Vol. 20 No. 6 · 19 March 1998
page 21 | 2209 words
Number One Id
Hilary Mantel
- The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden
Faber, 330 pp, £9.99, March 1998, ISBN 0 571 17916 9
When in the mid-Eighties I lived in the port of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, I lived in a city policed by gossip and run by rumour. While its citizens, flapping in white robes and black veils and wrappings, glided through the streets like formal ghosts, its guest-workers crept through their contracts, guided by intuitions as evanescent and mysterious as those of spiritualists. Perplexing questions hung in the still air. Some hung there year after year: who killed the nurse Helen Smith? Some were of immediate import: where has the main post office gone this week? Some were insoluble, questions almost too puzzling to pose: where, oh where, is Idi Amin?
The Uganda dictator, driven out by Tanzanian troops in 1979, had been offered refuge by a regime more merciful than others – or perhaps by a regime that was beyond embarrassment. But where did the Saudis hide him? How in that monochrome urban habitat would you disguise a streak of equatorial virescence, and how would you muffle behind the walls of a Red Sea villa the roaring of an imprisoned bull-elephant? The district where he lived was known; or at least, people mentioned it to each other, as if they knew it. Standing outside the Safeway supermarket, liquefying in the evening heat, waiting for prayers to end and the metal shutters to rattle up, I sometimes used to imagine I might see Idi pushing a trolley, among the counters of pallid veal and the glossy flavourless vegetables. Perhaps he had dwindled in exile, I thought. Perhaps his skin is grey and dusty now, and too big for him, perhaps he wears it in swags. Perhaps his many wives bully him and send him out to shop. But I never saw him, and I never heard anyone claim they had: we caught not a glimpse of the manic, blood-stained days of glory of ‘His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadj Doctor Idi Amin Dada, Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular’.
To perceive Amin as something more than a fugitive wraith, or a sick joke, you must turn to Giles Foden’s first novel. Its title suggests the endless scope for macabre comedy that Amin provides. As a former soldier in the British Army, he had done part of his training in Stirling, and admired the Scottish officers he had met; he understood the part that empire-building Scots had played in Uganda’s history, and recognised their pioneering qualities even if he was forced, as an anti-imperialist, to deprecate them. These Caledonian connections were enough for Amin to proclaim himself a proponent – indeed a leader – of Scottish nationalism, and of Welsh nationalism and Irish nationalism, just by the way. But it was the Scottish tradition with which he most identified, and with which he identified his hapless country-men. One of the most bizarre moments in The Last King of Scotland occurs when the narrator, Nicholas Garrigan, is picnicking out in the hills with his Israeli girlfriend, Sara:
Letters
Vol. 20 No. 7 · 2 April 1998
From Giles Foden
I am sorry that my novel about Idi Amin, The Last King of Scotland, failed to generate Hilary Mantel’s excitement (LRB, 19 March). That can’t be helped, or corrected. What can be corrected is wild misquotation, especially in the light of the reviewer’s suggestion of her own alternative ‘proper formulation’ for some dialogue in the book. Mantel reports the narrator’s estimation of Amin’s ‘jaunty sophistry, his brilliant tongue’. The proper formulation, at least in so far as what exists on the page is concerned, is ‘his gangster sophistry, his miraculous tongue’.
Giles Foden
London N1
Vol. 20 No. 8 · 16 April 1998
From Joseph Nuttgens
Hilary Mantel’s review of Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland (LRB, 19 March) reminded me of a strange apparition some twenty-five years ago in my garden, an acre of roughly cultivated vegetables, flowers and fruit trees set amid a profusion of long grass, nettles and those flowers we define as ‘wild’, whose existence depends on a benign neglect of ‘proper’ horticulture. It is situated on the western side of a Chiltern hill, topped by beech woods and overlooking a valley village which, at that time, looked much as it had two hundred years earlier. It was in this Gethsemane that, early one fine morning, I came across some startling resurrections: a group of about twenty men and women or, more accurately, boys and girls, all uniformly tall and extremely elegant, with magnificent aristocratic black faces and dressed from head to foot in immaculate white robes. They were in deep grass, moving slowly and gracefully, but huddling together. I said ‘Hello’ to them with an air of amused bonhomie, but they turned to stare at me silently with a mixture of timidity and what seemed to me slight menace, so that I thought it best to leave them to look after themselves.
I did, in fact, know that my sister’s husband was due to accompany a group of Ugandan dancers from Heathrow Airport to their London hotel, but not that they had been refused lodging as no proper finance had been arranged, and so had been driven late the evening before to my father’s house adjoining mine, where they had slept in armchairs and old mattresses on the floor. They left that morning and were never seen again. Some weeks later it was reported in the newspapers that Idi Amin had established bases ‘deep in the Heart of the English Shires’, where he would be given warm hospitality at any time and from which he would start his liberation of the Home Counties.
Joseph Nuttgens
High Wycombe, Bucks
From Joseph Nuttgens
Hilary Mantel’s review of Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland (LRB, 19 March) reminded me of a strange apparition some twenty-five years ago in my garden, an acre of roughly cultivated vegetables, flowers and fruit trees set amid a profusion of long grass, nettles and those flowers we define as ‘wild’, whose existence depends on a benign neglect of ‘proper’ horticulture. It is situated on the western side of a Chiltern hill, topped by beech woods and overlooking a valley village which, at that time, looked much as it had two hundred years earlier. It was in this Gethsemane that, early one fine morning, I came across some startling resurrections: a group of about twenty men and women or, more accurately, boys and girls, all uniformly tall and extremely elegant, with magnificent aristocratic black faces and dressed from head to foot in immaculate white robes. They were in deep grass, moving slowly and gracefully, but huddling together. I said ‘Hello’ to them with an air of amused bonhomie, but they turned to stare at me silently with a mixture of timidity and what seemed to me slight menace, so that I thought it best to leave them to look after themselves.
I did, in fact, know that my sister’s husband was due to accompany a group of Ugandan dancers from Heathrow Airport to their London hotel, but not that they had been refused lodging as no proper finance had been arranged, and so had been driven late the evening before to my father’s house adjoining mine, where they had slept in armchairs and old mattresses on the floor. They left that morning and were never seen again. Some weeks later it was reported in the newspapers that Idi Amin had established bases ‘deep in the Heart of the English Shires’, where he would be given warm hospitality at any time and from which he would start his liberation of the Home Counties.
Joseph Nuttgens
High Wycombe, Bucks
