A Dictator in the Swimming Pool

Barbet Schroeder's "General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait" (1974)

There is a kind of rhetorical statement, not very intelligent or inventive, but characteristic of our time, that proceeds by the listing of dictators. Hitler. Stalin. Mussolini. Typically, the list arrives as an attempt at drama, or maybe persuasion, as if names alone counted for argument. In their flattening of history, the loss of all proportion and context, such lists are obviously stupid. But they reflect, in interesting ways, a consensus about the past. Every society has its canon of heroes and villains; it is one of the most basic forms of history.

Mao gets occasional mention, on these American lists, and now and then you hear Pol Pot or Castro. One name might weigh against another: My sister overheard someone say of late, “Hitler? Pol Pot made Hitler look like a Girl Scout.” (Which passes, I guess, for wit.) But consider the names we do not add. For example, any native characters, like Jefferson Davis. African and Arab dictators, once prominent, have now all but dropped from view. You do not really hear Gaddafi, Hussein, Assad, let alone Mobutu. And no one, in my generation, seems to know General Idi Amin Dada, who just a few decades ago appeared to have secured, beyond most others, his rhetorical place.

Amin ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979, coming to power by coup and losing grip when he decided to invade Tanzania, for reasons that are probably best described in Greek terms, as a deluded and grasping pleonexia. Within those eight years he managed to kill Ugandans on the order of hundreds of thousands. The number, as in all cases where the dead are left in rivers, for the crocodiles and to clog turbines, does not submit to real discovery. Nor did Amin ever face justice, if such a phrase is meaningful. When he fled the country, Saudi Arabia gave him refuge, as a member of Uganda’s Muslim minority. He lived out his elderly life there, with only the occasional reattempt at power, dying in 2003. Since then, as Andrew Rice reports, Uganda has moved on, with a politics of memory that mostly involves forgetting. The site of his crimes has become a tourist spot, as in a TripAdvisor review: “Highlights were the markets, the mosque, Idi Amin’s torture chambers, and a Ugandan lunch.”

I learned about Amin a few years ago from a movie called Mississippi Masala. Mira Nair directed the melodrama, which opens with the real history of Amin expelling 80,000 Asians from Uganda and seizing their property. The Asians (that’s how they were known; they were Indians who had come to Uganda under the aegis of the British Empire) were in many cases Ugandan citizens. Many were born in Uganda. A successful merchant class, they controlled an estimated 80 percent of the economy, which became the “reason” for their expulsion. Mississippi Masala is not an entirely serious film, seeing how its plot relies on two young lovers meeting by car crash. But Nair efficiently sketches the historical conflict: “Okelo, this is my home,” the Asian Ugandan says near the film’s opening. “Not anymore, Jay,” his friend replies. “Africa is for Africans. Black Africans.” Jay flees to America, and the film proceeds to tell a new story about race in the South. In her heavy-handed but moving way, Nair works through the curious place that third populations—those who do not fit neatly into the official “oppressor” or official “oppressed”—can have in both democracy and empire.

Twenty years before Nair’s film, Amin was the subject and, in a sense, the author of a major documentary. General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait, directed by Barbet Schroeder, was an improbable production. Schroeder had made his name in the French New Wave, with a film about heroin and free love. His cinematographer, Néstor Almendros, was a man doubly exiled (his family fled Franco; he fled Castro) who would go on to make Days of Heaven, among the most beautiful color films ever shot. With a skeleton crew, Schroeder and Almendros followed Amin at the height of his power, recording scenes that get closer to the workings of authoritarianism than almost anything I’ve watched before.

Like many appalling men, Amin is charming and very good on camera. Schroeder shot just eight hours of footage; the rushes were almost all usable. “I couldn’t believe what I was getting,” he said. The events, orchestrated by Amin, filmed by Almendros, make for a disturbing and joyful movie. When Amin charges at us laughing with a spear, or tells us about donating money to the “Save the British Fund” (those poor Brits, in economic shambles!), he is a winning comedian, actually a star.

