Yes, Idi Amin really is a monster, worse than a dragon. I don’t want to hear any more about him, though Papa Roger’s determined to make us listen. Since Maman Pauline’s listening carefully, even though politics isn’t really her thing, I can’t really leave the table, it would look rude, people would think that boy Michel isn’t interested in what’s going on in a country that’s part of our continent.
Papa Roger explains again that Idi Amin Dada was a military man who came to power by a coup d’état . Well that doesn’t surprise me one bit, what self-respecting country’s going to say to someone who can’t read and write, ‘You can’t read, you can’t write, but don’t worry, you can still go and speak on our behalf to the whole of the rest of the world’? And how is this illiterate going to manage to sign the papers that real presidents who’ve been to school sign when they all get together? How will he know when he’s actually signing his permission for the capitalist countries to steal the wealth of the Ugandans, for example? The worst thing is, Papa Roger says Idi Amin Dada was also the president of the Organisation for African Unity, the OAU, which is like being the head of all the African countries. The African presidents made him that, and not just for a joke either. It suited the Europeans very well that Idi Amin Dada couldn’t read or write. In this case that meant the English — it wasn’t just the French that colonised our continent. They had to leave a few countries for other Europeans too, otherwise a war would break out among the Whites. And the English said: ‘It’s a good thing Idi Amin Dada can’t read or write, it means we’ll be able to control him at a distance even if colonisation is meant to be over in his country.’
This makes Papa Roger really angry. ‘The man’s a dictator, but even the United States and Israel supported his coup d’état to become president! And after the coup d’état he stuffed the army with his own people and threw out people from other ethnic groups, and had them killed, the monster. He was so crazy, he woke up one morning looking sad and solemn, saying “I had a dream, sent straight from heaven”! It’s not like he’s a black American, like Martin Luther King! Why should his dream be special?’
Everyone has dreams, I think to myself. The problem is, according to my father, Idi Amin Dada had a really big dream: God asked him to drive out all the Asians from his country, even though they were the ones who ran the shops, so that the Ugandans could eat three times a day. Could God really be that wicked, to make someone dream a dream like that? Idi Amin Dada did drive out the Asians, saying, ‘We’re going to run our country ourselves now, we’ll manage our own shops and businesses. We’re sick of you eating the Ugandans’ bread. If you haven’t left Uganda, my ancestors’ land, in three months from now, be warned. Now get out, leave everything, just take your toothbrush, pants and sandals.’
So the poor Asian people ran round madly like headless chickens, even though they’d been in Uganda for a long long time. They’d forgotten they were Asian, and the people in Asia had forgotten they had brothers who’d become Ugandan blacks. The poor Ugandan Asians went and hid in a neighbouring country, where nobody knew them.
Idi Amin Dada got more and more crazy by the day, he killed off entire villages, and if you didn’t agree with him he’d cut your head off, or your genitals. His supporters — the Americans and Israelis — started saying to themselves, ‘We’d better get out of this country, the president’s sick, he’s really crazy, we’d better stop selling him arms or one day he’s going to turn them on us. And all the English people who’d stayed in Uganda after independence thought: ‘We’ll get out now too, it looks like things are going to end badly around here, we’ve never seen anything like it on the Black continent, when this guy’s finished eating all the black flesh around here he’s going to start putting us Whites in his pot.’ And Idi Amin, who didn’t care, replied: ‘Yeah, that’s right, you feeble old ex-colonisersyou, get out of my country, I’m telling you now, I’m going to make friends with the Russians and the Libyans, they like a good deal too, and they’ll sell me lots of lovely weapons so I can go on massacring the Ugandans and the neighbouring countries that make trouble for me.’
And to really annoy the Israelis, who used to be his friends and were now his sworn enemies, Idi Amin Dada started chatting up the people in a country called Palestine. He invited the Palestinians to Uganda and said to them, ‘You can come here if you like, the Israelis are always against you Palestinians, but I, Idi Amin Dada, will give you a huge place where you can have your office, it’s a really good building, in fact it’ll be in the same building as the Israeli embassy! Which is good, because then you can take your revenge on them, and I’ll support you, all the way.’
Papa Roger explained that the Israelis are Jewish, and the Palestinians are mostly Arabs, and these two peoples have been fighting for many many years. Maman Pauline asks why, and my father replies, ‘It’s too long to explain all that now, I get confused myself, it’s all to do with politics and religion and one people killing another and lots of countries don’t recognise that Palestine’s a country, just like us.’
And I think to myself: ‘If it’s not a country just like us, then what is it? Does nobody live there? Are there no children like me, going to school? Are there no roads, no cars to hoot when there’s a traffic jam? Do they not have houses, or a flag, or music, or schools or a president?’ Well, at least Papa Roger agrees that Palestine is a country, like it or not, and that the Palestinians’ president’s name is Yasser Arafat, it’s a sort of nickname.
I’m just thinking how Yasser Arafat is a nice name, it sounds nice, when my father adds that there is a serious problem with this Palestinian guy.
‘I’m disappointed in Yasser Arafat: he agreed to be the witness at the wedding of Idi Amin Dada, killer of over three hundred thousand people, when he married a fifth wife.’
When I hear that, I start to hate his name too.
My head’s going to burst, it’s letting in things more complicated than the ones they teach Lounès at Trois-Glorieuses Secondary School. I can hear my brain beginning to boil as Papa Roger starts telling us the story of a plane that landed in the capital of Uganda, with gangsters in it, who supported the Palestinians. The Palestinian supporters had diverted the plane and were threatening to kill the poor passengers if some Palestinians in prison somewhere or other weren’t released. Idi Amin Dada was delighted to act as referee in this affair, so the whole world would think he was a good guy, with lots of white globules. He calmed everyone down, made long speeches, went to see the passengers trapped in the plane. But because the Israelis get angry about anything to do with the Palestinians, they sent their famous special forces, the scary ones, zooming into Uganda, and they set the hostages free. Papa Roger says that when the Israelis carry out an operation like that, they are very efficient and always succeed, because they train people for special missions like that, and sometimes the agents are actually women, whereas in our army they think women can’t be soldiers.
Before they left Uganda with the people they’d freed, the Israelis took the opportunity to bomb the Ugandans’ war planes. This made Idi Amin Dada very angry and he killed all the Ugandans working at the airport because he thought it was because of their stupidity that the Israelis had been able to land in his country, free the hostages and bomb the war planes. If he had no war planes, how was he going to defend his own country or attack neighbouring countries like Tanzania? He was so angry he even drove all the foreigners out of his country, and killed even more Ugandans. And because he thought no one was prepared to recognise he was the most powerful man in the world, he decided: ‘I’ll make myself a Field Marshal, I want lots of war medals pinned to my front, from my neck to the zipper of my trousers, and I want the whole world to know that I am the warrior who banished the English, so you must call me The King of Scotland, period. I want all foreigners who come to do business in my country to crawl on their hands and knees before me, like animals. Especially the English.’
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