Idi Amin — why ‘Big Daddy' is popular in modern Uganda

Times

18 hours ago

Uganda is in election campaign mode, so it came as no surprise on a recent trip to Kampala to see the face of the opposition leader Bobi Wine, complete with signature red beret, gazing out from walls and shopfronts. What I hadn't anticipated was the number of times I'd glimpse another, burlier face: that of Idi Amin.
You see the stickers on taxi-buses and lampposts. 'Big Daddy' is enjoying something of a 'moment' in this east-central African nation, a reappraisal unthinkable in 1979, when an invasion by the Tanzanian army prompted his flight into exile, ending eight years of increasingly violent rule. One veteran Ugandan journalist, who has spent years researching the man once labelled 'Black Hitler' and the 'Butcher of Africa', disconcerted a group of visitors I was travelling with by arguing that the death toll attributed to Amin was massively exaggerated by racist British officials who had spotted the perfect bogeyman in the swaggering, loudmouth president.
The group's response was incredulous, but his views were echoed by our tour guide who, while acknowledging far too much blood was shed, quietly insisted that Amin wasn't all bad, pointing to a portfolio of infrastructural investment — a hospital, barracks, embassy buildings at home and abroad.
As the days passed I realised that this arguably romanticised 'take' on the past was rooted in worry about the future. There's mounting exasperation among Ugandans, who know exactly what to expect in the January 2026 presidential election. Another win for President Yoweri Museveni, who once preached the danger of 'overstaying', but will have been at the helm for four decades.
So it's a good moment for a revisionist history of Amin, although this one may leave some readers slightly nonplussed. For Derek Peterson, a history professor at the University of Michigan, shows no interest in confirming or disproving the lurid, severed-heads-in-the-fridge stories that have clung to Amin. Nor does he attempt to deliver a standard cradle-to-grave account.
His interest lies instead in the little people, the 'commoners', the marginal players who buzz around any Big Man in search of advancement or who merely try — as society crumbles around their ears — to keep their heads below the parapet and do their duties. The core argument of this intriguing, always readable work is that far from being imposed on Ugandans at the point of a gun, as is commonly suggested, Amin's regime, which lasted from 1971-79, was built on a firm base of genuinely popular appeal. Peterson sets out to explain 'why so many earnest, knowledgeable people placed themselves in the service of a military dictatorship whose violence was widely known'.
The stage seems set for a Ugandan version of Daniel Goldhagen's controversial Hitler's Willing Executioners, which argued that the Holocaust, often portrayed as the work of a Nazi elite that kept its crimes hidden from ordinary citizens' eyes, was made possible by the profound antisemitism of the German population, which therefore bore collective guilt for the slaughter. But Peterson doesn't do that. He does, though, make the case that Amin was a leader whose soaring aspirations far outstripped his country's economic and geographical limitations. Despite being dismissed by Henry Kissinger as an 'ape without education', Amin was a man of restless vision, regarding Uganda as a frontline African state in a global war against racism and imperialism.
It was fascinating to learn that Amin volunteered three million Ugandans to fight against the state of Israel and offered Uganda as a base for training up an all-African army to take on apartheid South Africa. Amin not only called for the UN's headquarters to be transferred to Kampala, he wrote to the Commonwealth offering to replace Queen Elizabeth II as its head. 'Amin's diplomacy made Kampala into a centre of the global left,' Peterson writes.
In a precursor of Trump's style of diplomacy, 'there were no secret overtures, no private dialogues, no circumspection or politesse or tact' — all this was done in public. And where today's demagogues use X and Instagram to bypass 'the legacy media' and speak direct to the public, radio allowed Amin to beam straight into Ugandans' homes and minds. Just coming into its prime in Africa, the new technology meant Amin no longer needed civil servants, MPs or journalists as go-betweens. 'Radio helped make [Amin] a dictator.'
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So in many ways Amin was a thoroughly modern demagogue, with an anti-imperial message likely to appeal to post-independence Africans. But when it comes to demonstrating widespread support on the part of ordinary Ugandan citizens — solid and sustained enough to offset mounting public horror at the atrocities committed by Amin's army — Peterson is less convincing.
The official archives that he and teams of Ugandan researchers valiantly saved from heat, rain, mould and wasps are a treasure trove of quirky insights and vignettes. But what comes across is not so much the equivalent of a nation of 'willing executioners' as a nation of wary civil servants and local officials — interlaced with the odd, genuine eccentric — dutifully going through the motions, either to retain their salaries or because there was no obvious alternative to Amin.
Peterson and his Ugandan colleagues deserve praise for their dogged work of salvage and restoration. However, documentation can present both an opportunity and a trap. An archivist delighted by a file's mere survival can forget to ask himself the key 'so what?' question that every historian should retain at the back of their mind. Peterson disappears down a few too many rabbit holes.
Towards the end he focuses on a community that did the opposite of working 'to make the Amin regime function'. There's something almost magnificent about the contempt in which the inhabitants of the Rwenzururu kingdom, on Uganda's mountainous western border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then called Zaire), held central government, and their defiant determination to remain independent. It's an intriguing, under-reported tale that highlights the complexity of Ugandan history.
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By the time Amin fled, Uganda's economy was in a state of collapse. If the tales of cannibalism were almost certainly fabrications and the death toll massively inflated — more Ugandans died during Milton Obote's second presidency — thousands of citizens including prominent churchmen, politicians and government ministers had certainly been tortured, killed or disappeared. The country was regarded abroad as a blood-soaked basket-case, rather than an appropriate venue for the UN headquarters.
As Uganda gears up for next year's polls, the citizens and leadership of this linchpin African nation, which rarely gets the international attention it deserves, will need to shed their rose-tinted glasses and reassess the past in all its multilayered richness.
A Popular History of Idi Amin's Uganda by Derek R. Peterson (YUP £25). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members