Plot
In 1970, Nicholas Garrigan graduates from the University of Edinburgh Medical School. With dull prospects at home, he decides to seek adventure abroad by working at a missionary clinic in Uganda run by David Merrit and his wife, Sarah. After Garrigan arrives in Uganda, General Idi Amin overthrows President Milton Obote in a coup d'état. Amin gives a well-received speech, but Sarah is pessimistic. Garrigan is called to a car accident involving Amin and treats Amin's hand. During the incident, Garrigan takes a gun and shoots a mortally wounded cow when no-one else is willing to perform euthanasia. Initially hostile to Garrigan, Amin warms up to him after discovering he is Scottish due to his xenophilia for the Scots. Delighted by Garrigan's initiative, Amin exchanges clothing with him and subsequently invites Garrigan to serve as his personal physician and lead efforts to modernise the Ugandan healthcare system.
While working for Amin, Garrigan becomes a trusted confidant and is entrusted with a wider range of duties, including matters of state. Despite being dismayed by acts of government repression, Garrigan accepts Amin's explanation that cracking down on political opposition will bring lasting peace to Uganda. Garrigan eventually learns that Amin has ostracized the youngest of his three wives, Kay, because she has given birth to an epileptic son, Mackenzie. When treating Mackenzie, Garrigan and Kay start to form a relationship. Eventually, Garrigan becomes disillusioned by Amin as he witnesses increasing amounts of paranoia, murders and xenophobia. He attempts to announce his intention to return home, but is rebuffed by Amin. While at a party, after doing his best to evade a go-go dancer who is assigned to become his lover, he and Kay have sex; and she says he must find a way to leave Uganda. Amin secretly replaces Garrigan's British passport with a Ugandan one to prevent him from escaping, which leads Garrigan to seek help from Stone, the local Foreign Office representative. Garrigan is told by Stone he will be secretly transported out of Uganda if he assassinates Amin, which Garrigan refuses.
In 1972, Amin orders the expulsion of Asians from Uganda over Garrigan's protests. This creates a labor shortage that tanks Uganda's economy. Kay informs Garrigan that she has become pregnant with his child. Aware that Amin will murder her for infidelity if he discovers this, she begs Garrigan for a secret abortion. Delayed by Amin's command that he attend a press conference with Western journalists, Garrigan fails to meet Kay at the appointed time. Kay concludes she has been abandoned and seeks out a primitive abortion in a nearby village, where she is apprehended by Amin's forces. Garrigan finds her dismembered corpse on an autopsy table. Distraught, he decides to kill Amin. A hijacked aircraft is flown to Entebbe Airport by pro-Palestinian hijackers seeking asylum. Amin, sensing a major publicity opportunity, rushes to the scene, taking Garrigan along. At the airport, one of Amin's bodyguards discovers Garrigan's plot to poison Amin under the ruse of giving him pills for a headache. Garrigan is beaten by Amin's henchmen before Amin arrives and discloses he is aware of the relationship with Kay. As punishment, Garrigan's chest is pierced with meat hooks before he is hanged by his skin.
Amin arranges a plane for the release of non-Israeli passengers, and the torturers leave Garrigan unconscious on the floor while they relax in another room. Garrigan's medical colleague, Dr. Junju, takes advantage of the opportunity to rescue him. He urges Garrigan to tell the world the truth about Amin's regime, asserting that the world will believe Garrigan because he is white. Junju gives Garrigan his own jacket, enabling him to mingle unnoticed with the crowd of freed hostages and board the plane. When the torturers discover Garrigan's absence, Junju is killed for aiding in the escape. The Entebbe incident irreparably ruins Amin's reputation in the international community, and in 1979 he decides to invade Tanzania, which counterattacks and captures Kampala, overthrowing him. He lives the rest of his life in exile in Saudi Arabia until his death in 2003.
