‘I should have known’, that is the phrase of my life, its summing up, its consummate acknowledgement.
(The narrator of The Last King of Scotland, Nicholas Garrigan, looking back over the sorry series of events depicted in the book, page 119)
Giles Foden
Giles Foden was born in 1967. When he was 5 his parents moved from Warwickshire to Malawi and he spent a lot of his early years in Africa, although he was sent back to Britain to be educated at public school (the very posh Malvern College) then Cambridge.
Foden has written six novels but is still best known for this one, his first novel, which won a clutch of prizes (the Whitbread First Novel Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, a Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize). It gained a significantly greater prominence when it was made into a powerful movie, in 2006, starring Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy, himself just about to be propelled to superstar status in the X-Men movies.
The Last King: premise
The premise of the novel is simple: it’s a first-person narrative told by young Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, who goes to Uganda in 1971 on secondment from the British government’s Overseas Development Agency, to see something of the world and, through a chance encounter, is selected by the country’s new military dictator, Idi Amin, to become his personal physician.
Over the next 200 pages Garrigan witnesses Amin’s descent into psychopathic dictatorship, the ethnic killings, the arrests and tortures, mysterious disappearances, the expulsion of Uganda’s Asian community, the humiliation of the white community, the rising body count – he witnesses much of this in person, up close and personal, yet fails to intervene, at various key moments, to save friends and colleagues from horrendous fates, becoming more and more morally compromised and implicated in the process.
The reader accompanies Garrigan as he is dragged deeper into an inferno of violence, cruelty, torture, murder and terror until the narrative feels like it’s inhabiting a different kind of reality, one of endless melodrama and horror, war, destruction, evisceration, terrorism, random killings. The narrative turns into a gruelling nightmare.
It’s a solid book at 345 pages but I found it easy and pleasurable to read (at least to begin with) because of the narrative voice Foden creates. Garrigan’s narrative has a relaxed candid manner conveying an appealingly easygoing but observant, slangy but perceptive worldview. Basically, it’s enjoyable being in his company for a couple of days. (Compare and contrast with H.E. Bates’s classic ‘Fair Stood The Wind for France’ which I just finished reading and found a metallic, alienating, cold and heartless ordeal. By contrast, Garrigan is fun, chill and interesting.) Here’s what I mean by casual tone and easy-to-read style:
On the way back, after we’d poured Ivor into his bungalow, Sara invited me in for a whisky. Her place was even more sparsely furnished than mine: not much more than a desk, a chair and a sofa. And a bed, I supposed, though I didn’t get to see that. (p.100)
Apart from ‘sparsely’ it’s pretty much how someone would speak. Sometimes Garrigan’s tone can be consciously entertaining:
She turned a knob and a wave of white noise came out. On top of it or behind it, or wherever things happen in radio world, was an eerie electronic neighing, going up and down jaggedly, and a deep squelchy voice choppily declaiming in a foreign language some repetitive sounding set of orders or other permutation of words and numbers. Altogether, it was as if the football results were being read by one of the prophets. In a snowstorm. On a runaway horse. (p.101)
One of the ways the book challenges the reader is the way this easygoing attitude and approach, which we are encouraged to identify with from the beginning, turns out to be hopelessly inadequate for coping with the increasingly fraught situations Garrigan finds himself in.
Part 1
The narrative starts with a frame. Garrigan explains that he is back in Scotland, safe and sound, looking back over his mad time in Uganda as physician to Idi Amin and is determined to write a history of this period of ‘blood, misery and foolishness’ despite the fact that he seems to be the subject of scandal and criticism, for he tells us the newspapers ‘continue to execrate me’ (p.19). What for? We don’t know, it’s a teaser for what will emerge in the main narrative.
Very briefly Garrigan describes his boyhood and upbringing in the Scottish suburb of Fossiemuir, West Fife, his years as a student doctor. His father, George (p.41) was a stern presbyterian minister: ‘religion covered our family like a fine soot’ (p.19). But after just a few pages we’re on to him graduating as a doctor, to escape his parochial background and see the world, taking the civil service exam.
The narrative slows down to give more detail about his flight to Kampala, meeting the Embassy people (Nigel Stone and the eccentric Major Weir, intelligence officer, who builds model helicopters). He stays at the rundown Speke Hotel while he gets used to the heat, the street life, the food. Meets fellow guest Freddy Swanepoel.
