the golliwog-cakewalk tradition, capering for a white audience while confirming its prejudices, but there was a crucial difference which Amin understood very well: he performed not as a slave but as their equal, perhaps even their superior. This is the subversive subtext to the telegrams and announcements from Amin that entertained the international media, such as the message to Lord Snowdon after his split with Princess Margaret (‘Your experience will be a lesson to all of us men to be careful not to marry ladies in high positions’), or indeed the letter to Nixon after he cut US aid to Uganda: ‘My dear brother, it is quite true that you have enough problems on your plate, and it is surprising you have the zeal to add fresh ones. At this moment you are uncomfortably sandwiched in that uncomfortable affair [Watergate]. I ask almighty God to help you solve your problems.’
Hence, too, the pleasure he took in extravagant titles, those familiar ornaments of post-colonial personality cults. Macias Nguema was the Only True Miracle of Equatorial Guinea, Joseph Désiré Mobutu of Zaire renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga (‘the warrior who knows no defeat because of his endurance and flexible will and is all powerful, leaving fire in his wake as he goes from conquest to conquest’), while Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic awarded himself so many medals that his uniforms had to be specially adapted to accommodate all that clanking vanity. But Amin outdid them all: when he and Bokassa met, they stood side by side in full dress uniforms ‘as if competing to see who could fit the most sashes, stars, medals and ribbons on their fronts. They were like moving display cabinets.’ The enormous Ugandan, six foot four inches of display cabinet, won easily: Bokassa was barely five feet tall. The man who began his reign as President Idi Amin Dada, or ‘Big Daddy’, enhanced his status with ever more rococo additions: ‘His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Member of the Excellent Order of the Source of the Nile, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular’.* He also anointed himself King of Scotland, supplying one of his regiments with Royal Stuart tartan kilts, plastic sporrans and bagpipes so he could be serenaded with ‘Scotland the Brave’ while taking the salute. This Caledonian nostalgia dated from his time in the King’s African Rifles, where almost all his commanding officers had been Scots.
His feelings towards the English – particularly English politicians – were far less affectionate, and as Britain sank into an economic quagmire its government had to endure regular taunts from the Conqueror of the British Empire. ‘In the past few months the people of Uganda have been following with sorrow the alarming economic crisis befalling on Britain,’ he wrote to Ted Heath on 14 December 1973. ‘I am today appealing to all the people of Uganda who have all along been traditional friends of the British people to come forward and help their former colonial masters … These contributions will help the ordinary British who are now victims of measures such as power cuts and inflation. In this spirit, I have decided to contribute ten thousand Uganda shillings from my savings and I am convinced that many Ugandans will donate generously.’ In another telegram a month later, after the imposition of a three-day week in Britain, he told Heath that ‘the response has been so good that today, 21 January 1974, the people of Kigezi district donated one lorryload of vegetables and wheat. I am now requesting you to send an aircraft to collect this donation urgently before it goes bad.’ Fearing that Amin would take punitive revenge on British expatriates in Uganda if his offer were ignored altogether, the Foreign Secretary asked the UK’s High Commissioner in Kampala to explain, with all the politeness he could muster, that no assistance was required.
Big Daddy wouldn’t be rebuffed so easily. A month later he volunteered his services as a peacemaker in Northern Ireland, inviting British ministers and leaders of the Unionist and Republican factions to a conference in Uganda, ‘where I would discuss with and make suggestions to them as to how to end the fighting’. (A Foreign Office memo advised the Prime Minister that ‘as the general’s messages go, this is one of his more lucid and although it is as preposterous as one might expect, the acting high commissioner believes that it was sent with the best of intentions. It would therefore seem appropriate and courteous to return some acknowledgement.’) In January 1975 Amin notified the Queen of his intention to visit Britain that summer: ‘Your Majesty, it is ardently hoped and expected that you will, through various agencies, arrange for me so that I can see and visit Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I should like to use that chance to talk to these people who are struggling for self-determination and independence from your political and economic system.’ He also hoped to meet the British Asians ‘whom I booted out of this country in September 1972’. The Queen never replied.
Piqued at this discourtesy, Amin ordered the arrest of Denis Hills, a sixty-one-year-old teacher who had lived in Uganda since 1964, for writing in an unpublished manuscript that Big Daddy ruled like a ‘village tyrant’. A secret military tribunal swiftly found Hills guilty of treason and sentenced him to death by firing squad. Amin admitted the real purpose of this charade: ‘The British must bow. They must kneel at my feet.’ Two of his former commanders from the King’s African Rifles, Lt. Gen. Sir Chandos Blair and Major Iain Grahame, flew to Uganda as special envoys to ask for clemency; their old subordinate received them in a small thatched hut whose entrance was so low that they had to crawl through, thus enabling Radio Uganda to crow that ‘the two guests entered the general’s house on their knees’. This grovelling whetted Amin’s appetite for more: he now announced that Hills would be shot within a week unless the British Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan, came to Kampala in person to beg for Hills’s life. Callaghan obeyed, and was allowed to fly home with Hills as a reward for his self-abasement.
