Photos taken by official photographers show how the Ugandan dictator exploited the media 'to boost his ego and political will'.
(By Jason Burke Africa Correspondent)
Idi Amin's media savvy was revealed in the newly published photos
Idi Amin and guests celebrate 'Refugee Day' in 1975.
Photo: Uganda Broadcasting Corporation
Photos taken by official photographers show how the Ugandan dictator exploited the media 'to boost his ego and political will'.
For decades, he has been portrayed as a simple-minded and sadistic dictator or a clownish thug.
Tens of thousands of newly discovered photographs now show how Idi Amin used sophisticated media technology, populism and radical ideologies to maintain his grip on his countrymen in the 1970s.
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Idi Amin playing on Buuma Island in 1971. Photo: Uganda Broadcasting Corporation
Most of the 70,000 photos were taken by a team of information ministry photographers who followed the Ugandan dictator during his eight-year rule. Most show Amin in public moments, but some are private episodes, where alleged petty criminals were arrested and humiliated shortly before they were executed.
Others are more intimate, showing the dictator with his family or close friends, taken by officials and associates. Amin is seen with his children surrounded by Christmas decorations, playing the accordion and swimming.
Idi Amin in Lake Albert in July 1973. Photo: Uganda Broadcasting Corporation
Historians say the images, discovered four years ago by archives in a locked filing cabinet at Uganda's state broadcaster but only now made public, offer extraordinary new insights into the nature of Amin and his regime, which was one of the worst. They also shed new light on the reality of life for ordinary Ugandans under the rule of a man responsible for between 100,000 and 500,000 post-colonial African deaths.
Amin and his family with the President of South Vietnam in Uganda, 1973. Photo: Uganda Broadcasting Corporation
Rose Mwanja Nkaale, commissioner of the government's Department of Museums and Monuments, said she was surprised to see images of a "jolly character who was very social with the general public".
“I wondered what made him who he was. He started well but became something else. We need to learn what we have to fight to stop these things from ever happening again,” Nkaale said.
Amin grants citizenship to British officials in 1975. Photo: Uganda Broadcasting Corporation
During Amin's rule, the security services and the military targeted various ethnic communities as potential traitors, as well as real and imagined opponents. Journalists, judges, businessmen, artists, officials and priests were kidnapped and tortured to death. Among the victims were Uganda's Anglican Archbishop and Amin's own wives.
Dr Richard Walkes, an anthropologist at the University of Western Australia who was involved in the discovery, said the photographs showed a "crazy energy" that was "behind the brutality as well as part of the savagery".
"We see how [Amin] embraced the media and understood its power. We see how he had a great sense of how the media could amplify his ego and his political will," Vaux said.
Many of Amin's relatives, as well as the families of several of his victims, have welcomed the display of selected images in a pioneering exhibition at Uganda's National Museum.
Sara Bananuka, whose father and three brothers were killed during Amin's regime, said the exhibition was a good initiative, but expressed concern that official photos could hide the harsh reality of the regime.
“In these pictures you can see him partying, enjoying life and meeting people. We did not see the other side of Amin that we felt, lived and experienced,” the 69-year-old said.
The traveling beauty girls had come to meet Amin at the State House in 1978. Photo: Uganda Broadcasting Corporation
Hajji Edrisa Mayanja Njuki, who was the head of the presidential press department in the 1970s, said the show portrayed "the real Amin". “Pictures showing his good side had never been produced and published. It is always the negative side of the story,” Njuki said.
Unlike in South Africa after the fall of the apartheid regime or in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, no official effort has been made in Uganda to address the violence that followed Amin's seizure of power in 1971.
“[Uganda] has never had a mourning process, not even a reflection. Public memorials, groups of victims... all the things you see elsewhere in places with traumatic periods in their past. So this is the first public memorial,” Vokes said.
Organizers of the exhibition had to contend with several photographs depicting the violence of life in Uganda in the 1970s.
Amin addresses troops during a visit to the border areas. Photo: Uganda Broadcasting Corporation
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