He is posted to assist a Dr Alan Merritt at his hospital in the West Ugandan town of Mbarara. He takes an overcrowded minibus or matatu there, helped and advised by friendly local Boniface ‘Bonny’ Malumba (p.49). Soldiers stop the bus at a makeshift roadblock to demand bribes. When a Kenyan diplomat refuses to pay, the soldiers smash him in the face with a gun. After they’ve gotten off Nicholas goes to help him and is surprised when the Kenyan is very angry, saying ‘where were you when I needed you to stand up for me?’ (p.153) Why does this passage exist? Is it intended to be an early indicator of Nicholas’s cowardice or, to be more fair and accurate, his not knowing what to do in confrontation situations?
So he arrives at Mbarara, some kids guide him out to the medical compound, and we are introduced to Dr Merrit, his tutting wife Joyce (who calls her husband ‘Spiny’) and the servant Nestor. More importantly to the sprawling ‘hospital’ with its primitive facilities. Garrigan gives us an overview of the kinds of patients and diseases they’re called on to treat, which is very interesting (machete wounds, elephantiasis, vaginal fistulas in women caused by giving birth at home in primitive conditions, malaria etc pages 74 to 77).
Earlier Garrigan told us he arrived in Uganda on Sunday 24 January 1971 (p.21). The precise date is important because Amin carried out his military coup, overthrowing the government of President Milton Obote, the very next day, on 25 January 1971.
Why did Amin overthrow Obote? Because he learned that Obote was planning to arrest him for misappropriating army funds and, more generally, threatened the army’s lucrative corruption. In the words of Wikipedia:
The 1971 coup is often cited as an example of ‘class action by the military’, wherein the Uganda Army acted against ‘an increasingly socialist regime whose egalitarian domestic politics posed more and more of a threat to the military’s economic privileges.’
Of course none of this is clear to any of the characters because it’s only just happened, although Dr Merritt gives Harrigan the view of a jaundiced old hand:
‘It’s very simple. This place – chaos, you just have to expect the worst. You think it’s a matter of it having to get worse for it to get better, but actually it just gets worse and worse. Take this new business with Amin. I hear they’re all happy as sandboys right now up in Kampala, but it’ll end in tears, I promise you.’ (p.60)
This little remark obviously plants a seed of expectation of the horrors that will come later. Prolepsis or the anticipation of something that comes later in a story.
Garrigan is introduced to Sara Zach, on secondment from a hospital in Israel, to two Cuban surgeons, and to a ravaged Englishman, Ivor Seabrook, with the ‘destroyed features of the long-term tropical alcoholic’ (p.71) and closet homosexual who seduces the various serving boys. He is taken on field trips by Merritt’s assistant, William Waziri, vaccination and anti-mosquito spraying (pages 79 to 80) on one occasion being stopped at another army roadblock by drunk soldiers demanding a bribe (p.81). Africa.
Altogether this first hundred pages or so give a vivid, fascinating and totally believable picture of an outback medical practice in rural Uganda, packed with fascinating details? How on earth did Foden find out all this stuff?
The new president, Idi Amin, comes to Mbarara to make a speech to an excited crowd. Garrigan records his incoherent thoughts about God, the crowd lap it up, Sara makes notes and hustles them off, scared of being attacked because they’re white.
Cut to a year later, so must be 1972, and he mentions June as the month, when he’s getting used to conditions and has, rather inevitably, started an affair with the tough, no-nonsense, attractive Israeli doctor, Sara, descriptions of picnics in the foothills of the Ruwenzoris mountain range, making love, spotting exotic flowers and birds.
There’s an attack on the barracks in town. The doctors learn that troops were sent from the north and massacred all the Langi and Acholi soldiers, supposedly because they’re from a different tribe than Amin (p.106). Some Americans came snooping round, supposedly journalists, and are themselves killed and buried.
A few months later there’s a mortar attack on the barracks which misses and kills a lot of civilians. Merritt and Sara tend to them. Garrigan’s friend Bonny, and his mother and father, are among the dead.
