The Last King of Scotland (1998) Read online

  When I said it was time for me to go home, Amin frowned.

  “It is not time. I say when time is. But since you have helped me, I will agree. But you must drive me as I have had too much of this spirit. I will sleep at State House tonight.”

  So that was how I came to be driving Idi Amin home. He had dismissed all his bodyguards and retainers when we had gone to the bar: it was like he wanted, that night, to make me his special friend.

  He had the silver revolver in his lap as I drove us through the dark along the pot-holed road to Entebbe.

  “I am sorry I was fearful when you cured me,” he said. “You see, I thought that you, too, wanted to kill me. So many people want to kill me.”

  “I’m sure you have enough protection,” I said, nervously.

  “Yes, it is true. Because the god is on my side. I dreamed it, but it was impossible. They couldn’t do it. Because I know, I dreamed that. I know that exactly: when, how and what time I am going to die. This I know. And which year and which date. All this I know already and it is a secret…I have said this clear…And I know exactly that, who will be making something against me. Very soon, I can notice him straight and he can get punishment from god straight. Because I work only according to the god’s instructions.”

  Once we reached Entebbe (the guards peering into the van were shocked to see that it was Amin who was my passenger), he made me come over to his quarters and talk to him some more.

  We drank more waragi, just the two of us sitting at the long mahogany table in the banqueting room at State House, with the loathsome masks and the paintings of the colonial governor-generals looking down on us. I looked up at them, at the white-polled one that parroted my father especially, and Idi Amin’s voice echoed in the big, gloomy space.

  “It is good of you to speak with me,” he said. “I cannot tell you how tired I am getting, from all this work. Leading Uganda. It is very difficult.”

  “You should delegate more,” I said. “Get other people to do things.”

  “You do not understand. I cannot trust. There are many who are my friends today, who would betray me tomorrow. The one that is famous in the sea is the shark, but there are many others.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have to be on my guard always.”

  I sipped my waragi thoughtfully. “Have you ever thought of retiring?”

  He gave me a strange, benevolent smile, his cheeks gleaming under the dim light of the lamps suspended over the table.

  “I will be in charge here for the full distance. As a man of destiny, I cannot go to a shamba and raise chickens. Yes, I must run for the distance. And, as you know, Doctor Nicholas, there is no distance that has no end. That is my tragedy.”

  “It’s not necessarily a tragedy,” I said.

  “No,” he said, sharply. “I know full well that it is. I know that I know I must keep on for all miles, until the god says.”

  “Who…is this god?” Though slightly frightened, and very wary, I was enjoying this rare moment of intimacy.

  “It is the Lord Jesus Christ, and it is Allah, and it is the colobus monkey whose flowing white fur makes him look like a priest. And it is the River Nile and the mopani bee who drinks the sweat from your neck. It is many things.”

  He pointed up at the colonial paintings. “Yes, even it is them.”

  “You know what you were saying,” I said, probingly, “about knowing when you would die?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Well, do you believe in an afterlife?”

  Amin was thoughtful for a moment. I thought about Stone and his plans. At that moment, there was no way that I felt I could do anything like put this man on tranquillizers. Flushed with drink, I even felt a sneaking sense of affection towards him.

  “I do not know,” he said, in answer to my question. “I have my sons, of course. It is maybe like this: when the lips die, the saliva is scattered.”

  He looked down at the tiled floor. “My own father…I did not know him. All I know is that he was soldier in the King’s African Rifles. He could have been the king himself, for all I know – yes, except that I am the wrong colour. Or the governor, at the least.”

  I laughed. “Do you think it was better before, when the governors were in charge?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “An ivory tooth is not a cure for a gap. Although it is true that I learnt many things from the British. Your empire was a shameful conquest, but a good teacher.”

  He poured some more waragi into his tumbler. “And yet some days, I am afraid that the same things I learned from them will come to fetch me into a trap, and that is when I am afraid for my position as the saviour of Africa. Because your countrymen, doctor – well, the English anyway – they are not good to me any more. And this makes me sad. And angry.”

