A POPULAR HISTORY OF IDI AMIN'S UGANDA

Uganda’s murderous myth-maker.

Peterson, a scholar at the University of Michigan and author of The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin, writes that Amin’s 1971-79 rule generated massive paperwork, which Peterson and colleagues have recovered from warehouses, rubbish dumps, crumbling archives, and outhouses and then cleaned, digitalized, and examined. The result, he accurately claims, is a more nuanced if not more edifying portrait of a brutal, bumbling dictatorship. Uganda achieved independence peacefully in 1962 but with a weak central government ruling a collection of five semi-autonomous kingdoms. In 1966 the prime minister sent his army to destroy the largest kingdom, Buganda, and declared himself president of the nation. His army’s commander, Idi Amin, seized control in a 1971 coup. Following the rhetoric of other African autocrats, he proclaimed that he represented the people, not a corrupt, unpatriotic elite, and would lead the fight against colonialism and racism and launch an “economic war” to build a great nation. Economics was not his strong suit, and Uganda has never recovered from his 1972 expulsion of 50,000 people of Indian and Pakistani descent whose businesses and property were handed over to Africans, but most Ugandans approved. Mining his archives, Peterson works hard and successfully to find honorable Ugandans working to build their nation, but he can’t overturn hard evidence that Amin’s legacy was mostly unmarked graves and poverty. In 1978 his army, for unclear reasons, invaded neighboring Tanzania and was ultimately routed; Amin fled into exile. Chaos and civil war followed. Today Uganda is officially a parliamentary democracy, although the current president has won every election since 1986.

A penetrating if not encouraging analysis of a dysfunctional nation.