Big Daddy in Books

More gigantic, ridiculous and murderous than real life

Big Daddy was playing another of his mysterious, macabre jokes last week--or so it seemed. From Uganda came reports that President for Life Idi Amin Dada had gone into a coma following surgery--at the hands of a Soviet doctor--for an undisclosed ailment. "It looks serious," said an aide. But as with so many other dramatic moments in Amin's life, there was less here than met the eye. The operation, it turned out, apparently lasted all of three minutes and was for the removal of a swelling on the lower part of his neck. At week's end there was no more talk of comas, and Big Daddy was said to be recovering very nicely, thank you, on an island in Lake Victoria.

Western diplomats speculated that Amin may have concocted the medical crisis to keep public attention away from some grim news that added to his reputation as black Africa's most bloody-minded dictator. Shortly before the operation, Amin announced that he had rejected an appeal by Liberian President William Tolbert to spare the lives of twelve Ugandans who were to be executed later in the week for plotting to overthrow Big Daddy's regime. The public executions of the twelve, along with three others, took place on schedule. In Nairobi, eight Kenyans who had spent four months in Ugandan prisons on charges of spying said that they had seen at least 180 Ugandan prisoners battered to death with sledgehammers by Amin's troops.

Amin somehow seems more gigantic, more ridiculous and more murderous than any other real-life figure; if he did not exist, a novelist could scarcely invent him. As it happens, Big Daddy has already inspired what amounts to a budding literary subgenre. In Britain, two small satirical paperbacks by Punch Columnist Alan Coren, The Collected Bulletins of President Idi Amin and its sequel, The Further Bulletins etc., have sold 750,000 copies. Within the past year, at least four fictional thrillers (Target Amin, The Killing of Idi Amin, Excellency and Crossfire) and a play (For the West, by Michael Hastings), dealing either with Amin or with Amin-like dictators, have appeared in London. The plots of these works tend to focus on assassination. Amin, of course, is also a central figure in the numerous books and films about the daring Israeli rescue operation at Entebbe in July 1976.

This fall several nonfictional studies of the Ugandan dictator are to be published in the U.S. One, Idi Amin: Death-light of Africa (Little, Brown; $8.95), was written pseudonymously by a white civil servant who spent 20 years in Uganda; another, Idi Amin Dada: Hitler in Africa (Sheed Andrews and McMeel; $7.95), is by Thomas Patrick Melady, the last U.S. ambassador in Kampala, and his wife Margaret. In his short I Love Idi Amin (Fleming H. Revell; paperback, 95-c-), an African clergyman, Bishop Festo Kivengere, has written of the trials of the church and churchmen in Amin's Uganda.

The book most likely to attract attention to Amin is A State of Blood (Grosset & Dunlap; $10. Paperback, Ace Books; $2.50) by Henry Kyemba. He sought political asylum in Britain last May after serving Amin for six years as principal private secretary and later as Minister of Health. Written with the help of a former Reuters correspondent, John Man, A State of Blood is full of sensational detail. Kyemba reports for instance that Amin has experimented with cannibalism. "I have eaten human meat," he once remarked. "It is very salty, even more salty than leopard meat." Although Amin's bizarre behavior has been attributed to the prolonged effects of syphilitic infection, Kyemba is not so sure: "He knows well enough how to stage-manage his rages." In 1973 a French television crew photographed him in high fury, threatening to shoot some of his ministers. As soon as the French team had left, Amin joked about his performance. "How did it come out?" he asked Kyemba, laughing.

Kyemba sheds some new light on the deaths of Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum and two Ugandan Cabinet ministers last February. At the time, Amin claimed that the three had been killed in a traffic accident shortly after he had denounced them as traitors at a mass meeting. In reality, Kyemba writes, the three were killed by Amin's dread secret police. Kyemba, as Health Minister, was asked to arrange for the arrival of the bodies at a local mortuary. "As I expected," he writes, "they were bullet-riddled. The archbishop had been shot through the mouth and had three or four bullets in his chest." Doctors obliged Amin by writing in their post-mortem report, however, that the three had died of internal injuries.

Perhaps the ugliest tale Kyemba offers concerns Amin's own family. In March 1974 the dictator suddenly divorced three of his four wives; the three, says Kyemba, had been unfaithful, as Amin found out. Five months later, the dismembered body of one of the former wives, Kay, was found in Kampala. For once, Kyemba exonerates Amin: "I do not believe, as I first did, that Amin had a direct hand in Kay's death." Instead, he writes, she died during an abortion that was being performed by her lover, a doctor. Kyemba speculates that the doctor dismembered the body in an effort to hide it, but then changed his mind; he committed suicide a few hours later. When informed of his former wife's death, Amin requested that the body be sewed back together; at the funeral, he raged to her assembled family about her unfaithfulness.

Why did Kyemba remain in Amin's service for so long? He never fully explains. In the end, after the killing of so many Cabinet members and other officials who had once been favorites of Amin's, Kyemba realized that "however friendly the President seemed, I would never be safe. I knew too much." Some have argued, he notes, that Idi Amin may ultimately be succeeded by an even greater chaos or an even more evil regime in Kampala. "I disagree," writes Kyemba. "Nothing could be as bad."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.