A peep into Amin’s charm and acidity

It was as if the former Member of Parliament for Obongi County, Mr Kaps Fungaroo, had thrown a stone into a beehive – thereby provoking stinging responses from the angry bees – with his proposal for an educational outfit that would, in effect, immortalise Idi Amin.

(Ah, but the bees randomly flying en masse out of the beehive – that could be a clever trick by the stone-thrower for quickly collecting honey from the temporarily abandoned beehive!)

And – my fellow Ugandan – where is Obongi? Formerly a county but now a district since 2019, Obongi is located in the West Nile region and was carved out of Moyo District. The district is thus part of the general region that Amin hailed from, who was fully Ugandan by birth, born (in Koboko District) of a Kakwa father and a Lugbara mother. By virtue of citizenship alone, it may indeed be argued that Amin is as entitled as any other Ugandan citizen to being memorialised. Ah, but there is the question of the politics and moral values. 

A retrospective peep into the person, acts, achievements, and miscarriages of the Idi Amin that ‘yours truly here’ knew, reveals that character who was both a compelling charmer and a horrendous killer, and was accordingly loved and hated in equal measure. 

Amin the charmer was the massive military coup d’état leader that we saw being driven in an open jeep, without lead car or armed convoy, in the streets of Kampala on the day of the coup, magically waving to the enchanted and yelling crowd, who threw their hats and handbags into the road for him to ride upon. 

Amin the charmer is the untutored hero who sent Kampala’s musicians into utter ecstasy; and from one of them we were soon treated to, “Ani eyali amanyi nti omuntu alizibukuka omumwa? Waama, Amin wangaala!” (Who could have known that one’s mouth could ever be un-gagged? Oh Amin, long live you!) And from another musician came the adulation, “Eyali omuseveni, n’ofuuka omuseeviya!” (You that were a soldier, you became the saviour!) 

The untutored, lower-primary-school dropout hero that he was, Amin was the special pride of the unschooled inheritors of the businesses left behind by the Ugandan Asians that he expelled from the country in 1972, and whose wealth he allocated to favourites of the new politico-military regime, that he called ‘mafuta-mingi’ (plentiful-oilers). 

In their surprise and self-congratulation, these plentiful-oilers would be heard exclaiming their satisfaction, by saying, “Twasoma wa?” (Where did we go to school?)

But perhaps the most interesting of Amin’s enchanted victims were the young and older women whose mini-skirts he banned from being worn in public. 

The said affected women did not even go for the expected ‘midis’, skirts that reach below the knees. Instead, they went all the way for ankle-length ‘maxis’ – which they creatively, and somewhat caressingly baptised, “Amin, nvaako!” (Amin, leave me alone!)

That was Amin the charmer, who was simultaneously Amin the horrendous killer. That was Amin the Chief Justice killer; the Vice-chancellor killer; the Archbishop killer; the wife killer; the killer of politicians; the killer of the ordinary man by the hundreds of thousands!

But if Amin’s name must be stoned into oblivion – where is that ‘guiltless Ugandan champion’ who should cast the first stone?

Prof Timothy Wangusa is a poet and novelist. [email protected]