  “Things have changed,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “But maybe it was always so. I see all this rottenness around me, all these people – here in Uganda and in all the world – pulling the skin to their own side when they stretch the skin for the drum, and I do not know what to do is best.”

  “You…could stop the corruption,” I said, edgily, “and stop the army killing people.”

  He sighed. “Doctor Nicholas, in Swahili we say, la kuvunda halian ubani. There is no incense for something rotting. And that is the condition of the world. This I know.”

  23

  A lot else happened during that time (in all I was in Kampala for six years, having been in Mbarara for two), and I don’t blame myself for all of it. Life went on, of course, as it usually does. I went to work. I ate. I slept. I got older. Every now and then I thought of Stone’s instructions – flirted with the idea, and then dismissed it.

  Naturally, this happened most of all when I was called upon to treat Amin. He himself had nothing serious wrong with him during all my tenure: overweight, certainly, and a touch of gout, but otherwise reasonably healthy, physically speaking at least.

  This I discovered when I was finally able to give him a proper medical. I’m recalling my notes of that episode from memory, and have expanded them, since doctor’s short-hand would be incomprehensible to the lay reader.

  On examination:

  Man in late forties, early fifties [it depended on the uncertain birth-date, of course, and I don’t think he knew the exact date himself], looks fit and well. Height: 6 ft 6. Weight: 20 stone.

  No jaundice, no anaemia, no cyanosis, no clubbing, no lymphadenopathy.

  Blood pressure: 130 ⁄ 90. Temp: 37.4. Pulse: 84 bpm, and normal. Jugular-venous pressure, not raised. Heart-sounds normal, no murmurs.

  Abdominal: soft, obese, tender in the right sub-costal region [the bloat problem again]. Bowel-sounds, normal.

  Cranial nerves, II-XII intact. Pupil reactions, normal.

  Power, tone, co-ordination, sensation normal.

  Reflexes right and left, present and normal. All +.

  This achieved with the usual business of auscultation (listening to heart and lungs with the stethoscope), opthalmoscope, reflex hammer and torch. I remember the sound of his heart, its reassuring lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub. I remember saying to him – it seems unbelievable now – “Follow my finger with your eye, Your Excellency…” I do wonder, in fact, how many other people have actually looked into Idi Amin’s eye: less, if I may gainsay the poets, a question of the window being open to his debatable soul than of the red cup of the retina, glazed with blood vessels, and the end of the optic nerve like a drop of milk in the centre.

  In any case, nothing critical was wrong. I did have to drain an abcess in his throat at one point. He was quite anxious about that, as it was affecting his voice, making it higher.

  “Thank God you have done it, doctor,” he said, as I dabbed at the incision. “I might have died.”

  “I don’t think it was quite that serious,” I said, chuckling.

  “Mzaha, mzaha, hutumbuka usaha,” he countered. “Joke, joke, discharges pus.”

/>   “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Even a little scratch can be dangerous.”

  All those rumours about brain-lobe epilepsy or tertiary syphilis, they simply weren’t true. The mental problems were there, yes – a type of impulsive grandiose delusion that I now see might have been common to dictators – but nothing clearly organic. Once, I never quite understood why, I had to pretend he was in a coma at Mulago.

  I carried on with my duties there and, even though Amin later offered me a house of my own on the lakeshore, I remained in the bungalow at State House. I had grown used to it and didn’t fancy a change. It was none the less curious that I had been billeted there in the first place, since he was hardly ever in residence: he preferred the Lodge at Nakasero.

  Every now and then I would be invited there for tea, or to attend some function. Idi would invariably hold forth. I remember him doing so when Heath resigned as British Prime Minister in 1974. “I told you so!” he cried. “How sad it is that Heath is now so very poor, having been relegated from Prime Minister to the obscure rank of bandmaster. I understand he is one of the best bandmasters in the United Kingdom.”

