‘DEMAGOGIC TRICK’ Idi Amin was a ‘phony liberator’ of the oppressed majority

FIFTY years ago, Ugandan President Idi Amin wrote to the governments of the British Commonwealth with a bold suggestion: Allow him to take over as head of the organisation, replacing Queen Elizabeth II.

- DEREK R PETERSON

After all, Amin reasoned, a collapsing economy had made the UK unable to maintain its leadership. Moreover, the “British Empire does not now exist following the complete decolonisation of Britain’s former overseas territories.”

It wasn’t Amin’s only attempt to reshape the international order. Around the same time, he called for the UN headquarters to be moved to Uganda's capital, Kampala, touting its location at “the heart of the world between the continents of America, Asia, Australia and the North and South Poles”.

Amin’s diplomacy aimed to place Kampala at the centre of a postcolonial world. In my new book, A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda, I show that Amin’s government made Uganda — a remote, landlocked nation — look like a frontline state in the global war against racism, apartheid and imperialism.

Doing so was, for the Amin regime, a way of claiming a morally essential role: liberator of Africa’s hitherto oppressed people. It helped inflate his image both at home and abroad, allowing him to maintain his rule for eight calamitous years, from 1971 to 1979.

Amin was the creator of a myth that was both manifestly untrue and extraordinarily compelling: that his violent, dysfunctional regime was actually engaged in freeing people from foreign oppressors.

The question of Scottish independence was one of his enduring concerns. The “people of Scotland are tired of being exploited by the English,” wrote Amin in a 1974 telegram to UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. “Scotland was once an independent country, happy, well governed and administered with peace and prosperity,” but under the British government, “England has thrived on the energies and brains of the Scottish people”.