The Last King of Scotland (1998) (25 page)

“Do not be sad, doctor. Are you tired? You must be tired as you have done good work.”

“I’m fine,” I said, “I’m fine.”

“You will be rewarded for your professional behaviour. But first, waragi!”

Waragi was Ugandan gin, and in the bar Amin called for five bottles of it. Everyone crowded round, fawning at him and readily taking up his offer of free drinks. I had only a few sips. The fiery stuff made me gag, and the music made my head spin. At one point Amin got up and played the accordion with the band. Then he danced, and made me dance too.

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.”

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:

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:

“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.