Historical accuracy
While the character of Idi Amin and some of the events surrounding him in the film are mostly based on fact, Garrigan is a fictional character. Foden has acknowledged that one real-life figure who contributed to the character Garrigan was English-born Bob Astles, who worked with Amin. [5] Another real-life figure who has been mentioned in connection with Garrigan is Scottish doctor Wilson Carswell. [6] Like the novel on which it is based, the film mixes fiction with real events to give an impression of Amin and Uganda under his rule. While the basic arc of Amin's rule is followed, the events in the film depart from both actual history and the plot and characters in Foden's novel. The explusion of the Asians as the Indians in Uganda were known occurred in 1972; Kay Amin died in 1974; and the Entrebbe raid occurred in 1976, but the film gives the impression that these events occurred right after one another. Astles, the man who inspired Garrigan, was in reality a rather sleazy and disreputable former British soldier turned businessman who profited from association with Amin. Astles, a corrupt and unscrupulous businessman was a considerably more unlikable character than Garrigan, and seems to have been replaced in both the novel and film versions of The Last King of Scotland with a well meaning doctor for the purposes of providing a likable protagonist. The film presents Amin as engaged in riotous bacchanalian excess with much drinking and topless go-go girls dancing at his parties, but in reality Amin was a devout Muslim who would never had permitted topless women to be present at a party attended by him. Amin banned the wearing of miniskirts in Uganda and in 1972 banned any foreign men with long hair from entering Uganda as he disliked hippies, which makes Garrigan with his long hair an unlikely companion to Amin. Forest Whitaker's performance as Idi Amin was praised by those who knew Amin as being true to him as Amin was described as being charming, funny, and charismatic, but also as a terrifying man capable of extreme violence and cruelty.
In real life and in the book, Kay Amin was impregnated by her lover, who was a Ugandan physician (given a different name in the book than in real life). She died during a botched abortion performed by him, and he subsequently died by suicide. [11] Astles said in a lengthy interview for The Times with the journalist Paul Vallely that her body was dismembered by her lover so it could be hidden and was then sewn back together on Amin's orders. [12] Henry Kyemba, who served as Amin's Minister of Health before defecting to Britain in 1977, stated that the grotesque scene where Kay Amin's arms have been sewn onto to her corpse in place of her legs and vice-versa, never happened. Whitaker who researched Amin's life before taking the part, likewise stated this scene is "not true". The American critic Lesley Marx wrote that the film reduces Kay Amin down from a woman to "a plot point", an "object of the gaze" first in the eroticism of her body, which attracts Garrigan, and then to the grotesque form that her body is reduced to, which horrifies him. The stories about the way that Kay Amin's corpse was said to have been mutilated featured prominently in popular history books about Amin, through the British anthropologist Mark Leopold noted that none of these authors are specialists in Ugandan history.
Leopold wrote none of the popular history books about Idi Amin are reliable as such books commonly claim that Amin's people, the Kakwa, are cannibals and that Amin himself was a cannibal despite the lack of any evidence to support these claims. The claim that Amin was a cannibal was first made by Kyemba in his 1977 book A State of Blood: The Inside Story of Idi Amin. In his book, Kyemba proudly wrote that he was a Muganda aristocrat whose family had served the Baganda kings for centuries and Leopold noted that Kyemba made no effort to hide his contempt for people from northern Uganda and especially from the West Nile province (Amin's home province). Kyemba wrote that the Kakwa were an especially savage people who engaged in cannibalism and other "blood rituals" and alleged that Amin told him that he routinely ate human flesh. Leopold charged that Kyemba's account reflected the prejudices of people from southern Uganda against people from northern Uganda, and that during all his time as an anthropologist in Uganda he had seen no evidence that the Kakwa practice cannibalism and the other sinister "blood rituals" alleged by Kyemba. Amin's former commanding officer in the King's African Rifles, Iain Grahame, in his 1980 book Amin and Uganda: A personal memoir, strongly implied that Amin was an cannibal, saying it was well known that the Kakwa along with people from the West Nile province in general were cannibals. Leopold wrote that Grahame was seeking to appeal to traditional British prejudices against Africans in order to sell his book with his dark hints that Amin was doing something unnatural to the bodies of the people he killed (Grahame does not accuse Amin directly of cannibalism since that would have led to awkward questions as why he did nothing as Amin's commanding officer). Kyemba and Grahame both served as the historical consultants on The Last King of Scotland and much of the picture of Amin in the film is based upon their memories of him. Despite the involvement of both Kyemba and Grahame in the film, there is no mention of cannibalism on the part of Amin in The Last King of Scotland. Amin's family threatened to sue the filmmakers if he was shown as a cannibal, but the film's director, Kevin Macdonald, stated in an interview that he found the cannibal stories about Amin to be extremely unbelievable, noting that Kyemba was the only person who knew Amin well who claimed he was a cannibal.
