Idi Amin: Lion of Africa (2010)
In writing a revisionist account of Idi Amin’s rise to power and expulsion of Uganda’s Asian minority, Manzoor Moghal simultaneously asserted his own importance in the country’s politics and history.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.
Content warning: Mass murder; Anti-Asian racism; Anti-Blackness.
Idi Amin: Lion of Africa was a self-published (through the British arm of US company AuthorHouse) biography of the former Ugandan dictator, written by Manzoor Moghal. The book sought to challenge the dominant perceptions in the Anglophone world of Amin, who ruled Uganda between 1971 and 1979 – during which time Amnesty International estimated his regime killed between 100,000 and 500,000 people – as a fool or a monster.1 Moghal himself knew Amin personally: he was a Ugandan Asian, and a prominent figure in community politics and local government there prior to Amin’s expulsion of the country’s Asian community in 1972, and who after relocating to the British city of Leicester, eventually became prominently involved in community and race relations organisations there.
The book begins with a introduction explaining Moghal’s desire to provide a different account of Amin’s rise to power, followed by a scene-setting prologue of Moghal’s own escape from Uganda with his wife and children in 1972, after learning Amin had placed him on a hitlist.2 It then takes the reader through Amin’s ascent from captain to commander of the Ugandan Army shortly after independence, consolidating his own power base while Prime Minister Milton Obote dismantled the country’s nascent democracy, and ramped up persecution of the country’s small but economically relatively prosperous South Asian diasporic community. The book relates how Amin exploited a worsening rift between Uganda and Britain to seize power himself while Obote was attending a Commonwealth summit, with covert British support, ostensibly on the precept of normalising the political situation in the country, but instead consolidated his power.
Lion of Africa explains how Amin cannily ramped up pressure on the Asian community, and after a further fallout with Britain, announced their expulsion. Throughout the book, Moghal seeks to set out the complex ethnic dynamics and worsening cronyism operating in post-independence Ugandan politics, but also his own personal proximity to Amin and other key political figures, especially during the negotiations between Amin and the Asian community’s leaders. He concludes with a final chapter in which he reflects upon Amin as a politician and personality, as he knew him, including a final meeting between the author and his subject in Saudi Arabia in 1984, after Amin had been deposed.
My own interest in Lion of Africa is less in the insights it provides into Amin than it does into Moghal, a fascinating figure in his own right, in the way he connects the histories of post-colonial Uganda and ethnic conflict with those of multicultural and multifaith politics in Britain in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He is someone I first came across when he was a contributor to a 2012 episode of the BBC Radio 4 panel programme The Reunion on the subject of ‘Ugandan Asians’, which I have previously written about for this newsletter. In this current post, I want to set the story Moghal tells in Lion of Africa within the broader context of his own life and career, and the wider narratives he has related about Uganda, Amin, and the Ugandan Asian diaspora over the past three decades.
Manzoor Moghal, from Masaka to Leicester
Manzoor Moghal migrated from India to Uganda as an infant and, after returning to Pakistan to complete his higher education, became a successful businessman in the Ugandan city of Masaka, as well as a member of its municipal council. He also represented the Asian community as a delegate in meetings with the national government. Although he had initially intended to move to Canada, Moghal and his family settled in Leicester after expulsion. From the 1980s onwards, he became an influential figure locally and nationally, serving as chairman of the city’s Federation of Muslim Organisations and of Leicestershire County Council’s Race Relations Committee – being awarded an MBE in 2001 for his contribution to race relations in the city – as well as vice-chairman of the Ugandan Evacuees Association. He also unsuccessfully stood for election as the Social Democratic Party candidate for Bradford West in the 1987 General Election, a campaign that he said was marred by intimidation against potential Muslim voters by the local Labour Party.
Moghal has frequently contributed to public discourse on the Ugandan Asian experience, being regularly sought since the 1980s for comment for the local and national press, as well as the BBC, as part of broader reporting and reflections upon the community’s history in Leicester and Britain more widely, particularly during anniversaries of expulsion, including the aforementioned 2012 episode of The Reunion. Moreover, he has contributed as an interviewee to oral history projects such as the Heritage Lottery Foundation-funded ‘East to West’ project, marking 50 years since expulsion, administered by interfaith charity Faith Matters.