Garrigan and Sara take in Bonny’s kid brother, Gugu, but he is mute and never speaks again. Eventually his extended family come to collect him. His relationship with Sara breaks down: Garrigan is prone to psychoanalysing everything and comes to realise he and Sara liked having Gugu with them because it created a family feel, gave them both security. With Gugu gone Sara moved back to her own bungalow. The radio reports weirder and weirder speeches by Amin.
Garrigan describes Operation Mafuta Mingi, the name Amin gives to his campaign to intimidate and eventually expel the entire Asian population of Uganda, around 50,000 people. Garrigan watches them being rounded up, their belongings impounded, bullied by soldiers, then driven to the airport deprived of all their belongings.
He records the effects of the expulsion: shops closed because many of them operated on lines of credit from India which terminated overnight. Basic items like salt, matches, sugar or soap became scarce. The army slaughtered a dairy herd for beef and so milk disappeared. This happened in August 1972. Sara had been increasingly distant and one day in October she simply leaves, without telling anyone (p.119). It’s because Amin had also been making speeches attacking the Israelis in Uganda, mostly working on development projects, about 600 of them and so, overnight, they left.
A few weeks later Garrigan has his first personal contact with Amin, being fetched by soldiers because the great leader had driven his Maserati into a cow and sprained his wrist. Garrigan is bowled over by his primeval physical presence. Amin has a soldier pour them brandy which, on the hot day, makes Garrigan light-headed.
And so it is that a letter arrives from health minister Wasswa requesting that Garrigan becomes Amin’s private physician. By this time he’s fed up of the Mbarara hospital which reminds him of the sad affair with Sara so he’s happy to go.
Ominousness
As it progresses the text drops references to Garrigan’s current position, contrasting the time of writing (now) with the events he’s writing about (then) and emphasising how something has made him re-evaluate everything. The technique adds an air of ominousness, the sense that something dreadful happened in the interim:
- I realise now that… (p.116)
- Or so I thought back then… (p.118)
- Bewildered in Uganda, and not for the last time… (p.128)
- Looking back, it seems crazy… (p.144)
Part 2 (p.131)
Part 2 opens with a recap of Amin’s birth, boyhood, young manhood, rise in the colonial army, rise in the post-independence army of President Obote, his involvement in smuggling from Congo, his overthrow of Obote in January 1971.
The strange thing about this section is that it seems to be told in a completely different narrative voice from part one. It is mannered and strange in a style so different from the laid-back casualness of part one that I thought it must signal the arrival of a completely new narrator.
I have been able to find out little of the history by which Amin is come to us. After all, who knows where any of us is come from, who could go to the cause?
This unusual phrasing, and the present tense, persist throughout this chapter (chapter 16), throwing me completely off-kilter, wondering if it was a different person talking, or a different type of text, like maybe the transcript of a recording. But no, chapter 17 returns to the normal voice of Garrigan, now installed in Kampala as Idi Amin’s personal physician and with very little to do. Odd.
Anyway, back in the narrative, every encounter with Amin is hair-raising. He is a big man, he dominates his courtiers who laugh with him, applaud his every word, out of obvious terror. He is painted as deeply stupid and illiterate but loving the sound of his own voice, capable of speaking at great length.
For it is true, also, out of my nature, I love to rule! (p.148)
Garrigan is mesmerised and hypnotised by Amin, like the rest of his retinue. The narrative continues to emphasise Garrigan’s gaucheness and insecurity – worry about what he looks like, what he says, how others perceive him, rising to stammering terror when faced with Amin. He is, after all, only a few years out of university. The book is a study in callowness.
After the weird opening chapter part 2 settles down into a series of brilliantly imagined scenes: Amin phones Garrigan to tell him his son is ill, come over immediately; Garrigan hurries over to discover the boy has put a piece of Lego up his nose, pulls it out and anti-bacs the nose (p.153). The wife is delighted and Amin sends him a Toyota van as reward (admittedly, still painted with the logo of the Asian fashion shop it was confiscated from).
As doctor to the Prez, Garrigan is now living in a bungalow in the State House compound, near Entebbe, a suburb of Kampala. He attends to Amin at the so-called ‘Command Post’, in fact a large suburban villa, or Nakasero Lodge where he spent most of his time (p.155), then at Cape Town, a property on Lake Victoria he awarded himself (p.165).
