Idi Amin Dada

General Idi Amin, president of Uganda, portrays himself in Idi Amin Dada as a healthy animal bursting with physical prowess, the king of his domain. One is charmed by his bulky exuberance, and by the heartiness of a host showing home movies, while feeling slightly chilled by the pallid landscape surrounding the giant. His people seem like listless wraiths in his live presence, before his monstrous appetite for life.

It is the film’s exuberance which gives one pause. In puzzling fact, Amin’s monstrosity seems inseparable from his charm.

The filming took director Barbet Schroeder and his French crew only two weeks, although they spent several months on the editing. Amin demanded that much of it be cut, so that, in effect, he controlled its direction. Yet what emerges is the more fascinating for its being a self-indicting self-portrait.

His presence dominates the film. The camera is relentlessly on Amin--Amin showing off, playing war games, playing the accordion, admiring captured arms, telling his dreams, lecturing his cabinet. Shroeder has wisely gone the whole way and allowed the dictator to show us the man through his manners, the bric-a-brac of a larger-than-life self. The ironies are all the viewer’s, who alone bears the burden of interpretation. Neither a documentary with a narrator, nor an entertainment film with an imposed design, the film is a documentary comme artwork.

The only continuity provided is the continuity of the self. The viewers begin to realize that they are confronted with all the baggage of a psyche whose self expression has been absolutely unreined: a shock to one’s evaluative powers under any circumstances, but particularly so in the passive confines of the darkened theater seat, riveted by the gleaming screen.

The camera zooms from a jumping, leaping tribal dance replete with spears to the fighter planes lined up in the background. This sort of visual metaphor is Schroeder’s strong suit. He has avoided, for the most part, the ironic juxtaposition, or the heavily significant aside.

One exception in this general policy of restraint is a sequence in which Amin states that the whole country is revolutionary. In the next frame, screaming bats swarm from a bare tree. That sudden image of predation is an uncharacteristic and unnecessary insertion. The attractive health and power, and the threat implied to the weak, are all there in the animals Amin explicitly admires.

The film opens with Amin playing guide on a motorboat ride through a game preserve. He calls to some crocodiles basking on the bank and claps at them to move into the water. “You see?” he laughs, “They obey me.” A few moments later the camera pans to an elephant braying as he stands in the river. “I like elephants,” says Amin. “They range freely in Africa, as nowhere else in the world. It is a sign of freedom.”

The dictator’s equation of power with its symbols is by turns ludicrous and frightening. He seems locked in his own charade, a 10 year old gone mad with the intoxicating power of guns and tanks. “I had breakfast with the Syrians in their tanks,” he says about Arab relations. “We had a good time.” When asked about progress in Uganda, he replies, “Yes. Ugandans used to carry the British on their heads, in carrying cars. Now I will see Heath in the command post. He will have to come to me.”

It is difficult to believe that Amin was playing confidence games with the director, as some have suggested. What slowly dawns on the audience is that here is a man with no self-perception. He has cut himself off from any adult, critical presence, and made the rest of the world figure in his fantasy.

The final moments of the film compress its humor and horror into a more closed facial arena. Amin faces an amphitheater of medical doctors, and, in response to a query about his relations to their medical association, lectures them on cleanliness and the evils of drinking. Then the look of sweating authority in diatribe vanishes, and a boyish expression comes over his face, “You have some points to tell me?”

The cool, evaluating stare of one doctor is played off against a closeup of Amin’s darting eyes. This final frame, sustained for several minutes, held a quality of terror for me. It located the threat in Amin’s physical presence by focusing on him in silence--only his breathing was audible. The shot confirmed my uneasiness with his Nixonlike verbal overkill (“I have said it--it is clear!”) and his overlong, too-hearty laugh at the mention of his reputed admiration for Hitler. Schroeder’s final focus keys up the viewer’s free-floating passivity to the pitch of claustrophobia.

Amin’s is a solipsism which cannot endure adult evaluation. He retreats either into protestations of fun (“You said Uganda’s frogmen?” “Yes--it’s our secret weapon in Lake Victoria.”) Or annoyed insistence (“I am just explaining to you”).

In the old comedies, the interlude provided a low-life caricature of the nobles’ actions,--e.g. the Fool’s insulting riddles to Lear on the heath, or the tinker’s asinine parody of the Athenian lovers’ courtship in A Midsummer Night Dream.

Amin’s portrait is all comic interlude. We keep waiting for the appearance of the sane, more sophisticated counter part to balance him. But it never comes. The Lord of Misrule is never deposed.

Amusement would be the wrong reaction, though the temptation to incredulity is fierce. Laughter can insulate by allowing us to dismiss his crudity. If Amin is undifferentiated low-life parody, perhaps western mentors of emerging African states can cast themselves as the missing “nobles” in this drama. Amin has only wielded our own symbols a little more clumsily, with more braggadocio and less flair, so that we see all the workings and the illusion of their meaning is shattered.

Idi Amin Dada can serve, as did Jonathan Swift’s device of the travelog, or Thomas More’s voyager to a Utopia with different manners and customs, to educate us about our own ways. This journey to Uganda is a comic foil--reflecting unexpectedly on us. The humor of the film is at first hilarity at Amin’s excess--we laugh at him be cause he is a stooge. But Schroeder’s restraint wins. His is the sanity and balance which forces the viewer to put the pieces together, in the absence of the filmmaker’s commentary. And as that happens, a grimmer funniness, and the shock of recognition, makes a mental mosaic of the film’s fragments.

The viewer must decide whether Amin’s parody of Western values is unconscious, or whether he and the director indulged themselves in baiting each other. In either case, Schroeder accomplishes an implicit satire in the filmed portrait which More or Swift could envy.

Kefa Sempangi wrote in the July/ August issue of Sojourners:

“The atrocities in Uganda would render life absolutely meaningless, were it not for the Christian’s hope... And it is only the church--the kingdom made visible--which offers the hope of life.”

Only the church can offer a different set of symbols of power and leadership. Only its witness to another way of life can undermine the vastly stacked edifices Amin aspires to with his ghastly caricature of power and respectability.

Nancy McCann was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.