The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden: book review

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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