Garrigan works at the city’s main hospital, Mulago, filling us in on the kinds of patients you get in a big city compared to the countryside (car accidents), working alongside a fellow Scot, senior surgeon Colin Paterson, makes friends with a local surgeon, Peter Mbalu-Mukasa (p.157). The hospital is big enough to have foreign teams, from China, Algeria, Vietnam, Russia, and to be carrying out serious medical research. How did Foden get to know so much about tropical medicine? And not just knowledge but a feel for all the spin-offs and insights of doctoring:
Hospitals are like people, they grow, they develop, they learn. And they decay too, and die. (p.163)
He and Mbalu-Mukasa cruise the bars of Kampala and bump into the meaty, dodgy South African Freddy Swanepoel, Garrigan permanently afraid that Swanepoel’s outspokenness about the regime will get him into trouble.
Right from the start Amin had a bonkers fondness for Scotland, having spent some of his military training in Britain there, but it becomes ever more surreal, him outfitting regiments in kilts and making them learn the bagpipes; making booming speeches about how the Scots were like the Ugandans in having suffered from English imperialism. Now Amin invites Paterson and Garrigan for tea and tells them he is going to punish the English community in Uganda for its imperialism. As a local had told him back in Mbarara, ‘First wahindi, then muzungu’ (p.172). He forces some Brits to carry him in a litter through the streets, others to kneel and take an oath of fealty.
Stone, from the Embassy, invites Garrigan for a chat and works the conversation round to asking Garrigan to take advantage of his position to administer Amin with calmatives, tranquilisers, to try and bring him to his senses.
Merritt, his boss at the Mbarara hospital is kicked out, visits Garrigan on the way, says he if he’d stayed at the hospital it might have saved it. He is not the last to blame Garrigan for cowardice or failing to do the right thing.
In another demonstration of his gaucheness Garrigan takes Marina Perkins, wife of the British Ambassador, Robert Perkins, who he’s been chatting up at the swimming pool, on a fishing trip. All goes well till he makes a move to kiss her at which she is shocked and horrified, sits bolt upright and insists he take her home (p.177). He has completely misjudged the situation.
The famous scene (well, a centrepiece of the movie) in which Garrigan is summoned at night to Amin in his bedroom (carefully described) because he is in great stomach pain which, after extensive examination, Garrigan determines to be wind, and helps Amin into a position where he can release a great fart, thus relieving the pain, and overjoying the dictator.
Amin takes Garrigan into his confidence and talks about the burdens of office. He makes a feeble attempt to ask Amin to stop the army killing people which Amin swats aside.
Brief review: he tells us he was in Uganda for eight years in all, two in Mbarara, six in Kampala (p.191). A general overview in which he describes their many meetings, tea and conversation, naively thinking he’s getting to know him. The narrative begins to feel like summaries of a series of episodes:
There’s an attempt to assassinate Amin at an army review, which fails but kills the driver of his jeep. (In fact Amin survived eight attempted coups.)
In 1972 Amin gets married, to wife number four, and the text gives a detailed description of the ceremony and pen portraits of the previous three (chapter 24).
Amin phones Garrigan at all times for confidential chats and to let off steam. In public press conferences he announces he is training to be an astronaut. Also that he is assembling a pan-African army to attack South Africa. An excuse to quote (presumably actual) press meetings and outrageous quotes.
Amin sends inappropriate letters to world leaders, for example Mrs Thatcher on her election as leader of the Conservative Party (February 1975). He publicly states that Hitler had the right idea about the Jews. he did a deal with Colonel Gaddafi and Libyan businesses and soldiers become seen on the streets of Kampala. A lot later, after he’s escaped, in the novel’s aftertime, his sister Moira asks him why he stayed on so long, and let himself be portrayed as being close to such a lunatic. Garrigan can barely understand it himself. He was hypnotised. He’d fallen under Amin’s spell. He knew he was a monster but sometimes thought he loved him. Psychology of a dictator’s minions.
