The Last King of Scotland
 My latest reading journey is Giles Foden's The Last King of Scotland - a story mostly concerning Uganda, my country of origin, and the madman who ran it in the early 1970s, Idi Amin1. The awkward title comes from the even more awkward fact that Idi declared himself the king of Scotland. A madman indeed.
The narrative of the book is mesmerizing: a young doctor from Scotland travels to Uganda to work in a rural hospital as a part of the British Foreign Service but is enlisted to become Idi's personal physician after a chance incident by the roadside when Idi has a mishap with his Maserati.
Field medicine got me: I squirmed as I read about elephantitis, parasites and infections of worms. Idi gets me: a mixture of loathing and fascination occupies me when I hear anything of the man. His position as probably the most famous Ugandan is a horrible bane to the pride of any of us. Language2 got me: Foden occasionally throws out a word or two of Luganda, the language of my parents, and I realize how as people we are such wordsmiths, capable of such beautiful and novel terms for things.
And while I loosely use the terms "us" and "we" when referring to myself and other Ugandans I feel another strange disconnect as I read: I reach for a past that is my own but unrelentingly vague. In the mid-1970s my parents were forced to leave Uganda as a result of Amin and have not since returned to live. We visited each year after we moved to Kenya but I always sensed in them a pain of loss and exile. As much as I wanted to empathize, however, it wasn't mine, it was theirs. I remember talking with my mom once about it in the context of recent events. She talked of how much people suffered. How much they wished someone would have come and save them - an idealist America or Britain, outraged by the kind of damage a misguided dictatorial tyrant could wield on his people3. Both my parents don't really like to talk about it because it's sad. It's shameful.
Maybe one day I'll write a Harry Turtledove4 style revision of history and extrapolate the Uganda of today if someone good had come to save us. If you want to know the real story, the sad one, this book presents an interesting account.
1Amin was in the news recently, but after I'd picked the book up. His family was asking that he be buried in Uganda after his exile to Saudi Arabia. The obvious answer, from people who hated him even worse than myself, was no.
2A sampling of Luganda: the word for cell phone is "baluwomfune" which loosely translates to "you can get me anywhere".
3I find it more unfortunate than ironic that the present holds similar stories of mad dictators.
4Writes speculaive fiction like "what if the South won the Civil War" and so on. Never read him but he's well known.
7:56:22 PM 
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