By Jason Burke Africa correspondent
For
decades he has been reviled as a simple-minded and sadistic dictator, or
lampooned as a clownish thug.
Now tens of thousands of newly discovered images
have shown how Idi Amin exploited cutting-edge media technology, populism and
radical ideologies to maintain his bloody grip on power in the 1970s.
Most of the 70,000 pictures were taken by a team of
photographers from the information ministry who followed the Ugandan dictator
over the course of his eight-year rule. Many show Amin at public occasions, but
some are of private episodes, such as the arrest and humiliation of alleged
petty criminals shortly before their execution.
Others are more intimate, showing the dictator with
his family or close associates, and were taken by officials and associates.
Amin is seen with his children surrounded by Christmas decorations, playing the
accordion and swimming.
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| Idi Amin playing the accordion at Buvuma Island in 1971. Photograph: Uganda Broadcasting Corporation |
Historians say the images, found in a locked filing cabinet
at the Ugandan state broadcaster’s offices by archivists four years ago but
only now given a public view, provide extraordinary new insights into Amin and
the nature of his regime, which was one of the worst in post-colonial Africa. They also cast new light on the reality of life for
ordinary Ugandans under the rule of a man held responsible for between 100,000
and 500,000 deaths.
Rose Mwanja Nkaale, the commissioner of the
government’s museums and monuments department, said she had been surprised to
see images of a “jovial character who was very social with the common people”.
“It made me
wonder what turned him into what he became. He started well but turned into
something else. We need to learn about what we must fight against to stop these
things ever happening again,” Nkaale said.
During Amin’s
rule, security services and the military targeted different ethnic communities
seen as potentially disloyal, as well as real and imagined opponents.
Journalists, judges, businesspeople, artists, officials and clerics were
abducted, tortured and killed. Victims included Uganda’s Anglican archbishop
and one of Amin’s own wives.
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| Amin and his family with the South Vietnamese President in Uganda, 1973. Photograph: Uganda Broadcasting Corporation |
Dr Richard Vokes, an anthropologist at the
University of Western Australia, who was involved in the discovery, said the
photographs depicted a “kind of manic energy” that was both “behind the
brutality and part of the brutality”.
“We see how
[Amin] embraced the media and understood its power ... How he had a great sense
of how media could amplify his ego and his political will,” Vokes said.
The display
of a selection of the pictures at Uganda’s national museum in a pioneering
exhibition has been welcomed by many of Amin’s relatives, as well as the
families of some of his victims.
Sarah
Bananuka, whose father and three brothers were murdered during Amin’s rule,
said the exhibition was a good initiative but expressed concern that the
official photographs might hide the grim reality of the regime.
“In these
pictures you see him in parties, enjoying life and meeting people. We didn’t
see the other side of Amin, which we felt, lived and experienced,” the
69-year-old said.
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| Amin gives citizenship to British officials in 1975. Photograph: Uganda Broadcasting Corporation |
Hajji Edrisa Mayanja Njuki, the head of the
presidential press unit during the 1970s, said the exhibition depicted the
“real Amin”. “The pictures that show his good side had never been produced and
published. It has always been the negative side of the story,” Njuki said.
Unlike in
South Africa after the fall of the apartheid regime, or in Rwanda after the genocide of 1994, there has been no
official attempt in Uganda to address the violence that followed Amin’s seizure
of power in 1971.
“[Uganda]
has never had a process of mourning, even of reflection. There are no public
memorials, victims’ groups … all the things you see elsewhere in places with
traumatic periods in their past. So this is the first public memorial,” Vokes
said.
The
exhibition’s organisers had to wrestle with the fact that few of the
photographs depict the violence of life in Uganda in the 1970s.
“As curators, we have made efforts throughout
this exhibition to remind the viewer that for many Ugandans the 1970s were a
perilous time,” said Derek Peterson, a historian at the University of Michigan,
who is working to preserve endangered government archives in Uganda. “The
photos are so overwhelmingly positive in their appraisal of Amin that we’ve
really had to work to find ways to bring the violence of the time into focus.”
One strategy
was to feature images of Amin’s victims, as well as pictures taken immediately
after his fall of torture chambers used by his feared security services.
So extensive
was the violence under Amin that state photographers themselves were at risk.
One was executed after taking pictures of the aftermath of a hijacking by
Palestinian and German terrorists that led to a raid by Israeli special forces
on Entebbe airport in 1976.
Peterson said the images underlined the breadth
of Amin’s relations with radical leftist organisations and regimes across
Africa, the Middle East and beyond. There are photos of representatives from
the Palestinian Liberation Organisation meeting the dictator, and pictures of a
deputation of black activists from the US.
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| Amin addresses troops during a visit to border regions. Photograph: Uganda Broadcasting Corporation |
British and
other officials expected Amin to choose the west in the cold war battle for
influence under way across Africa at the time. Instead, he took Uganda into the
“revolutionary international” group of what were then known as “progressive”
states, receiving wide-ranging support from Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and arms from the Soviet
Union. East Germany assisted Amin’s security services.
Amin was
ousted after launching an invasion of Tanzania in 1979 and died
in exile in Saudi Arabia in 2003.
Bananuka
said the exhibition was “a beginning”. “It’s making people come out to think
how we can do it better. We need to get more people who are willing to talk
about their experiences and share it out. Maybe somebody may learn a lesson or
two,” she said.
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