Amin loved dreaming up new humiliations for foreign grandees. He once summoned the entire diplomatic corps in Kampala to hear an important presidential speech – which, to ensure maximum inconvenience, would be delivered in the remote north of the country. He then ordered Uganda Aviation to cancel all internal flights that day, obliging the diplomats to drive for six hours. (To Amin’s delight, the Chinese ambassador had to walk the last ten miles because his Mercedes-Benz broke down.) Just before he was due to speak, Big Daddy showed the text to his sidekick Bob Astles. ‘It was four sentences,’ Astles recalls, ‘written in Ki-Swahili. They said: “Africans like chickens. Every African wants to own his own chicken. Africans will not allow Russians to come to their country and steal their chickens. Let the Russians remember that.” That was all. He delivered it and went, laughing. The diplomats, especially the Russian delegation, were furious.’
The English-born Astles seemed an unlikely lieutenant for Big Daddy, especially since he was appointed just after the Denis Hills stunt. If Astles is to be believed (and that’s a big if), he was a victim rather than an accomplice, another helpless plaything in Idi’s games with the former imperial power. ‘Sometimes I was like a friend to Amin, other times he just wanted me around like a dog – I was a sort of court jester … It was a consistent tactic. When the phone rang, you never knew if it was going to be “How are you, my old friend?” or “You are a subversive, a spy plotting against Uganda.”’ Posted to East Africa in 1951 as a supervisor of works, Astles had stayed on after independence, using his British redundancy pay to set up Uganda Aviation and then taking charge of Uganda Television, a job he held until the 1971 coup. As an Obote supporter, he was arrested and taken in shackles to his old TV station for a public interrogation by the State Research Bureau, Idi Amin’s secret police. ‘They made one mistake. They told me how long the programme was to last and let me glimpse the questions which Amin personally had drawn up. I was able to spin out the argument on the first two so that they ran out of time before they could get to the tricky ones.’ Amused by his guile and courage, Amin allowed the Englishman to retire to a pineapple farm on the shore of Lake Victoria, where he remained until receiving the presidential summons in 1975. Over the next four years he had various titles – leader of the anti-corruption squad, ‘special adviser for British affairs’, manager of the Cape Town Villas hotel – but despite his protestations that he was no more than a court jester or household pet, many Africans were terrified of him. The New York Times correspondent John Darnton, an old Uganda hand, described Astles as ‘one of the most hated and feared men of the Amin regime’. Although Idi promoted him to the rank of ‘Major Bob’, beyond presidential earshot he was more usually referred to as the White Rat.
‘I never had the influence with Amin which people make out. I saw him fairly infrequently,’ Astles told a British journalist in 1985, six years after the tyrant’s downfall. Moments later in the interview, however, he couldn’t resist bragging about their intimacy: ‘I was the only person he could trust because I never asked him for anything – no fine house, no privileges, no Mercedes-Benz. I was the only one, perhaps because I was white, who he could be sure was not after his job and his life. If Idi Amin ever had a sincere friend, it was Bob Astles. I was the only person who could cope with him. The other members of his government would phone me and say, “Can you come quickly? He is out of control.” I would go and let him shout and rail at me and then I would try to calm him down. I was one of the few people he trusted.’
He was certainly close enough to see what had once been calculated buffoonery sliding into a wild and murderous irrationality. Liquor was partly to blame: Amin, a teetotaller in his army days, had developed a serious brandy habit by the mid-1970s. ‘Soon he was drinking brandy with his breakfast. As the years went by he became a maniac when he was drunk. The alcohol began to eat into his brain. It caused him great pain and he would swallow Aspros by the handful.’ But the biggest corrupting influence was power. ‘In African politics everybody wants to be the top man. When you get there you know that everybody is out to kill you – so in defence of power you become more and more ruthless. That is what happened to Amin.’
His fear of conspiracies swelled into a paranoid suspicion of everyone in his entourage – including the White Rat, who was detained in the Nagura Public Safety Unit for three weeks in 1976. ‘I was head of the anti-corruption squad … Powerful enemies were made and they fed Amin’s suspicion of me.’ Hoist by his own petard, one might think, since Astles himself had nurtured the presidential paranoia. ‘Your excellency,’ he wrote in one memo. ‘We have evidence through documentation and interrogation that foreign companies are working against the Ugandan economy. We also have evidence that the CIA is working against you. We would like to give our intelligence verbally. Your obedient servant, Bob Astles.’