The closer I got to him, the fewer my illusions about him – and still I stayed, more fascinated than frightened. (p.213) (cf his ‘reluctance to get the hell out of there,’ p.222)
One stormy night his friend from the Kampala hospital, Peter Mbalu-Mukasa, turns up. Tells him he’s been having an affair with Amin’s second wife, Kay, and has got her pregnant. Since Amin hasn’t been having sex with her, he’ll know she’s been unfaithful and murder her and any lover he can track down. The man is understandably terrified and asks Garrigan if he can perform an illegal abortion on Kay. Garrigan lets himself be driven to Mbalu-Mukasa’s apartment, encounters the terrified moaning woman, but realises he can’t do it. Not only is he also terrified of being discovered, but he’s never actually performed an abortion and will likely make a mess of it. With all kinds of excuses, he refuses, backs out, and makes his way home.
It’s the last time he sees either. Rumour had it that Mbalu-Mukasa botched the abortion, Kay died of blood loss, and Mbalu-Mukasa committed suicide (August 1974). Worse, Garrigan was invited by the mortuary assistant who shows him Kay’s body and how all four limbs and the head had been detached from it, then clumsily sown back on.
In a bar Garrigan is appalled to see fat oafish Freddy Swanepoel putting his paw on the knee of the trim woman who rejected him, Marina. Chagrin. Worse, at their next meeting Amin tells him Nicholas knows all about his attempts to seduce Marina, about her affair with Swanepoel, and his poor opinion of the South African pilot, who he thinks is a spy.
Stone calls Garrigan back to the Embassy. He makes clear that the Ambassador is just a front man, it’s he, Stone, who pulls the strings. He shows Garrigan a series of photos of Amin taking part in executions and torture. Hundreds of people are dying every day. Stone accuses Garrigan of being complicit in this mass murder. Then he asks Garrigan to murder Amin. Use whatever is necessary, poison, adrenalin or inject air into his heart, whatever it takes. Garrigan refuses, a) because he’s a doctor but b) because, on some level, he likes the man:
There was, I conceded it to myself again, something in me that actually liked the man, monster though he was. (p.231)
To his amazement, Stone tells him the authorities have placed £50,000 in his bank account, with more to come when he achieves the murder. Garrigan turns him down. Next week Amin expels Stone, Perkins, the entire British Embassy.
Then Garrigan’s bungalow is burgled and his journal disappears, the one he’s been keeping notes in on all the events and all his opinions. He gets a midnight call from Amin to go see him immediately. Amin pulls a gun and terrifies a sweating Garrigan who grovels on the floor. Amin tells him that Weir, from the Embassy, told him about Stone’s request that Garrigan murder Amin! Then Amin summarises the contents of Garrigan’s journal and is disappointed at his lack of loyalty.
Then, in a scene which crosses the line from mundane reality into horror, Amin opens a secret door (in his bookshelves) and takes Garrigan deep into the cells and torture chambers which are just a short walk away, along dim concrete passages.
Here he is shown his colleague from the Mbarara days, William Waziri who used to take him on medical tours of local villages. He is pinned down, tied and gagged. Amin says he is associated with enemy guerrillas. Garrigan is forced to watch as soldiers press him to the floor, one stepping on his head, as they use a kitchen knife to saw open his throat, and Waziri’s eyes meet Garrigan’s as they do it.
Garrigan passes out and regains consciousness to discover he, also, is in a prison cell where he stays for a day, being insulted by the jailer who comes to deliver the disgusting food. Obviously all the worst thoughts in the world go through his mind, maybe he’ll be there forever, or be tortured or murdered. In fact, only a day later the door opens and the health minister, Wasswa, is there with clean clothes. He hustles Garrigan along the corridor, telling him he’s lucky to be alive. From the cells they pass along the corridor where prisoners shout at him to help them. Garrigan hesitates but Wasswa tells him there is nothing he can do. Along some more corridors and then through a concealed entrance and, bizarrely, back into Amin’s bedroom where the dictator is resplendent in an electric-blue safari suit and greets him like an old friend.
Amin tells Garrigan he has to renounce his British citizenship and become a Ugandan citizen. Then orders him to come back soon. Amin disapproves of Garrigan’s journal because it is informal and unofficial but approves the fact that he’s a writer. And so he orders Garrigan to come back so that Amin can dictate to him his Life and Achievements.
Next day Garrigan drives straight to the airport to discover Fate is against him. It is July 1976 and terrorists have hijacked a civil airliner and rerouted it to Libya, then Uganda.
