The Last King of Scotland (1998) (3 page)

“They are called zebu,” said Wasswa. “The birds eat their ticks, and the hump is for storing fluid during drought.”

“Like a camel, I suppose,” said Perkins. “Don’t cows have two stomachs, Doctor Garrigan?”

“Three. Grass is very difficult to digest. Though I believe the digestive structure of zebu is even more complicated than that of the European cow – more like buffalo or wildebeest.”

“You have buffalo cheese in Italy, don’t you, Bosola?” asked Todd, leaning forward.

“Yes, mozzarella. But it is mostly made from ordinary cow’s milk these days.”

Amin cut him off, booming. “Only in Africa are there real buffalo, strong like me.”

“A nice display,” Marina Perkins whispered to me, touching the flowers in front of us. It was the first time I saw her smile. I lifted up my glass of wine and looked straight into her eyes over the rim.

The sweet, like the starter, was a choice of three: guava fool, pumpkin pie with cream, and, as the menu put it, “Delicious Pudding” – some kind of blancmange, each portion moulded into a quaint little castle shape.

This last Idi himself had, scooping it up swiftly, closing the distance between mouth and plate with every spoonful. By the end, he was almost bent double.

“All gone,” he said then, pushing it aside like a little child.

As I finished my own Delicious Pudding, the waiters began to bring in the coffee and liqueurs, and the jazz band struck up for the dancing. I watched transfixed as, in one fluid, seamless movement, Nathan Theseus brushed a bead of sweat off his brow, reached into his jacket, pulled out a cigar from one pocket, a clipper lighter from the other, cut and lit the cigar and put the silver contraption away again. All in a matter of seconds. It was a quite astonishing piece of prestidigitation. I almost felt like asking him to do it again, to prove that it had happened at all. But it was final, this perfect execution: the tip of the cigar was already glowing fiercely.

Much later that evening, I took a walk down by the lake. The moon was high and the first birds had begun calling from the shrubs and marsh grass by the edge. As I looked out over the water, I supposed the crocs were moving in the dark shallows that stretched out towards the fires and lamps of Kenya on the other side. And I fancied, standing there, that I could see the circles of tilapia rising to the surface for crane-flies, rising as if coming up for air; denizens of the lake, our scaly forebears: white eyes, blind mouths.

A
ll that, it feels so long ago. Strange times in a strange place. But things here seem strange enough, in their way. For instance, a bomb went off last week. A ‘device’, as they put it, was remotely detonated on the mainland. An electricity pylon was knocked over and one person was killed. They showed the funeral on the television. There was a shot of the steeple and you could hear the knell – you could hear the clank of it – and that reminded me of something.

What it put me in mind of was a very bad joke that once ran in my family. Ask not for whom the Bell’s tolls, it tolls for you. That’s what my father used to say whenever he took a glass of the hard stuff. This wasn’t often, but the repetition of the joke made it seem so.

Perhaps, to begin with, I really ought to explain how I’ve come to be writing this, my tyrannical history, my rainy-day rhapsody. Rather than stumbling around like a drunken man. Which, I must concede, I am. Though only a little.

The dwelling I presently inhabit is little, too. It seems an inappropriately northern place to embark upon this tropical tale. For as I take up my pen, the snow has been falling for several hours, and it seems likely that the road will be blocked by morning. I know the portents of my new habitat, I have been learning my local lore. I know that ‘track to the village impassable, NG runs out of milk’ will be tomorrow’s story.

The real story, of course, lies somewhere quite other: “I am going to write it all down in my book. I am going to write what I did bad and what I did good.” These are, truly, the words of the man – H.E., His Excellency, Idi, the number one id – whose deeds I am about to describe. He has never written it, so here I am. It is a story of various strange happenings in Central Africa, happenings which involved the author, Nicholas Garrigan, in a professional and private capacity. I have resolved to publish not for the purpose of exonerating myself, as some will no doubt believe, but to provide a genuine eyewitness account. For while the newspapers continue to execrate me, I’m committed to preserving for posterity a fair judgement on a history of blood, misery and foolishness.

I want to do this right. My father was a Presbyterian minister, and I was brought up according to the strictest precepts. “Sometimes I do think,” he would say over his steel spectacles at the breakfast table, after some misdemeanour of mine had been reported to him, “that you are as set for damnation as a rat in a trap.”

My sister Moira would giggle into her bowl, and my mother would sigh, readying herself for the concentration – upon me, over the toast and marmalade – of the full force of my father’s oratory. This was considerable. His sermons at Fossiemuir were well attended. Yet for all his proverbial fire and brimstone, my father was not a violent man. He had a sort of dry, if unadventurous, humour in him, as suggested by that dreadful Bell’s adage.

I should point out that he died himself while I was abroad. It’s a matter of eternal regret to me that I didn’t have the chance to make some kind of reconciliation with him (though we hadn’t exactly fallen out), not least because my mother’s death followed hard on the heels of his own. Pure grief, she died of: the learned doctors may not have rehearsed it to me on the hard wooden benches of the lecture halls of the university, but I know it can happen.

Apart from its ecclesiastical atmosphere – religion covered our family like the fine soot that would sometimes come down from the clouds, spewed out by the automotive products factory on the edge of Fossiemuir – my early life was unremarkable. I attended the local school, went to the swimming baths on Wednesdays and the cinema on Saturdays. I chased about with my friends in the pine-wooded hills above the town – the hills that began at the end of the paddock where my donkey grazed, and might have stretched, so far as I was concerned, up to high heaven. Emotionally speaking, the death of ‘Fred’ was the most significant thing that happened to me as a child; I cannot see creme de menthe but think of that green stuff coming out of his stomach.