  A month or so later, President Nixon released the transcripts of the Watergate tapes. Wanting my opinion, Idi sent me over a copy of the telegram he planned to send to his beleaguered counterpart, in the context of the US having recently withdrawn aid to Uganda:

  My dear brother, it is quite true that you have enough problems on your plate and it is surprising that you have the zeal to add fresh ones. At the moment as you are uncomfortably sandwiched in that unfortunate affair, I ask Almighty God to help you solve your problems. I wish you a speedy recovery from this business. I am sure that any weak leader would have resigned or even committed suicide after being subject to so much harassment because of this Watergate affair. I take this opportunity to once again wish you a quick recovery and join your well-wishers in praying for your future success. PS. I know that you have been very sick and had to be taken to hospital and that people were very worried you were going to die and might not give the answers on the case of Watergate for the whole world to know. Allow me to extend an invitation to you to come and rest in Uganda, so that you will be able to answer all questions with a healthy body and a clear conscience. You are not damned. You needn’t be doubtful about salvation.

  “I think it might be taken in the wrong way,” I said, when he called me on the phone to ask what I thought.

  “But that fellow Nixon,” he said. “Even prostitutes on the street are more respected than him. I don’t care what you say, I will send it.”

  And he did. By such encounters, in those early years, I thought I got to know him. But it was not so. He was too full of contradictions, just as my head is too full of images of him, even now. Him sitting in an armchair in his bright blue air force uniform a few weeks later, legs crossed, a stick across his knee. Big braid on his shoulders, the customary array of medals across his chest. One was a Victoria Cross made up by Spink’s, the London jewellers, at Amin’s request – except that they would only emblazon it ‘Victorious Cross’.

  Him raising his glass at yet another banquet, or walking through the streets surrounded by his retinue.

  Him reaching up to pat a big bronze statue of himself on the shoulder.

  Him in an English three-piece suit, addressing the business community.

  Him wearing an academic gown and mortar board during a speech in his capacity as head of the Department of Political Science at the university.

  Him (again) by the poolside, lighting a cigarette for a female companion. Him inspecting a fleet of black Mercedes-Benz.

  Him with Kenyatta, with Yasser Arafat, with Mobutu.

  Him dancing a warrior dance, jabbing with a spear.

  Him showing visiting dignitaries the squadron of MiG fighters at Entebbe.

  Him with Castro, with Kurt Waldheim, with Tito.

  Him with his family: the sons, little Maclaren, Mckenzie, Campbell, Mwanga or Moses dressed up in camouflage like their father; the wives as they came on the scene, fell out of favour.

  Him (again) with Mwanga, pretending to shoot a toy gun at the boy. The boy holding a gun too, but pointing it at the floor, uncertain what to do.

  Him frowning, laughing, holding his clenched fist up to his mouth.

  Him with a baby.

  Him driving a jeep through jubilant crowds.

  Him alone.

  Him with me.

  ∗

  The day they tried to kill him, I wasn’t with him. I was at the hospital. He turned up there, roared up there, rather, in an open jeep, dumped a man in casualty – the driver – and shot off again. The man seemed normal at first but on examination we realized that there was an inch-long, needle-like shrapnel splinter in his temple. There was nothing we could do.

  I heard later what happened from one of the Ugandan doctors, whose wife had been among the crowds.

  Amin had been due for some time to attend a police review at Nsambya Police Recreation Ground, where there was a football pitch. He obviously knew someone was out to get him, as the word was that he had already changed the site of the review four times. Crowds thronged the worn-out grass of the pitch.

  He sat in the covered stand. The parade included march-pasts and a martial-arts demonstration by a South Korean-trained unit. During the display, Amin took out a rifle with a bayonet. He ordered a constable to defend himself against his mock lunge.

  The bayonet horseplay lightened the mood, and afterwards Amin and the various ministers and army officers went off to a reception nearby. After three-quarters of an hour of drinks and canapes, he set off for Kampala.