Amin never had a son named Campbell. In the book, Amin's Scotphilia is explained by the Scots officers he served under in the King's African Rifles while in the film it is presented merely as another of Amin's eccentricities. Foden in writing The Last King of Scotland stated that in Amin was deeply influenced by his service in the King's African Rifles, which led him to have "an Oedipal relationship with the former colonial power". Foden added that Amin's much publicised support for Scottish independence alongside with his demand (which was apparently serious) that he become the king of Scotland reflected both his admiration and hatred for the United Kingdom. The film is correct that Amin was very fond of Scots and Scotland. When Amin visited in Britain in 1971, he insisted on visiting Scotland. In a 1973 interview, Amin claimed that he loved Scotland because the English officers in the King's African Rifles had treated him with contempt, but the Scots officers had treated him with respect. Marx noted that in the film, this aspect of Amin is downplayed and his desire to be the king of Scotland is presented as an eccentric gesture that might possibly reflected insanity on his part. However, the film is correct in depicting Amin as making outlandish and often bizarre statements such his frequently stated wish to marry Queen Elizabeth II. Amin was well known for making outrageous statements in his press conferences and speeches, which partly reflected his narcissism as he loved being the center of world media attention and partly as a way to deflect attention from the collapsing Ugandan economy.
The film presents Amin's decision to expel the Asians as the families of Indian origin were known in Uganda as being made on a whim. In fact, it was stated in The Common Man's Charter A Move to the Left, a statement of government policy issued by President Milton Obote in November 1969 that the Indians were going to be expelled sometime in the near-future, and plans for the expulsion started to be drawn up at the same time. Leopold wrote that even if Amin had never taken power, the Indians would still have been expelled from Uganda as there was a widespread consensus in Uganda that it was unacceptable to have almost all of the large and medium sized businesses along with most of the small businesses owned by Indians and that the Indian minority by their sheer presence in Uganda were blocking the black population from rising up to the middle class. Leopold wrote given the intensity of anti-Indian feeling in Uganda that it was inevitable that the Indians were going to be expelled regardless of who was in power. This was especially the case as the Indians had arrived in Uganda in the early 20th century when Uganda was a British colony and for most black Ugandans the Indo-Ugandan community was by its very existence a reminder of Uganda's former colonial status. In 1970 as part of an effort to "Ugandanise" the economy, Obote expelled all of the Rwandans and Kenyans working in Uganda, an expulsion that was executed quite brutally and was intended to serve as a trial run for the expulsion of the Indians. Only the fact that Amin overthrow Obote in January 1971 gave the Indians more time, and when Amin did finally expel the Indians in August 1972, it was on the basis of the plans that Obote had drawn up in 1969.