To interview a dictator is usually to get played; the intelligence of Schroeder’s film rests in its distance and self-interruptions. Schroeder lets us get involved in Amin’s lies, as in a play, and then he shocks us out with narration. “I have eighteen children,” Amin says on camera, and Schroeder shows the dictator with all his brightly clad, adorable mini-Amins, in a garden of flowers and green hedges. The scene is exactly what Amin wants broadcast. But then the narrator elaborates: “Idi Amin had four wives and has eighteen children. He has just repudiated three of his wives for not being revolutionary enough.”

In some ways, the film reads like playing a trick on a child, or a naïf, who does not quite understand that reporters are rarely your friend. “I knew that this man was responsible for about 300,000 people killed,” Schroeder said, “and I found him quite sympathetic, quite open, quite charming—quite innocent in a way.” For his part, Amin thinks he is the one tricking Schroeder: he has staged everything, from the “people’s welcome” in villages to the songs celebrating his rule. He was, after all, generally successful at deception. A British officer, in the time of colonial rule, had written: “Idi was a splendid chap, though a bit short on the gray matter.” An error. The “innocence,” the appearance of smiling stupidity, was Amin’s gift, which perfectly concealed his threat.

Like many liars, Amin claimed to speak only the truth. He was not a politician, he said, which again are the words of a swindler. On film, he walks imposingly about, a heavy man, 6 foot 4 and 240 pounds, bearing his natural heft and often the weight of his self-awarded medals. He is garrulous and appears to have no private self. This is part of the terror. For all our fears of hypocrisy in politics, the fully public man is a greater monster—someone who is always in character, who appears to have no interior and no desire to be alone. Amin laughs often, which forces his adversaries off stance; his laughter disarms, without putting you at ease. A sense of humor, so often taken for decent humanity, here suggests a different lesson: that authoritarianism comes in many guises, more varied than the clichés of iron fist and velvet glove.

“I’m afraid they may take you for a dictator,” Schroeder warned Amin, in the process of filming. He then proposed a scene to round out the picture of Amin’s leadership: “We should see you when you are in a cabinet meeting.” On film, the cabinet meeting is what confirms, actually, the degree of dictatorship. The men are bundles of nerves. They look down at their notebooks and write subservient, meaningless notes. They are to be enriched by the president’s favor, or killed at his whim. They do not make eye contact. Amin gives a long speech about the importance of people being “revolutionary.” “You must not be like a woman, who is just weak,” he says. Shortly after these lines, the narrator interrupts. We learn that two weeks after this meeting, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, whom we have just seen, will be denounced as a capitalist and murdered. His body turns up in the Nile. Princess Bagaaya, a former model with a law degree, replaces him. A woman, notably. Then the cabinet scene goes on. If you miss a meeting three times without good reason, Amin says, you’ll be removed from office. People are instructed to denounce each other; Amin refers to himself buffoonishly in the third person; and all women must now wake up at 5 a.m., for a more productive nation.

The cabinet meeting is the most obvious indicator of Amin’s tyranny. But the scene with the greatest psychological insight comes when he and his cronies stand at the edge of a pool, four feet deep, and get ready to race. They dive in. They swim. As the others splash forward, Amin cuts across the water. He makes a diagonal line, sharp and fast, and he pushes down the only real challenger. Everyone is smiling. Amin takes a childish glee in his trick. And then, beneath that glee, an assertion: I am first in everything. I will break this rule, as I can break any rule. This inability to play fair, in a small game, strikes me as among the leading marks of uncivilization.

There is too much to say about Ugandan history, its entanglements with Rwanda and Congo, and the ways it reaches out into the wars in the Middle East now. Amin had, for instance, received military training in Israel, before turning on the country and propagating a nasty hatred of Jews. He was an enthusiast of the Protocols of Zion; he wrote a telegram praising Hitler. (Dictators like precedents.) On film, Amin simulates an invasion of the Golan Heights, and then publicly invites hijackers to land in Uganda. Two years later, in 1976, a group of Palestinians and German hijackers did in fact commandeer an Air France flight, landing the plane at Entebbe National Airport and making Schroeder’s film bizarrely prophetic. The Israeli military freed the hostages in an operation that humiliated Amin, with the IDF losing only one soldier: Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of Benjamin. This gave birth to Bibi’s political career. (“In a sense, he is a sinister accident of history,” David Schulman, an Israeli peace activist, writes in the most recent NYRB. “He had no business being in politics. At first his one credential was being the brother of Yoni Netanyahu…”) Another two years onward, during Amin’s deranged invasion of Tanzania, some PLO guerrillas fought alongside Uganda, with major support from Libya: the mosque mentioned in the TripAdvisor review was named after Gaddafi. It all connects, in this outlying land.