  He took the wheel of the jeep himself, telling the driver to move over. The jeep swung towards the gates of the sports ground, where more crowds were in place to cheer him. The dignitaries, as usual, waited for him to go first.

  As Amin turned out on to the main road, there were two explosions, in quick succession. Smoke billowed and there was a faint rain of debris. Then two shots rang out. The ministers, my informant told me, judiciously fled through the same gate as Amin, lest they be accused of being involved in the attempt. The crowd ran away less thoughtfully, screaming. Already the police were pulling imagined perpetrators from among them.

  The first grenade, it emerged, had exploded where Amin would have been sitting, had he not taken the driver’s seat. As my X-ray later showed, it forced the splinter into the driver’s brain. The moment after the blasts was pandemonium. Amin, opening his briefcase, pulled out a grenade himself, ready to throw it if there was another attack.

  That night, I remember, troops flooded Kampala. Civilians were haphazardly killed and beaten as punishment for the attempt. No one knew who were the culprits, but the reprisals took place none the less.

  “Three grenades hit me,” Amin told me later. “They killed thirty-nine people. My driver was killed and so was my escort – it was only I that escaped. I was saved by God’s wish. I will not die until the date God has ordained. I know it, but I don’t tell you to stop your suspense.”

  24

  Idi got married again. Wife number four. I attended the ceremony at the cathedral. It was packed, not to mention the thousands cheering themselves hoarse outside. It had been announced that he was also having a Moslem ceremony – “I love all the religions in Uganda,” he’d said on the radio – but I wasn’t invited to that. The Christian one was a strange affair, not least because the ushers were high-ranking army officers, except for Wasswa, who was best man. I took up my seat at the back on the right, along with the other expatriates – among whom, I was embarrassed to see, were Marina and her husband, and Stone as well. Nearer to me, half-obscured by a pillar, was Swanepoel.

  The cathedral was very big and grand, and I concentrated on its high pink-and-blue-painted ceiling while the organ was playing before the bride came in. I tried not to look at Marina. It was now over a year since my gaffe, but I still smarted – though it wasn’t much, really. I had
n’t done anything that offensive. My eyes fell instead on Idi, his back taking up a sizeable portion of the first pew. His jacket was dark green. Sea-green. He kept looking round, with a puzzled expression one saw often on his face, manifesting itself in frowns and darting glances. The soldier sizing up danger, I supposed. The strange thing was he smiled when he did this. As if two parts of his brain were working totally independently.

  The music stopped, and we stood up. My eye swivelled inevitably towards Marina. I couldn’t help it. She was wearing a plain white blouse buttoned up at the neck and, so far as I could see below the pew, a green skirt with flounces. Not the same colour as Idi’s, more like parsley. She was also wearing a hat, under the brim of which – she didn’t look at me.

  The procession started and the ushers, two by two with the scarlet stripes on their military trousers criss-crossing like scissors, walked up the aisle. A few paces behind walked the bride on her father’s arm, her long heavy train and the bridesmaids behind her. The father’s suit didn’t fit. He looked like a Scottish farmer on market day. At the top of the aisle, the bridesmaids and groomsmen peeled off to left and right respectively. The new wife’s name was Medina. Almost as tall as Amin, she was a dancer with the Heartbeat of Africa troupe, which was used for entertaining visiting diplomats and at official state functions.

  “Please sit down,” said the Archbishop of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Boga-Za’ire. A tiny man, in spite of his title, he was dwarfed by the altar. His head, with its greying temples and kind creases round the eyes, had the statesmanlike look that many senior churchmen seem to acquire.

  “Dearly beloved,” he intoned, “we are assembled here in the presence of God to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony. Marriage was instituted by God in the Garden of Eden when He saw that it was not good for man to be alone. It thus is an institution of God – ordained in the time of man’s innocence, before he had sinned against the Maker, and been banished from the Garden. It was given in wisdom and kindness, to repress irregular affection, and to support social order. Older than laws of merely human origin, it lies at the basis of all human legislation and civil government, and the peace and well-being of the community and country.”