But even then, I didn’t let it show very much: while I had inherited from my mother a capacity for hard work and for worry, from my father I had learned that feelings, if one is to be successful in life, must be strictly controlled. There was none, in our household, of that ‘express yourself mentality that is today’s common wisdom. So if I was ever wild as a young boy, I was wild in my head, which was full of wandering yearnings: I was mad for maps and stamps and adventure stories. Firths and fishing villages, hills and golf courses – Fife’s rich, venerable landscape bored me, and in my overheated imagination I played out stories of Hickok’s Wild West, Tarzan’s Africa, the Arctic of Peary and Nansen. And I, oddly, was always the Red Indian, the Zulu, the Eskimo…

Come puberty, these evagatory longings were transmuted in the customary fashion, though I didn’t lose my virginity until my post-Highers year, with the daughter of a neighbour. At that stage I took some specialist scientific subjects, my natural sense of orderliness standing me in good stead in this respect. Oh, the files I had. Then came Edinburgh and the long hard slog of a medical degree and the various hospital training jobs that followed.

My student life was eccentric, rather than revolutionary or louche. My college friends and I did have a dog-eared old exercise book, called the Sweaty Betty, in which we recorded the results of our weekly poker game and odds for proposed (and most unlikely) sexual conquests – but it wasn’t like it seems now. As for those 1968, paving-slab ructions, we didn’t see any of that, not in the medical faculty at Edinburgh at any rate.

We did like a drink, though. This image sticks in my head: several of us stumbling out into the stony light of the High Street at dawn after a fancy-dress party, one a clown, one a pirate, one holding a plastic skeleton kidnapped from the faculty. I myself was Dracula, my lips (I saw, as I caught my reflection in a shop window) conveniently stained red from the night of wine: a happy vampire!

Such antics aside, I lived in digs while I was at Edinburgh, along with another doctor and two humanities students, under the watchful eye of Mrs Berkeley. She was a nice old bat really, but I think it was partly the combination of her refusal to let us bring girls back to the rooms and my slightly oppressive home life that made me want to spread my wings when I qualified. I had a brief, raucous holiday in Malta – it was cheap – with a couple of my friends, and then pondered what I would do.

In the end, rather than going for consultancy or into general practice, in October 1970 I took the Civil Service (Medical Division) exam, having specified in the application that I was looking to go abroad. Most of the others were Foreign Office hopefuls, taking the main examination. As we waited in the cold on the steps outside the hall, they were all talking about the PLO bombs in Israel and the fate of a British diplomat some Quebecois separatists had taken hostage in Canada. I kept myself to myself.

Naturally, it was an uncertain period of my life, waiting for the results – everything pent up as I thumped down the stairs for the post each morning and disconsolately picked up the
Scotsman
instead. The envelope finally came on the day the electricians went on strike. I remember, that evening, obsessively re-reading the letter by candlelight. I was in. I was one of the elect. Not according to my father, however, who wanted me to practise as a GP in Fossiemuir. We argued about it, and when I left, I left under a cloud.

It was against this background that I arrived in Uganda – on Sunday, 24 January 1971 – to take up a post as a medical doctor attached to the Ministry of Health. Though I was on secondment from the British government’s Overseas Development Agency, I was to report directly to officials at the Ministry. My specific brief was to join a clinical practice in a remote rural area, and to pursue whatever more generalized researches in the name of public health that my superiors desired. Had I known, on arrival, the breadth of activity that this later would involve, I should have got straight back on the aeroplane.

As for the narrative I am presenting in these pages, it is nothing but the working-up of a journal I made at the time. I also had the opportunity of conducting a number of interviews with Idi Amin, at his own behest. Some of this material will already be familiar to readers of newspapers and to broadcast audiences around the world. But until now, only a fraction of the ‘dictatorphone’ tapes, as the caption writers have insisted on calling them, have been revealed to the outside world. It is eerie, now, to press the button on the machine and hear his voice: I should not, I know, listen so long, so eagerly.

These thoughts bear down on me as I sit here on this third night of writing. Gazing down over the outline of woody sand-hills and rocky outcrops that stretches down to the quay and out into the never silent Inner Sound, I’m overwhelmed with an awful sense of regret. Because good things seem bad to me now – even the light is cross. In the lamps hung in the windows of my neighbours, in the dark-beleaguered cluster of gold that signifies the port village, and in the gleaming traverse of the occasional ship, I see a picture not of others but of my own isolation.

Though I know that those village lights promise companionship, just as the magnificent white horses of the bay promise another sort of consolation, I am steeped in my churning memories. Like the roar of the Sound, the question comes incessantly. Can you tell the truth when you are talking to yourself? What is the truth about a man on an island?

D
uring the flight to Kampala – twelve hours’ worth of stale air from London, with stop-offs in Larnaca and Nairobi – I read one book,
Uganda for Travellers
(thin) by Charles Sabon-Frazer, and flicked through another, Bailey and Love’s
Short Practice of Surgery
(fat). My nose and ears kept blocking and unblocking as I read, as the pressure in the cabin changed – almost, it seemed, with every turn of the page.