The memories flooded back. Not just his family (that memory was never far away), but everything else he’d had and no longer possessed. His house, his friends, his work, the relationships with people at the Ministry for Development, even the four peach trees in his backyard. His future, too, the future that hadn’t happened and now never would—that also shone in on him with the sunshine through the windshield, closing his throat with the pain. He drove, eyes forward, hurting so much that he didn’t want to move any part of his body.
The land was familiar, the sunlight familiar, the ribbon of road familiar. The few vehicles they passed bore yellow license plates as in Kenya, but beginning with U, not K. The people in the occasional village were more brightly dressed than in the countryside around Kisumu.
God help him, God help him, he was home.
27
For Idi Amin, the least enjoyable aspect of his office was his office. He very much liked to be out on maneuvers with his Army, or observing a flyby of his Air Force, or making a whirlwind tour of “inspection” in a jeep at the head of a convoy of troop-filled trucks, racing through the small towns, laughing at the dogs and the babies and the chickens as they scurried out of his way.
Official dinners, they were also nice. And official lunches, official teas, official cocktail parties. Also official tours of locations such as Owen Falls Dam (making sure those thrown-away bodies which had not yet been eaten by the crocodiles had discreetly been removed the day before) or the Field Marshal Idi Amin Air Force Base at Nakasongola, seventy miles north of Kampala. (The air base was a particular favorite, though also something of an embarrassment. Amin, early in his presidency, had ordered it built, with its modern camouflaged underground hangars, because he wanted to protect his Air Force from the fate that had hit the Egyptians in the 1967 Six-Day War, when the Israelis had destroyed virtually the entire Egyptian Air Force on the ground on the very first day. However, Amin had only about twenty modern warplanes in his Air Force, which he couldn’t bear to keep so far away from himself, so the Field Marshal Idi Amin Air Force Base normally stood empty while his total Air Force remained at Entebbe, where the Israelis had wiped it out last summer. He had new planes now, though, and always ordered a few of them to Nakasongola before an inspection.)
Unfortunately, for the leader of a modern nation there’s more to the presidency than Army maneuvers and VIP inspections. From time to time he must seat himself in his office, listen to a lot of boring details from various ministers, make decisions, give orders, and even occasionally sign something. (He really disliked that part. He had learned late in life how to sign his name, and he remained convinced there was something funny about the look of it, that it didn’t have in some strange manner the appearance of a real signature. He thought other people could see the difference and were deliberately hiding their knowledge from him.)
As with many men who have reached the top in the world of power politics, Idi Amin’s talent was not for governing but for climbing. Now that there was nowhere left to climb, he was frequently bored or resentful or ill at ease, as though it were the world’s fault he had nothing left to do with his skills. Again as with so many such men, he had turned his energies to the obsessive struggle to retain the power he’d achieved, even if his enemies and competitors were frequently no more than ghosts.
But you can’t chase ghosts all the time, no matter how many you’ve made. Today, all his appointments finished, nowhere else to go, Amin prowled the large plush room he’d inherited from Milton Obote, drinking beer and thinking about next month’s Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference to be held in London. The British had been making a fuss lately about his attending; they said bad things about him and didn’t want him to go. They claimed it was because of the way he treated his enemies, but he knew that was false. Didn’t all strong leaders treat their enemies harshly? Of course; how else could you intimidate them, keep them in check? It was simple hypocrisy.
There had even been discussion in the British papers about his meeting with Queen Elizabeth. If he were to attend the conference, naturally he would with all the other heads of state be on the reception line to meet the Queen (whom in any event he had already met six years ago), and these newspapers had raised the question as to whether or not this Queen should shake Idi Amin’s hand. Yes, and he knew why, he knew why that was such an issue. “Amin’s red hand,” they called it, but they meant Amin’s black hand. Yes, they did.
Back in the 1950s, when he was in the Army, then called the King’s African Rifles, he was the only black enlisted man on the Nile Rugby Team with all those white officers. Every time they played a game in Kenya there would be a reception afterward, and while the rest of the team enjoyed the festivities Idi Amin would sit alone in the bus, waiting to be driven back to the barracks. Yes, he knew what color hand they didn’t want their Queen to touch.
“Sir?”
Amin had been deep in the past, staring sightlessly out his window, clutching his beer bottle by the neck. He was six feet four; he had a big gut he hadn’t owned back in 1951 and 1952, when he was heavyweight boxing champion of Uganda; he filled this room with a brooding intensity. He looked over at his secretary, a uniformed soldier, a Kakwa like himself. He liked to have people around him who spoke his tribal dialect; in it he said, hoping for something interesting, “Well? I am very deep in thought here.”
“Your Excellency, Mr. Chase wonders if you could spare five minutes to see him.”
Chase. It was possible that Chase would be amusing, particularly if he was here to talk against Sir Denis Lambsmith again. “Yes, I’ll see him,” Amin said, then added, “No, wait. Tell him I’ll see him soon, he should wait.”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
Amin, smiling, watched the secretary-soldier close the door; then he turned back to the window and to his thoughts.
On the whole, he would prefer to attend that conference. Such official occasions were among the best parts of being a head of state, and it was always enjoyable to twit the British and strain the fabric of their surface politeness.
Also, there was London, which he liked very much. Amin had been to several places outside Africa—to Rome to see the Pope, to New York to address the United Nations—but his favorite trip had been back in 1971, the summer after he had taken power, when he had gone up to London to see the Queen. They’d had lunch together, and he’d explained at length his economic and educational plans for Uganda. Of course, that had been before he’d understood the depth of British faithlessness.
Chase. He was Canadian, of course, not British, but how much of a distinction was that? An African from this tribe and an African from that tribe were as different as winter from summer, but all white men—at least, all English-speaking white men—were the same. When it came to white people, he could only agree with the attitude of Roy Innis, who back in March of 1973 had made him a life member of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality.
In preparation for an enjoyable conversation with Chase, Amin went back to his desk, unlocked a side drawer, and took out the Xerox copy of the letter, which he spread in front of himself on the desk. He still wasn’t a very good reader, but he’d had this one read to him by a trustworthy educated Nubian, and by now he had it memorized. It was typewritten, with neither date nor business-address heading, and it looked like this: