'This Man (Idi Amin) I Call Father’

'This Man I Call Father’

Meet Jaffar Amin. He does voiceover work, likes MC Hammer, and posts family histories on Facebook. Oh, and his dad was Africa’s most notorious dictator.



BY JUSTIN ROHRLICH
Foreign Policy


On April 11, 1979, His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Lord of all the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular, was overthrown by a rebel insurgency.


"...To most people, Amin’s eight-year reign is best remembered for its violence. Nine thousand “disloyal” soldiers — a full two-thirds of the Ugandan Army — were executed during Amin's first year of power. Supposed threats within the civilian population — Janani Luwum, the archbishop of the Church of Uganda, for one — were not only summarily executed, but often forced to do the work themselves and club one another to death. Throughout his life, rumors of cannibalism followed Amin, who was reported to have kept the severed heads of his rivals in a freezer. An obituary in the Guardian after his death in 2003 described the Ugandan leader as “one of the most brutal military dictators to wield power in post-independence Africa.” The exact number of killings for which he can be blamed is hard to pin down definitively, but the BBC has pegged the figure at around 400,000.

Some say there’s more to the man than the numbers. One of his most vocal boosters is none other than Jaffar Amin, the 10th of the late dictator’s 40 officially recognized offspring, by seven officially recognized wives. Jaffar insists that the world truly misunderstands his dad.

Jaffar, now 48, lives in Kampala with his wife and six kids. A prolific Facebooker, he regularly posts pictures of his family, including his father, along with anecdotes, reminiscences, and the odd complaint about the current state of Uganda.

I’ve always been interested in the private lives of dictators, and a couple of years ago, after a quick search, I landed on Jaffar’s profile. I sent him a friend request, along with a note asking if he’d be willing to share his story with me for an article. I expected a polite “No thanks.” But Jaffar responded right away, agreeing to forward along “generic” answers to questions he has either been asked over the years, or ones he assumed he would be asked.

What he sent was anything but generic. One afternoon in August 2013, I looked at my inbox to find dozens and dozens of pages littered with almost stream-of-consciousness reminiscences about life with his father. It took a while to make sense of it all — some of it seemed to be notes for a future book, some of it taken from a talk Jaffar had given, and some of it consisted of large, disjointed blocks of text pasted directly into the email.

Jaffar doesn’t come off as some sort of evil dictator’s demon spawn, but rather as an everyday guy living in the suburbs. He spent 11 years working as a manager for DHL. These days, he picks up commercial voiceover gigs when he can — his dulcet tones have urged people to visit the Kampala showroom of a South Korean furniture company called Hwansung, to tune in to 88.2 FM, and to fly Qatar Airways.

Though I wouldn’t describe the two of us as “friends,” Jaffar and I have spoken on the phone a handful of times to discuss our possible collaboration. After about a year, Jaffar’s emails started coming with signoffs like, “God bless you and your family.” He recently wrote to me, “I owe you a wealth of thanks for bringing out the human side of my parent.”

At the same time, Jaffar has also obviously grown somewhat weary of discussing the past. Early on, when I asked one too many follow-up questions, Jaffar replied, “You could be a run-of-the-mill blogger for all I [know], for I have always only given Interviews to the Established Media Houses so consider this my last correspondence with you[,] take the gift or simply trash it or bin it as we Anglophones are fond of expressing.”

It was far from our last exchange. The silence ended a month or so later, after I told Jaffar I had gotten the official go-ahead from my editors at Foreign Policy. I can only assume that Jaffar, who later told me he was looking for partners to work with him on a somewhat nebulous documentary film project that he said he hoped would show “the other side of Idi Amin Dada,” didn’t want to pass up the publicity.

To most of the world, the name Idi Amin carries dark connotations. The annals of history place the late Ugandan leader alongside Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Slobodan Milosevic in the pantheon of vicious madmen. For his part, Jaffar says he doesn’t view his father “through rose-tinted glasses,” though he argues that “more die from hunger and misadventures into Sudan and the Congo than have been accused of this man I call father.” Idi Amin’s overarching aim, according to Jaffar, was “to break the colonialist chains and unshackle the colonialist yoke from around our necks.” To many, Idi Amin, a man the last U.S. ambassador to Uganda referred to as “Hitler in Africa,” was simply a murderous tyrant. To Jaffar, he was “great as a father.”

Jaffar attributes some of the lingering ill will toward his father to basic breakdowns in communication. While the world was convinced that Amin had a taste for human flesh, it wasn’t so, says Jaffar. What of Jaffar’s brother, Moses, who was allegedly killed and eaten by his father in 1974? He’s actually “alive and well in France,” according to Jaffar.

And Jaffar says he’s not the only one who believes Moses is alive. “A few years ago when I was in the United States, the editor in chief of Chicago Suntimes [sic] newspaper told me how he would forgive Amin of all atrocities committed but never the one of sacrificing his son,” an acquaintance wrote to Jaffar in a letter, which he then posted to Facebook in 2009. “I tried but couldn't convince him that Moses Amin actually was still alive. According to him, many reliable Ugandans had told him of Moses's sad fate.”

The rest of the Amin family does not find it necessary to change anyone’s perceptions. They are happy, according to Jaffar, to “let sleeping dogs lie.” But, as he said in his “generic” answers, “I'm the type who feels that I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to explain my father's legacy. And I've set that as my own personal goal or agenda, so to speak...”

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http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/07/this-man-i-call-father/

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