A new movie provides a compelling glimpse into the reign of terror that was Idi Amin's Uganda in the 1970s and, even more importantly (even if unintentionally on the part of the filmmakers), serves as a powerful indictment of the state of American politics today.
Last weekend I had the chance to see a new movie, "The Last King of Scotland," set in the African country of Uganda during the dim, distant days of the 1970s. In the film, a young, aimless Scot, recently graduated from medical school, flees to Uganda to escape a suffocating home environment, and through a series of plot twists, ends up the personal physician to Idi Amin Dada, who has just seized power in a military coup (backed, the film hints, by Western powers).
As the film progeresses Amin tightens his grip on Ugandan society in the way all military dictators, do and, more importantly, tightens his psychological grip on the doctor, who gradually becomes repelled by what is going on but is also unable to turn on Amin. By the film's climax the doctor's body is broken by Amin, and he is struggling to hold on to what is left of his soul.
Like all good movies, "Last King of Scotland" works on several levels, including as a first-rate political thriller, a psyhologically astute character study, and also as a deeper statement about the human condition, and the life and times we find ourselves in. The story of the Scottish doctor is fictionally based (the original source material is a novel) but Amin was a very real figure, who spilled some very real blood (a whole lot of blood, it's estimated nearly 300,000 Ugandans died during his reign).
In his early years Amin was seen by many as a liberating figure, overthrowing a tired and corrupt regime, and as a comic figure, strutting about the world stage in his military uniform brimming with medals and proclaiming more and more grandiose titles and schemes (including calling himself the "Last King of Scotland.") Gradually, however, the laughter stopped as more and more sordid details about his increasingly bloodthirsty reigme seeped out, including reports of feeding victims directly to crocodiles and keeping the body parts of his victims in freezers on his presidential estate. In 1976, when Palestinean hijackers brought a planeload of Western hostages to the Ugandan airport of Entebbe, Amin freed all non-Jewish hostages (the Jewish hostages were rescued by Israeli commandoes shortly afterward). In 1977, Amin gave the new Carter Administration its first international crisis when he announced that the 300 or so Americans then living in Uganda would not be allowed to leave the country. At that time Time magazine ran a cover story on Amin, declaring him the "Mad Man of Africa."
I was reminded of all of this while watching the film. Of coruse the filmmakers, including the brilliant actor Forest Whitaker, who plays Amin, give him much more psychological depth than just a cardboard madman dictator. Which makes the film's story, and message, all the more powerful. Cardboard madmen do not earn the admiration, support, loyalty, even, yes, love, that Amin is depicted as winning from both his countrypeople and, for most of the film, the Scottish doctor. The film, at heart, is a meditation on the awesome seductive power of evil, at both the individual and collective level. People, even relatively well educated and sophisticated people such as the Scottish doctor, are willing to essentially sell their souls, the film argues, if a leading political figure can push the right emotional and psychological buttons.
"The Last King of Scotland" is set in the Uganda of the 1970s, but it also very much about the United States today. I highly recommend it, with the advisory it contains some very graphic depictions of Amin's brutality, which may remind some viewers of newsfootage out of Iraq in recent years.