We do not have to forgive Amin, but we should never forget him

Idi Amin was a brutal and violent man who tortured and killed his opponents, surrounded himself with mediocre but equally violent kinsmen, brought the economy to its knees, decimated the middle class, and created a culture of cutting corners that Uganda and Ugandans suffer from to this day.

This is why we should never forget him, as President Museveni has argued in a recent letter rejecting a proposal to set up an institute in Amin’s memory. It isn’t clear what purpose the Idi Amin Institute is meant to serve, and it is even possible that some of its aims could be hagiographic and designed to whitewash Amin’s blood-stained legacy.

But the antidote to disinformation – if that is what the institute is meant to purvey – is facts that lead to the truth, not silencing voices of dissent. People might seek to rewrite and airbrush history, but we should not condemn ourselves to the mental slavery of single narratives.

This flaw in knowledge and learning, unfortunately, infects a lot of our history. To this day school children in Uganda are taught that people like Apollo Kagwa, who collaborated with the British colonial masters, were the good guys, while others like Omukama Kabalega, who valiantly defended his Bunyoro Kingdom from capture albeit in vain, were the bad guys.

They are not taught about the genocide that the British colonial army committed in Bunyoro, or that Kabalega’s reputation had already been smeared, long before that campaign, for kicking Sir Samuel Baker’s arse and driving him out of his kingdom.

It took Prof. Samuel Lunyiigo’s landmark research and book on Kabaka Mwanga to show that the narrative of a petulant scheming monarch painted of him by the colonial storytellers was inaccurate and unfair.

Few Ugandans have had as contested a legacy as Idi Amin. A lot of the misdeeds attributed to him are true, but some are exaggerations or outright lies. The human head in the refrigerator? No independent corroboration. Expelled Asians without any compensation? Not entirely accurate.

Similarly, his good deeds were overshadowed by his atrocious human rights record. Lately, it has become fashionable among younger Ugandans to glorify Idi Amin. This is partly because more than six out of every 10 Ugandans alive today were born after Amin died in 2003 and have no first-hand experience of life under him. It is also partly a mechanism, borne out of frustration, to get back at the current government over its own human rights violations including torture, disappearances and killings.

Sweeping these different viewpoints under the carpet is not useful. We need an accurate history of the evil that Amin did, and whatever good he was interred with.

Telling our history and our stories more accurately must go beyond Idi Amin. The stories we tell of and to ourselves determine what we see in the mirror, and when we look at each other. Today’s politicians would think twice about unholy political alliances if they understood better the doomed political arrangements of 1962 that were aborted in 1966.

Security officials who pick up innocent civilians and disappear them in unmarked vans would perhaps act differently if they knew how much the panda gari doomed Obote and his UPC government to the same grave as their victims.

Those who build power centres around nepotistic concentric circles would look at many examples over the last six decades to see that the grass-thatched huts of ethnic chauvinism are rather easily flammable.

Many years from now, when the current government is a distant memory, those alive then should be able to have an unbiased view of the good, the bad, and the ugly things that Mr Museveni has done. They should be free to decide whether he was a good man who did some bad things, or a bad man who did some good things.

The same should be true for Amin, Obote, Lutwa, the colonialists, and the traditional leaders before them. We are more likely to repeat mistakes from our past if we have a distorted or one-sided view of history.

The official history will always be written by the victors, in much the same way that it is the lions, not the gazelles, that tell the story of the jungle.

But the birds, perched up in the trees, should be free to tell whoever is willing to listen, how fast the gazelle ran, or how gracefully it lived before it was devoured.  We do not have to forgive Amin for the evil things he did to our country – but we must never forget them, or him.

Mr Daniel K. Kalinaki is a journalist and  poor man’s freedom fighter. 
[email protected]; @Kalinaki