Unvarnished tyranny

MARK LEOPOLD has produced an excellent book about Idi Amin, one of Africa’s most notorious dictators. Well written and full of original research, this is perhaps the only book I have yet read about Amin which gives anything like an accurate assessment of who he was, what he actually did, and why.

Amin became president of Uganda, a country I once called home, during a military coup in 1971. In the years that followed, as Amin became a household name around the world, Uganda, the country I was growing up in, fell apart.

Yet, as Leopold recognises, so much of what has been written about Africa’s most infamous tyrant is nonsense. Amin has tended to column. Or else he has been shown as a sadistic madman, the sort who kept body parts in his fridge.