Amin was a man of limited intelligence and limitless ego, who would eventually adopt “”His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr. It’s a fascinating film about a man who was a ruthless dictator, giving access to a film crew in expectation that it would make a fine piece of propaganda, unaware of how nakedly it would reveal the vast gulf between his own self-image and reality. I suspect that Barbet Schroeder’s documentary, General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait, had a lot to do with that. Amin was well known in the 1970s, while the others remained obscure to all but foreign policy wonks. Never mind that Uganda is only the ninth most populous nation in Africa, or that Amin was arguably less murderous than (to name but a handful of African dictators) Haile Mengistu of Ethiopia, Francisco Macías Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, and possibly half a dozen others. That’s 3 A’s, 2 D’s, and one gun.”) He made the cover of Time magazine, back when it actually mattered. Richard Pryor spoofed him on TV (“My name is Idi Amin Dada. He wasn’t just an African dictator, he was the African dictator. At this remove, few people remember how big Idi Amin Dada was in the 1970s.
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