In the book, Garrigan is an idealistic young Scots doctor who goes to Uganda in 1970 on assignment as a part of a British foreign aid program while in the film Garrigan goes to Uganda on a whim as his finger just happens to land on Uganda when he spins a globe. The cinematic version of Garrigan is far more sexually aggressive then the Garrigan of the novel as the Garrigan of the film regards Ugandan girls as easy to pick up for sex and is shown as being amply rewarded for his view of Ugandan woman. The Garrigan of the novel by contrast is both fascinated and repulsed by sex owning to his sexually repressive Presbyterian background. In the novel, Garrigan's father plays a more prominent role in the plot and is portrayed as a humanist doctor who tells his son "The most important thing is to minimise the harm you do to those around you." In the film, Garrigan's father appears briefly at the beginning of the film and is portrayed as a stern, cold Calvinist and an unloving father whose lack of affection causes Garrigan to seek a surrogate father in the form of Idi Amin. The Garrigan of the film is shown as being far rash and impulsive than the Garrigan of the book, who has sex with Kay Amin despite knowing full well the dangers posed to both himself and her, a decision that Marx described as "an extraordinarily and unbelievably rash act, even for someone as fatuous as the film’s Nicholas". The Garrigan of the film is portrayed as far more shallow and superficial than the Garrigan of the book as Marx notes that the scene where Idi Amin tells Garrigan that "your death will be the first real thing that will happen to you" rings true. The Garrigan of the book is more morally conflicted as he admits to feelings of cruelty and admires Amin precisely because of his brutality as Amin acts out everything that a part of him really wishes to do to other people, through he also feels much guilt over the dark side of his personality. The Garrigan of the book does not hold the moral high ground in the same way that he does in the film as he admits that if he held power, he might behave in the same way as Amin. By contrast, the Garrigan of the film is more of a naive naif who associates with Amin because he does not know his true nature at first.
Contrary to the wording of the film's coda stating, "48 hours later, Israeli Forces stormed Entebbe and liberated all but one of the hostages", three hostages died during Operation Entebbe. The body of a fourth hostage, 75-year-old Dora Bloch, who was killed by Uganda Army officers at a nearby hospital in retaliation for Israel's actions, was eventually returned to Israel. [33] The murder of Dora Bloch is depicted accurately in the book but not mentioned at all in the film. Also when the non-Israeli hostages were released, they are seen being flown out of Entebbe, Uganda to Paris, France on an Antonov An-12 aircraft, but in real life the non-Israeli hostages were flown to Paris on a chartered Air France Boeing 747. [34] [35] In the book, Garrigan is imprisoned and tortured in Uganda, escapes to a forest, and is rescued from near-death by the soldiers of the Tanzania People's Defence Force who overthrew Amin in 1979. In the film, Garrigan flees Uganda in 1976 on the plane that flew out the non-Israeli hostages just before the Entebbe raid. Marx accused the film-makers of racism in making this change as she noted that the film's epilogue states that "world opinion" turned against Amin after the Entebbe raid, which led to the overthrow of Amin in 1979. In reality, Uganda invaded Tanzania in October 1978 and following the repulse of the Ugandan forces, the Tanzanians invaded Uganda in January 1979 and overthrew Amin in the spring of that year. Marx accused the film-makers as promoting a white savior story since audiences are led to believe that Garrigan after his escape from Uganda was the one who turned "world opinion" against Amin, and thus caused his overthrow, when in reality Amin was overthrown by his fellow Africans. It is true that the regime of Idi Amin was infamous for its atrocities against its own people (which was well known long before the Entebbe raid), but this did not cause the downfall of Amin. Marx also noted that, in the film, there is a scene not in the book, where Garrigan argues with Stone, the smug and duplicitous official of the British High Commission, who warns him that Amin is a bloodthirsty tyrant. Garrigan accuses Stone of racism by saying that Uganda is making progress under Amin and then adds "this is Africa. You meet violence with violence. Anything else and you’re dead", a statement that does acknowledge Amin governs Uganda via brutal methods. However, Garrigan's case for Amin is undermined when everything that Stone says about Amin is proven to be true, and he himself barely escapes Uganda. Marx argued that the sequence of events seems to be suggesting that people like Stone with his dismissive view of Ugandans and by extension all Africans know Africa the best.
In the film, Stone strongly implies that Britain was behind the coup that toppled Obote, and expresses regret that Amin in power proved to be even more anti-British than Obote was. Contrary to what the film implies, all of the evidence suggests that London was taken by surprise when Amin overthrew Obote on 25 January 1971. However, the British government through surprised by the coup initially welcomed the new government as Amin was felt to be an improvement over Obote and because as one British diplomat cynically put it at the time, Amin was so stupid that it would be easy to manipulate him. However, Amin proved to be far more anti-British than Obote had been, and Anglo-Ugandan relations soon went into a steep decline. A major reason for the breakdown in Anglo-Ugandan relations was the way that Amin constantly sought to provoke the British with bizarre publicity stunts such as proclaiming himself the King of Scotland and promising that he soon come to liberate the Scots from the rule of the English, which caused much tension with London, an aspect of Amin's rule that is portrayed accurately in the film. Amin deeply resented the way he had been treated as a soldier in the King's African Rifles by his British officers, and he sought revenge by trying to humiliate the United Kingdom at every turn.
