The Last King of
Scotland (1998) is about the Scottish doctor to the dictator of Uganda,
President Idi Amin, for six years in the 1970s.
This is a fictional
account, told in the first person, of Nicholas Garrigan, working as a doctor in
Uganda, dealing with cases such as putze fly, tsetse fly, yellow fever, blackwater,
ulcers, and machete gashes.
After two years
working in Mbarara, he is called to a car accident – a Maserati has knocked
down a cow. The driver of the red Maserati is Idi Amin, who subsequently
appointed Garrigan as his personal physician. Hence, from Part II, the real
story begins.
It was months
before Garrigan treated the president, and the account is comic and
well-written. He writes of Amin’s speeches, his marriages, his brutal regime
and reign of terror, the dismemberment of Kay Amin, and the Palestinian hijacking
of a plane from Israel and bringing it to Entebbe airport in Uganda.
But Idi Amin finds
Garrigan’s journal. In it are personal notes about the regime and the president
himself. The president is not pleased. What does Idi Amin do?
The writing, based
on historical facts and made into a movie in 2006, highlights everything
contradictory about the dictator, from the bizarre to the ridiculous, and from
the barbaric to the infantile. It also questions the motivation of the doctor
and why he stayed so long – was Garrigan corrupt, inane, complicit, favoured,
or under a spell? This is a brilliant account of the dark side of Ugandan
history and the rise and fall of a savage man, and a doctor who had intimate
knowledge of his health and wellbeing – his erratic thoughts and behaviours,
his fears and eccentricities, and his self-aggrandisement. A wonderful book.
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom
(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest
Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The
Sudan Curse (2009).
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