Which is why Garrigan is an eye witness to the hostage crisis, and to the arrival of Amin at the airport where he congratulates himself on persuading the terrorists to release the non-Jewish hostages. The captain of the plane refuses to leave without the 40-something Jewish hostages who are being held in a separate room. There is an implied contrast between the professionalism and responsibility of this plane captain, and Garrigan’s shuffling out of all his responsibilities.
That night he is amazed to get a phone call from his Israeli lover Sara, the one who left without saying goodbye. She now reveals she’s a Colonel of the Israeli Defence Force and insists that he describes the layout of the airport at Entebbe, where the hostages are, how many terrorists are guarding them etc. She is obviously laying the groundwork for the famous Israeli raid which frees the hostages.
(The present: slowly we have been drip-fed details about where Garrigan is writing all this. We learn it is in the bothy (‘a basic shelter, usually left unlocked and available for anyone to use free of charge’) left to him by a great-uncle [Uncle Eamonn, p.336], on a remote Scottish island. It’s from the peace and quiet here, that he is looking back, and trying to patch together, these last horrific months. Pages 249, 256, 263, 266)
As the Ugandan economy collapses, conditions at the Mulago hospital collapse with it. Garrigan continues to work, he considers he has no alternative. One day, during one of their tape recording sessions, Amin gives him a package contained a stuffed mounted lion’s head to deliver to a small plane at Entebbe airport, to the chairman of Rafiki Aviation who will be waiting for it. Garrigan nervously does so, handing it over to this man who gets into a small plane piloted by Freddy Swanepoel, and off it flies. Garrigan later finds out that the plane exploded and crashed for unknown reasons. He’s pretty sure there was a bomb in the package he gave.
It’s only 6 months later that he plucks up the guts to ask Amin about the package. By now their recording sessions have become well established. Garrigan comes close to witnessing examples of Amin’s cannibalism (p.260). Once or twice he has opportunities to kill Amin, one in particular when he is in reach of his holster and pistol. Something always holds him back.
Garrigan has of course been thinking about fleeing the country for years but doesn’t see how he can, now that the airport is tightly watched. His plans are paralleled by Amin’s increasing rhetoric about war with neighbouring Tanzania.
The escape attempt
Garrigan finally packs his necessaries in the van and heads off for the southern border, hoping to cross south into Rwanda via some remote mountain road. Unfortunately he runs into an army checkpoint. When he begins reversing, an army Land Rover comes charging towards him. Mad with panic he drives back the way he came and then wildly off into a road through the jungle which comes to a dead end at a deserted cabin. He leaps out of his van but has no idea what to do till he sees the cabin is slightly raised and wriggles under it. From here he watches the Land Rover arrive, the soldiers inspect the empty cabin, loose off some gunfire, then drive off with the Land Rover and his van, leaving him stranded.
He’s just wondering what to do when a huge snake rears up and bites him in the calf. He stumbles into the jungle and passes out. He comes round in a native village where the villagers have been feeding him and nursing his wound. Lying sick and delirious in a native hut he reflects on the long series of decisions which have brought him, an uptight, callow Scotsman, a ‘casket of emotional defects and diffident, inward-turning passions’ to this catastrophic situation (p.275). When he’s recovered a man indicates that he should follow him along a jungle track.
Obviously Garrigan hopes this will come out at some highway where he can hitch a lift back to civilisation. Instead it’s a further step in the descent into barbarism. they come to a road alright, where there’s a huge pile of corpses, twenty feet high, many still showing the gunshot wounds that killed them.
Feeling like he’ll vomit, Garrigan goes blundering down the road and soon, to his amazement, realises he’s in the vicinity of Mbarara. He carries on to discover a great crowd of locals. Pushing through he sees soldiers beating a figure tied to a chair. Pushed towards the front of the crowd, Garrigan finds the soldier turning and swinging his rifle butt into Garrigan’s ribs. To his absolute horror he realises it’s Gugu, the orphan boy he and Sara took in all those years ago. Now he has become a sadistic boy soldier in Amin’s deadly army.
But even as the boy stands above him, gun pointing towards him, there’s an explosion, presumably from artillery fire, and he sees the boy blown backwards, his chest opening in a splurge of blood.