The real reasons for the coup was not due to alleged British machinations to remove the Afro-socialist Obote as the film suggests, but rather related to a power struggle between Obote and Amin. Amin had started out as a loyal follower of Obote and on 24 May 1966 he was in charge of the operation that led to the storming of the Mengo Hill palace of King Mutesa II of Buganda, an operation that killed hundreds if not thousands of Ganda civilians who had rallied in defense of their king. As a result of the Mengo Crisis, Obote had emerged as a "quasi-dictator" while Amin had become Obote's favorite general. By 1969, relations between Obote and Amin had broken down and the two had come into conflict. Both Obote and Amin were strong-willed, autocratic leaders and Obote, an insecure, paranoid man who saw enemies everywhere had started to view Amin as a threat. Starting in late 1969 Obote had sought to reduce Amin's power by breaking up the Ugandan Army with some units being put under the president's personal command and promoting more Acholi and Lango soldiers at the expense of soldiers from the West Nile province. By 1970, Obote was openly jealous of Amin's greater popularity with the rank and file of the Ugandan Army and in September 1970 he reorganised the Army's high command in such way to remove Amin from operational responsibility and make himself the Army's new commander-in-chief. Leopold wrote that popular theory that Britain was behind the coup reflected the widespread belief that Amin was too stupid to carry out a coup on his own, and there had to be someone pulling the strings for the "puppet" Amin. In fact, Amin seems to have organised the coup himself, and besides for his own ambitions the coup seems to have been a defensive reaction against Obote's attempts to reduce him down to a figurehead general. Leopold wrote that the popular belief that Amin was a moron is based upon his evaluations by his British officers when he served in the King's African Rifles between 1948-1962 where he is frequently described as being of extremely low intelligence. Leopold argued that these evaluations are a biased source as the officers of the King's African Rifles took it for granted that all their African soldiers were stupid and their evaluations of their soldiers are full of blatantly racist remarks. Leopold wrote that the fact that most Western journalists and historians take these evaluations of Amin at face value in spite of their racism says much about Western attitudes towards Africans and argued that Amin was not the moron that he was portrayed as by his officers. The film's depiction of the 1971 coup as being popular with ordinary Ugandans is correct. Obote had ruled Uganda as a virtual dictator since his 1966 self-coup and become extremely unpopular. The coup was greeted with much rejoining, through as a British diplomat noted at the time most ordinary Ugandans were more anti-Obote than pro-Amin.
The end of the film features footage from 1979 of ordinary Ugandans celebrating Amin's defeat at the hands of the Tanzanians, which implies that Ugandan life took a turn for the better with Amin's downfall. In reality, the downfall of Amin ushered in a more darker period in Ugandan history. Obote was reinstalled as president by the Tanzanians just before they left in 1980, and the "Obote II" period as Ugandans call Obote's second time as president witnessed even worse atrocities than committed by Amin along with genocide unleashed by an enraged and embittered Obote who sought revenge against those who he felt had betrayed him. Obote included amongst his enemies the entire population of the West Nile province who were targeted for genocide as most of Amin's followers had come from the West Nile province along with the Baganda people who still hated Obote for deposing their beloved king in 1966. During Obote's second period in power from 1980-1985, a considerably greater number of Ugandans were killed by his regime and in a much shorter period of time than Amin's regime had managed to kill between 1971-1979. Amin during his first year in power had systemically disarmed and killed all of the Ugandan Army soldiers who not from the West Nile province, who were mostly Lango or Acholi, but it is generally accepted that Amin did not attempt genocide against civilians in the same way that Obote tried to do between 1980-1985, and it for this reason that Obote is considered in Uganda to be a much worse leader than Amin was.
According to Foden, the film's depiction of Amin is comparable with the Shakespearean character Macbeth, whom he had in mind when writing the novel. [49]