This memo was among hundreds of documents found in the President’s office and the HQ of the State Research Bureau after Amin fled the capital in April 1979, driven out by invading Tanzanian troops. They paint a garish and ghastly picture of the regime’s paranoid style. In one, a mother turned in her own daughter for saying at the dinner table that perhaps life would be better if Obote returned to power. In another, an SRB agent suggested that drinkers in the Gun Hill Bar ‘might have loose talks against the government’ and recommended that ‘our boys join the club to observe what these people are doing’. (An excellent patriotic justification for boozing while on duty, and at official expense.) The files included copies of letters intercepted by the Post Office – many from foreign businessmen complaining of having their phones tapped and their mail read. Among the papers in the desk of the SRB’s head of technical operations was a contract dated 3 August 1977 between the government and Frank Terpil, a renegade CIA agent who now plied his trade selling instruments of torture, assassination and surveillance. For a fee of $3.2 million Terpil undertook to supply Amin with telephone-tapping equipment and ‘secret special weapons’ – liquid explosives, remote detonators and weapons disguised as pens, cigarette lighters or attaché cases. The contract also covered ‘training of selected students in the art and craft of intelligence, sabotage, espionage, etc.’, with special courses on ‘psychological warfare practices’.
That was the deranged reality which the façade of jovial buffoonery obscured, rather as the pink stucco façade of the State Research Bureau – a three-storey mansion in the diplomatic quarter, next door to the Italian Embassy – concealed a chamber of horrors within, presided over by Amin and his henchman Lt. Col. Farouk Minawa. Ever the good neighbour, before commencing a torture session Minawa would start the cars parked in the courtyard to drown the screams of the victims. Most executions took place at weekends, when the Embassy was deserted. The Saturday routine often began with a visit from Amin, who ordered two or three couples under sentence of death to strip and make love before him. ‘Amin would lounge on the counter sipping Russian wine,’ said Abraham Kisuule-Minge, who worked at the SRB for five years before fleeing to Kenya, ‘and roar with laughter as the couples had sex on the floor.’ They were promised their freedom if they pleased the President, but the promise was never kept. On Saturday evening the prisoners chosen for execution would be brought down from the third-floor cells, one at a time, and told they were being released. Then, according to Kisuule-Minge, ‘guards would leap from the darkness, loop a thick rope round the victim’s neck and slowly strangle him. The coup de grâce was a sledgehammer blow to the chest. It took about ten minutes to kill each prisoner.’ The bodies were piled in trucks and driven north for five hours to the Karuma Falls to be thrown to the crocodiles.
Why did Bob Astles not leave Uganda when he’d seen the hideous nature of the regime? ‘You just do not do that sort of thing in Africa. To run would have been cowardice, and that is something Africans never forgive. It wasn’t me I was protecting but my wife and two children and the people who worked for me. They would have been imprisoned, tortured or murdered if I’d stayed away for long. Besides, I genuinely felt that by being there I could moderate his excesses.’ If so, he must have realised pretty soon that he was failing: more than 300,000 Ugandans were slaughtered under Amin’s tyranny. Exiles returning to Kampala after his downfall greeted one another with disbelief: ‘You still exist!’ How could the White Rat have heard and seen nothing?
‘I kept my eyes shut,’ he explains.
* So much so that the DJ and rock journalist Dave Haslam chose the title Not ABBA for his account of the 1970s, as a protest against ‘the Abbafication of history’.
* When Amin himself hosted the Organisation of African Unity’s annual summit four years later, only nineteen of the forty-six OAU heads of state turned up. Some boycotted the event because of his presence in the chair, but others were simply too insecure to leave their palaces unattended for even a few days. The overthrow of Nigeria’s General Gowon halfway through the conference prompted four other leaders – Congo’s Marien Ngouabi, Gabon’s Omar Bongo, Cameroon’s Ahmed Ahidjo and Niger’s Seyni Kountché – to scuttle home early. ‘Maybe they’re not exactly afraid,’ one delegate commented. ‘Just prudent.’
* A few days later, a British official told Eban that Amin had requested Harrier jets from London for the same purpose. ‘What did you do?’ Eban enquired. ‘I asked him,’ the official replied, ‘if he wanted another cup of tea.’
* Amin loved the sobriquet ‘Big Daddy’, which suggested a much-loved Father of the Nation, but the history of the 1970s shows that anyone who adopts this style might as well have ‘psychopathic mass-murderer’ tattooed on his forehead. The American cult leader Jim Jones, who killed almost a thousand of his disciples in the Guyanese jungle, demanded that they call him ‘Dad’. Pol Pot, whose murderous paranoia eliminated 15 per cent of the Cambodian population between 1975 and 1979, liked to be addressed as ‘Brother Number One’ and ‘Uncle Secretary’.