The Tanzanian invasion
This summary has gone on long enough already. Long story short, Garrigan is rescued by / comes into the custody of Colonel Armstrong Kuchasa of the Tanzanian Defence Forces. In response to a feeble mini invasion of their land by Amin, Tanzania has repulsed the Ugandans and is no only invading, but on a mission to overthrow Amin.
Garrigan is bundled into an armoured personnel carrier (APC) and accompanies the Tanzanian Army, seeing action, coming under fire, seeing soldiers killed around him, protected and fed by the Colonel once he’s understood that Garrigan is a trained doctor, who he gets to tend to his wounded.
So Garrigan accompanies the Tanzanian army all the way to Kampala and is eye witness to its capture (and to the vignette of the destruction of the Volkswagen fleeing from the Embassy quarter across a golf course, which was carrying Dr Gottfried Lessing, East German ambassador and husband of Doris Lessing.)
He is with Tanzanian soldiers when they enter and ransack Amin’s formal residences. He realises he won’t be safe in the streets and makes it across town to the Mulago Hospital. Here it is chaos with the surgeons giving emergency care to all-comers. The head of surgery, Dr Paterson, barely contains his anger at him: ‘How very nice of you to join us, Nick’ (p.299). He, like everyone else, simply thought Garrigan had run away with Amin. Once again he seems to have done utterly the wrong thing at the wrong time. He scrubs up and helps out.
Later, out in the streets he sees rioting followed by looting, alongside bizarre victory marches. He follows the flow of the crowd towards one of Amin’s residences at Nakasero.
Amin redux
The novel builds up to a really weird climax. Garrigan follows the local mob into Amin’s residence, noting how everything has been smashed and looted, following them up to Amin’s bedroom where all portables have been pinched and his big waterbed exploded. But nobody knows about or has opened the secret doorway in the bookcase. So Garrigan does.
And once again, as in a horror movie, relives the experience of walking down the dank concrete corridor. And then, just as in a horror movie, he sees Amin. Standing in one of the chambers which controlled the electricity supply to the torture instruments. Amin is addressing a surreal monologue to a severed head on a plate. Only as he moves around does Garrigan realise with horror that it is the severed head of the Archbishop of Uganda, the same diminutive churchman we met conducting Amin’s fourth marriage way back earlier in the text. The horror.
And then Amin addresses Garrigan. He’s seen him hiding. They have a bizarre dialogue, Amin as relaxed and confident as ever. Amin is made to implicate all the western countries who helped train his army, and train and equip his dreaded security police, the State Research Bureau (p.312).
Finally, unbelievably, Amin asks Garrigan a favour. Turns out that one of the maze of tunnels from his residences comes out at a landmark on the way to the airport. There he has a plane waiting for him. Could Garrigan go to the landmark and collect him and drive him to the airport? Amin comes and stands over him and Garrigan experiences a dizziness and a complexity of emotions which is like drugs or arousal or love – and agrees.
In the event it takes him so long in the general chaos to get hold of a vehicle that he gets to the landmark and waits and waits but Amin never appears. Eventually he drives on in the vague direction of the compound and his bungalow, passes a lake, stops, notices a number of boats moored at the quay, gets down into one, kickstarts the motor and heads off north, casual as that.
It takes 6 or 7 hours, chuntering away all night till he arrives at a quayside in Kenya and quickly makes himself known to the police.
In fact his travails are far from over as a curt Foreign Office official informs him that a) he no longer has British citizenship so might easily be turned away from Britain b) he is universally thought to have been one of Amin’s closest henchmen, so is very unpopular in the press c) he might be charged for murder for his part in planting an explosive device on that small plane that blew up.
Stone forces him to sign a document swearing to be silent about all activities of the British government in Uganda i.e. the offer of payment to murder Amin, but other things as well. In return for signing these non-disclosure agreements, Stone says he will be reassigned his British citizenship.
Lastly, Garrigan has to go through the ordeal of being interviewed by a handful of chosen journalists in a hotel at Heathrow under the supervision of a PR ‘handler’ named Ed Howarth, who is there to ensure the interviews are a one-off event and that Garrigan says nothing which will compromise the British government – an illuminating process for Garrigan and the reader.
