Spoiler alert: I'm going to write quite a lot of details about the film The Last King of Scotland, as well as its conclusion. So if you haven't seen it and don't want a sneak preview, stop reading...now.Last night Clay and I went to see this film with our friends Hester and Stuart. I have been wanting to see it, but had some reservations. Namely, I was sure there were a million stories to tell about Idi Amin's brutal rule of Uganda, and I was confused/annoyed that the one being told had to be through the eyes of a white Northerner. Was this the only way to get people to care about African history and African tragedy? Was the presence of a Northerner in Amin's inner circle really the most interesting or compelling aspect of the whole sad tale?
I didn't have much time to think about this once the film started. Running into a friend in the lobby afterwards, he asked "how was it?" and I replied, "like being punched in the face." This film is pretty full on, and it doesn't let you off the hook very often. In a nutshell, young, bored Scottish physician literally spins a globe and ends up working at a rural clinic in Uganda, just as Amin's coup is taking place. Through a series of coincidences he becomes Amin's personal physician and, at times, advisor. As a white Northerner myself, sitting in the dark of the theatre, I watched Amin's madness and brutality unfold through the naive eyes of this young doctor, whose sheltered place at the heart of the Amin regime does not spare him from getting blood on his own hands. You want to like this young guy, and you sympathise with him, because he doesn't "get" Uganda and you probably wouldn't either, because he is idealistic about Amin's plans for Uganda and you probably would be too, because he is enticed by power and you would be, and because he stumbles his way through life and frankly you do too sometimes. But there is something truly, deeply, and un-pin-pointably wrong with this young Scot and his actions or lack thereof, throughout the film. In the end you can't sympathise with him because he turned up to Uganda uninvited, not speaking the language and not knowing even the basics of the culture of history of the place. He turned up and got special treatment because he was a Northerner, and got heady with power. He helped put a legitimate face on a wide swath of brutality, oppression, and murder, and convinced himself Amin's "heavy hand" was for the greater good because "this is Africa, and you have to meet violence with violence."
By the end of the film, our young doctor has seen his pregnant lover (Amin's wife, no less) dismembered by Amin for trying to abort his (the Scot's) baby. He has been the half-witting cause of the death of a worthy public minister. And he has been at Amin's right hand during a period in which this dictator murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people. In the end, the doctor betrays Amin, in a failed attempt to poision him - He does this not to rid Uganda of Amin's menacing presence, but in revenge for the death of his lover. Even at this late stage, knowing of the brutality and killings across the country, our young doctor is driven to act only when his own self interests are harmed.
The doctor pays quite a physically brutal price for his betrayal of the president - a scene I watched through one half-open eye. But in the end, he is hustled onto an airplane by a goodhearted Ugandan doctor. And he escapes. Battered and bleeding, with a heavy conscience and much to grapple with, but he escapes. The film ends with his airplane lifting off from the runway, leaving Uganda (and its eventual civilian death toll of 300,000) behind.
So much for my annoyed, oh-so-enlightened, make a movie on Africa-about-Africans argument. The telling of the Amin story through this white doctor is a brilliant intellectual and psychological ploy, revealing after it's too late to escape the true weight and nature of the argument being made. I believed the trailers when they told me this was a film about Idi Amin and Uganda. I believed this for most of the film, to be honest. But I finally, really got it as that plane left the runway, taking the most dangerous weapon in the world today with it - the arrogant, half-informed, and ostensibly helpful Northerner.
The fundamental problem at the heart of all these centuries of playing chess with nations is that the chess players always have the option of that last flight out. Take the evacuation of Saigon - in the end, the US army left the underprepared, corrupted ARVN forces to slug it out with a well equipped, well trained force from North Vietnam. Why? Among other things, before even going in, we just didn't bother to deeply understand what was going on in that country. Did you know that before the US invasion, Ho Chi Minh wrote to a number of high-level US officials repeatedly, offering friendship and asking for help? Did you know that a quick look at Vietnamese history reveals Vietnam would never have joined forces with the Chinese? - but the United States assumed they would, because they assumed all Communism was the same, and that it overrode all other historical and political factors. And so we invaded. And when the American public had had enough of the dying, we left.
Iraq today - Democrats in the US Congress likely will soon show how smart and compassionate they are by forcing a massive reduction in US troops - yet I haven't seen anything that proves to me the country won't collapse once this frail support structure is removed. The same goes for my current home country, the UK.
Just to be clear: I am no hawk. My point is not that we should stay until "mission accomplished" - it's to ask why the hell is it our right to determine the mission in the first place?
And now you might think that I am a complete cliche (Vietnam = Afghanistan = Iraq, etc. - although interestingly, the enlightened phrase "Let's bomb them back to the stone age" featured in the press during the decision-making phase of both debacles). However, I think a review of European colonial and American neo-colonial practices worlwide consistently see the movie coming to the same end: the embarassed and battered North getting on the transport plane and escaping to "intervene" another day in another hot climate. At least Nero stuck around Rome to fiddle.
