Michael Currie Schaffer: Idi Amin's path to stardom
[Michael Currie Schaffer is a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer. ]
Idi Amin lumbered back onto our cultural radar this month, the subject of a splendidly reviewed new movie starring Forest Whitaker as the legendary Ugandan tyrant. But did he ever go away? Twenty-seven years after his overthrow, Amin, who fashioned himself Africa's strongest strongman, has managed to outlast his fellow despots in a category he himself might have appreciated: Celebrity. How many dead African dictators still figure in late-night monologues? For that matter, how many current ones do? Besides Muammar Qaddafi--whose Q ratings only shot up after Ronald Reagan bombed him--Amin is probably the only African ruler whose name rings a bell with most Americans. I'd lay even odds that his name-recognition numbers could beat those of Nelson Mandela.
Amin's infamy was hardly inevitable. Sure, he purportedly noshed on a political opponent or two. But Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who staged a $22 million ceremony to crown himself emperor of the Central African Republic, was said not only to have eaten humans, but also to have served them to foreign dignitaries as well. And, yeah, Amin was zany, granting himself titles like "King of Scotland." But, for sheer kookiness, his regime had nothing on Equatorial Guinea's despotic Francisco Macias Nguema, who forbade all use of the word "intellectual" and forced priests to pepper church services with phrases like "there is no God other than Macias." Surely a body count estimated at 300,000 also helped cement Amin's place in popular memory. Yet even that figure probably lags behind Ethiopian supremo Mengistu Haile Mariam, who refused to address a deadly famine because it interfered with the tenth anniversary of his 1974 revolution.
So why is Amin on the silver screen while his murderous contemporaries are lost to the ages, or at least to the entertainment industry? In fact, consciously or not, the late dictator followed a textbook path to celebrity. The key step, as anyone from Sid Vicious to Hugo Chávez will testify, is to outrage the establishment, and to do so memorably. In Amin's case, this meant England, Uganda's former colonial master. So, for all the genuine outrages--say, summarily expelling between 40,000 and 80,000 Ugandans of Asian descent, or tossing so many executed corpses into the Nile that a key hydroelectric dam became jammed--Amin was quick with shenanigans, too, leavening his blood-lust with an appealingly telegenic dose of buffoonery. He dubbed himself "Conqueror of the British Empire." He renamed Lake Victoria the Idi Amin Dada Sea. He had white men carry him about on a sedan chair. He reportedly wrote a letter to Queen Elizabeth that read "Dear Liz, if you want to know a real man, come to Kampala."...
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Idi Amin lumbered back onto our cultural radar this month, the subject of a splendidly reviewed new movie starring Forest Whitaker as the legendary Ugandan tyrant. But did he ever go away? Twenty-seven years after his overthrow, Amin, who fashioned himself Africa's strongest strongman, has managed to outlast his fellow despots in a category he himself might have appreciated: Celebrity. How many dead African dictators still figure in late-night monologues? For that matter, how many current ones do? Besides Muammar Qaddafi--whose Q ratings only shot up after Ronald Reagan bombed him--Amin is probably the only African ruler whose name rings a bell with most Americans. I'd lay even odds that his name-recognition numbers could beat those of Nelson Mandela.
Amin's infamy was hardly inevitable. Sure, he purportedly noshed on a political opponent or two. But Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who staged a $22 million ceremony to crown himself emperor of the Central African Republic, was said not only to have eaten humans, but also to have served them to foreign dignitaries as well. And, yeah, Amin was zany, granting himself titles like "King of Scotland." But, for sheer kookiness, his regime had nothing on Equatorial Guinea's despotic Francisco Macias Nguema, who forbade all use of the word "intellectual" and forced priests to pepper church services with phrases like "there is no God other than Macias." Surely a body count estimated at 300,000 also helped cement Amin's place in popular memory. Yet even that figure probably lags behind Ethiopian supremo Mengistu Haile Mariam, who refused to address a deadly famine because it interfered with the tenth anniversary of his 1974 revolution.
So why is Amin on the silver screen while his murderous contemporaries are lost to the ages, or at least to the entertainment industry? In fact, consciously or not, the late dictator followed a textbook path to celebrity. The key step, as anyone from Sid Vicious to Hugo Chávez will testify, is to outrage the establishment, and to do so memorably. In Amin's case, this meant England, Uganda's former colonial master. So, for all the genuine outrages--say, summarily expelling between 40,000 and 80,000 Ugandans of Asian descent, or tossing so many executed corpses into the Nile that a key hydroelectric dam became jammed--Amin was quick with shenanigans, too, leavening his blood-lust with an appealingly telegenic dose of buffoonery. He dubbed himself "Conqueror of the British Empire." He renamed Lake Victoria the Idi Amin Dada Sea. He had white men carry him about on a sedan chair. He reportedly wrote a letter to Queen Elizabeth that read "Dear Liz, if you want to know a real man, come to Kampala."...