Then he is free to go and catches a train north to Scotland, then travels by hire car, then ferry, over to this little island where…he has been holed up in the bothy writing this long account and trying to exorcise his demons.
At the very very end of the narrative the phone rings in the little cottage and…he hears Amin’s voice, friendly and coaxing as ever, tutting about his treatment in the papers and telling him how much he is enjoying his quiet retirement in Saudi Arabia. Is this real? Can this be happening? Will he never be able to escape from dreams and phantasms of the monster? Either way, Garrigan puts the phone down and that’s the end of the narrative.
Summary
Amazing
This is a mind-bogglingly brilliant achievement, an awesome historical novel which not only recreates life in Uganda and Kampala with superhuman accuracy and vividness, but is also a searing insight into the twisted mentality of a psychopathic dictator and, above all, into the psychology of an educated Westerner who lets himself be manipulated into becoming complicit and acquiescent in horrifying atrocities. A terrifying but profound novel which leaves you reverberating with horror for weeks afterward.
Zelig
The main criticism of the novel would be that at some stage, maybe from the incident of Kay’s botched abortion, Garrigan begins to feel like a Zelig character who keeps popping up at key moments during Amin’s career: the death of Kay, then the Entebbe hostage situation, and then the Tanzanian invasion, Garrigan increasingly happens to be at the right place at the right time, with mounting improbability.
I think credibility snaps when he finds himself on the receiving end of Gugu’s rifle butt. That’s just one coincidence too far. From that point onwards Garrigan becomes less like a character and more like a cipher with which to dramatise a checklist of incidents during the invasion. And that realisation feeds backwards, making you think the same about the Entebbe terrorist situation, and other incidents, too.
Maybe it sort of has to be like this – in order to have a dramatic fiction Foden has to make Garrigan part of all these real historic events – but in doing so the story leaves behind plausible realism and becomes something else: first, in the torture cells beneath Amin’s residence, into a genuinely hair-raising horror story; and then follows the delirious sequence of his Land Rover escape, his bite by a snake, his recovery in a native village, his being taken to a huge pile of corpses, and then stumbling across Gugu beating a prisoner to death and, at that very moment, an artillery attack blowing Gugu to pieces etc. By this time the whole thing has become more of a hallucination than a narrative, piling agony on agony, one vivid hyper-violent scene after another, until the reader’s imagination is shredded.
Comparison with William Boyd
William Boyd is another Englishman brought up in Africa by ex-pat parents, sent to a pukka public school then Oxbridge, who also became a novelist tackling African themes. His first novel, ‘A Good Man in Africa’, is about another Englishman completely out of his depth in a dire African country, who drinks too much, makes a fool of himself with women, and completely fails to understand what’s going on around him, leading up to a violent climax in riots and a coup.
So these are two books about useless Brits caught up in violent events in Africa, the difference obviously being that in Boyd’s books it’s played for laughs (‘A Good Man’ is a very funny farce) while in Foden’s the same basic subject is played for tragedy and horror.
Given the grim times we live in, I’d recommend people read the Boyd for its many hilarious scenes and smiling memories although, at the very end, it too has a bitter denouement.
Wikipedia on Idi Amin
The opening summary of Idi Amin’s Wikipedia article:
Idi Amin Dada Oumee (c. 1925 to 16 August 2003) was a Ugandan military officer and politician who served as the third president of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. He ruled as a military dictator and is considered one of the most brutal despots in modern world history…Amin’s rule was characterised by rampant human rights abuses, including political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, as well as nepotism, corruption, and gross economic mismanagement. International observers and human rights groups estimate that between 100,000 and 500,000 people were killed under his regime.
Foden takes a middle estimate, that Amin’s regime killed 300,000 Ugandans (p.133).
Africa words
muzunga – white people
musawo – a doctor
Chapter 9, pages 84 to 90, gives an extended explanation of various Swahili terms
the wananchi – ordinary citizens
Credit
The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden was published by Faber Books in 1998. References are to the 1999 Faber paperback edition.
Giles Foden reviews
- The Last King of Scotland (1998)
- Ladysmith (1999)
- Zanzibar (2002)
- Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika (2004)
- Freight Dogs (2021)
Books & Boots 