Amin objected to parts of the film and demanded changes, such as cutting the narrator’s final line: “After a century of colonialism, isn’t it in part a deformed image of ourself that Idi Amin Dada reflects?” Schroeder at first refused to edit his work, but he capitulated when Amin rounded up a hundred Frenchmen in Uganda and effectively held them hostage in a hotel. The cuts were then made, with an insertion to describe the excised scenes. Upon Amin’s fall, Schroeder restored his version, including the closing line. Amin, of course, could not stand the accusation of a “deformed image.” He was committed to being an African leader; he presented himself as the opponent of colonialism, not a continuation of its twisted legacy. Though not so extreme a fraud as Mobutu, who called for authenticité while taking Condor flights to shop in Paris, Amin still had his colonial military style (and look at his children’s outfits!). Pankaj Mishra describes Mobutu’s regime as “totalitarianism sanctified by a bogus Africanism,” and that will have to stand for Amin as well.

Politics has its well known definitions. The art of the possible, for one. Who gets what, when, how, for another. But so much, at base, turns on a simple question: Who belongs on this land? For all the people that Amin killed and tortured, it is his expulsion of the Asians that remains his definitive crime—definitive because it is so much of its displaced age. “What I had feared would happen on the coast came to pass,” Salim, the narrator of Naipaul’s postcolonial novel A Bend in the River says. “There was an uprising; and the Arabs—men almost as African as their servants—had been laid low.”

Such are the dilemmas of displacement, with the unresolved questions of identity, and all the confusions of perpetrator, accessory, beneficiary, victim, and innocent: men almost as African as their servants. The dilemmas do not excuse a murderous solution, though that is what people sometimes call for and approve. “It was extraordinary to me,” Salim goes on, “that some of the newspapers could have found good words for the butchery on the coast. But people are like that about places in which they aren’t really interested and where they don’t have to live.”

Our age has its easy praise of terror killings, too—its good words for butchery—as if it were impossible to resist both empire and the murder of innocent people. But that is probably getting beyond our theme. As for dictators, I will say this. Two years ago, I met a woman from Zambia, educated in England, who defended a certain African ruler on the grounds that he had brought stability to the nation. Anyone who calls a dictatorship stable has not, I think, read very widely in history. Stability requires a more complex political arrangement, capable of managing disagreements, which the repression of a strongman, at length, cannot. Since 1986, Uganda has had only one president, Yoweri Museveni. I have some small admiration for the cool protest of a Wikipedia editor, who writes on Museveni’s page: “As of 2022, after 36 years of his authoritarian rule, Uganda has been ranked 166th in GDP (nominal) per capita and 167th by Human Development Index.”

This of a nation that was described in the 1970s, by general admission, and eloquently by Naipaul, as a place “beautiful, fertile, easy, without poverty, and with high African traditions.”

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Despite my protest after The Spirit of the Beehive, I can’t really give up political cinema. It continues to occupy the blog. Sometimes I think it’s the only kind of movie I care to write about at all. Which is a strange admission, since I am known more frivolously as an aesthete. The next post, in any case, will cover two films: Barbara Loden’s Wanda and Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA. Both are from the 1970s. Both are wonderful.

In other news, Gene Siskel will play most of Lee Chang-dong’s catalogue over the next two weeks. Two very trusted friends dislike Burning, for plausible reasons, so I plan to work through my conflict with their opinion. If some insight emerges on this fresh viewing, I’ll try to write about it. We’ll see. Please send recommendations, always, if you know something great! I watch most things that people tell me to watch. — Matthew