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| I had a boss eye in the film you know. |
Idi Amin Dada (c.
1924 – 16 August 2003)
Idi Amin was a bad
lad. He was a hot head up in juvie; he was Kenickie the pock-marked T-Bird joy
rider, he was the corpse-bagsying Ace in Stand By Me, he was Johnny of the
Cobra Kai. He swept the leg. He had no problem with that, sensei. He was the
Gripper Stebson of east Africa - that's a lot of dinner money and Bullet
Baxter's not going to save you in post-independence Uganda. Is he? No sir.
Amin trod a well worn
path for ambitious poor boys when he joined the army, becoming an assistant
cook in the King's African Rifles. He wasn't great in the kitchen (his diet at
the time mainly consisted of maize porridge and Toffos) but he managed to
thrive thanks to his force of personality and his ability to answer the
question "what does this mean to you?" whenever an on-safari John
Torode or Greg Wallace were passing through with a camera crew. Once he was in,
Amin bullshitted and bullied his way through the ranks: pot-wash, private, lieutenant,
captain, major, colonel, army commander, dark lord of the Sith, the King of
Queens, the Fisher King and finally King Dong. Some of these positions only
existed in his head – he never caught a fish in his life for starters and
no-one knows whether he had a hefty dobber or not; some scholars argue that
Amin was more of a Hedwig & the Angry Inch, that his temper and sadistic
streak boiled down to self-loathing and penis envy. What is known is that he refused to eat sausages his entire adult life –
even Wee Willie Winkies.
Amin seized control of
Uganda from Prime Minister Milton Obote in a winner-takes-all game of raps in
1971. Amin was the victor in a gruelling four-hour battle when Obote drew a ten
of spades to his Queen. Ten hard. Obote looked down at his mitts, now a morass
of bone-in chopped liver, and conceded. Amin was ungracious in victory, chiding
his former superior with a bizarre version of Barry Manilow’s future hit Copacabana,
“His name was Milton, Milton O’Bottler!”.
As President of Uganda
(self-appointed) Amin survived seven major assassination attempts between 1972
and 1979, the most reknowned of these came in 1976 when a 50p piece tied
to a piece of string intended to lead Amin to his death by luring him over a
cliff edge. The plan failed as, unbeknownst to the conspirators, Amin had
employed an official coin flunky only weeks before. Nine underlings fell to
their deaths before the plot was discovered, a further three members of Amin’s
staff were killed as punishment for non-retrieval of the coin. The Bash Street
Kids were later rounded up, tortured and executed. Wile E Coyote scarpered to
Zaire.
As he became
increasingly mentally unstable, Amin took more of a shine to Islam, but much to
the dismay of his neighbour African states, he wasn’t very good at it and he
became something of an embarrassment to the Ummah. His religious theme park
‘Mecca 2’ was a disaster; Mullah Mouse was not deemed an appropriate
introduction to the prophet for children, the imposing centrepiece of the park,
Allah Pally, was demolished and the gates were closed. Existing pieces of
official merchandise now fetch a fortune on the collectors market – enthusiastic
‘Dislamist’ Gordon Honeycombe paid £73,000 for a pair of Muhammad Ears at
Sotheby’s in 2006.
Amin's religious
enthusiasm also led to disagreements with his wayward mother.
Assa Aatte (1904–1970) was a table dancer at Club Bombo Bonko, performing under
the stage name 'Ass-assin' during the height of Amin’s reign. It was in the
town of Bombo that a teenage Amin first attended Islamic school in 1941 (after
he’d clocked the bog-standard platformer Roman Catholicism on the PS2 and
fancied a different challenge, he was always a chicken and goat man in anyways
so the pork thing was nowts the matter). His conversion meant he could nag his
mother about her lifestyle with religious justification, she eventually relented
and changed her act - 'Big Burkha' met with limited success however and Aatte
drew the curtains on her stage career, spending the rest of her days drinking
Enguli, playing ARPANET bingo and cadging tab money off her son.
Amin's downfall came
in 1979 when Tanzanian troops counter-invaded Uganda following the looting and destruction
of villages along the Kagera river, hundreds of Ugandan exiles volunteered to
join the Tanzanian forces. Amin made off, legging it to Tripoli for a while
(Col. Gaddafi was an ally) before he had his Gazza on the road to Old
Trafford moment when he got a better offer from the Saudis and moved to a
villa in Jeddah on condition that he remained incommunicado and didn’t steal
any team coaches just for the frisk of it. It was a mutually beneficial
agreement; Amin avoided any repercussions from Uganda and got to live in some
comfort, Saudi Arabia muzzled the Clown Prince of Islam. Amin lived out his
remaining years drinking breast milk in a Jeddah Novotel and giving interviews
to anyone who would listen to him - his appearance on the cover of the Melody
Maker in July 2000 (‘“Amin – I like tits!”’) was the death knell of the music
weekly.
Then, in 2003, he
died. Kidney failure. He was responsible for the death of up to 500,000 people
during his eight year reign from his Kampala “Command Post” – that’s a bad
thing, obviously. What a waste. But think about it - that’s two Sunderlands, or 500,000 John
Terrys. If only his flair for cruelty, persecution and the logistics of mass execution
matched his sense of judgement and geography. What a waste eh? What a waste.
Postscript – he also invented
Dadaism, but I can’t be arsed.