Lion of Uganda was apparently based upon an unpublished memoir Moghal had written during the late 1970s, revised for publication with aid of his son Arif, and Manzoor’s assistant Radikha Madhani.3 Madhani would subsequently work for Jonathan Ashworth, the Labour MP for Leicester South. It was the first of three books Moghal would publish with AuthorHouse, with two more appearing in 2019: Commentaries: Politics Religion Terror, a compilation of articles he had written on these topics for newspapers including the Daily Mail and the Leicester Mercury; and Public Speaking: How to Master It.
Amin, Uganda, and the British
Central to Moghal’s thesis was that the rot set in under Obote rather than Amin. He characterised Obote’s rule as built upon courting and then violently betraying Uganda’s different African ethnic communities, as well as exploiting its religious divisions. He detailed how Obote initially forged an alliance with the Bagandans, the largest ethnic group in the country, originally backing their King Mutese II for the ceremonial role of President, before violently deposing him in a military assault on his Kampala palace in 1966, as part of his own consolidation of dictatorial power over the country. The tragedy of Ugandan politics, from Moghal’s perspective, was the way talented politicians like Benedicto Kiwanuka, independent Uganda’s first Chief Minister, and Francis Walugembe, mayor of Masaka, were marginalised and persecuted, to be replaced by cronies of Obote, and later Amin.4
Moghal’s approach to Amin himself, however, was marked by a refusal to moralise, and a barely concealed fascination with what he saw as the dictator’s ‘little-understood African intelligence’.5 As he put it in the book’s introduction:
Idi Amin was a uniquely fascinating character, always big news not only in Uganda and Britain but all the over the world. He made headlines everywhere, continually shocking and absorbing people with his words and actions and even more with the things he was said to do in private. He rose through his animal instincts and had no boundaries and no fears of repercussions for any act he deemed necessary or politic.6
Later in the Lion of Africa, Moghal compared Amin to Hitler, whom Amin admired, in a manner that stressed their shared importance, and political skill, rather than awfulness. He reflected:
[Amin] will not be remembered kindly. Estimates of numbers killed by his regime vary between 100,000 and 500,000. The damage he did to Uganda and her neighbours is barely quantifiable. But by his actions he immortalised himself: he will not be forgotten.7
Equally, despite having nearly fallen foul of Amin’s murderousness (which cost several of his close associates their life), Moghal was willing to meet with him in 1984, characterising Amin’s manner on the occasion as initially cautious but increasingly gregarious and concilliatory.8 Moghal insisted at the end of Lion of Uganda that he held no resentment towards Amin, nor did he take any pleasure in hearing of his death in 2003.9
Moghal was, by contrast, scathing in his account of Britain’s conduct throughout. He accused them of having conspired with their African allies before 1962 to demonise the Asian community for the unequal distribution of the fruits of late colonial development. He attributed their support for Amin’s coup against Obote for their humiliation at Obote’s public denunciation of their lack of action over oppressive white minority rule in South Africa and Rhodesia.10 He also felt that they had grossly underestimated Amin, whom they subsequently lampooned ‘in order to camouflage their own shortcomings in their dealings with this man who had outwitted them at every turn.’11 Moghal deemed the British refusal to honour a promise of a loan to Uganda, after Amin increasingly aligned with Arab states against the West, as the trigger for the expulsion of the Asians, whom Britain then only belatedly, reluctantly, and partially accommodated.12
Moghal and the Asian community
Lion of Africa portrays the Asian position in Uganda as having been deeply precarious from the outset, even before the worsening of anti-Asian sentiment under Obote. Moghal described how their hopes of an improved situation under Amin were swiftly dashed by the new ruler and his coterie also publicly criticising the community for a lack of economic and social integration.13 He detailed how Amin called an Asian conference in December 1971, only to then make a closing statement in which he accused them of siphoning off money from economy, not paying taxes, refusing to rent premises to Africans, and refusing to let their daughters marry Africans. According to Moghal, this backfired by encouraging greater unity and resolve among the Asian community, and the following month, Amin invited Asian leaders to his home in Entebbe and behaved much more cordially, in order to alleviate their concerns. Yet this too was only a brief reprieve, and later that year he would announce the expulsion order, accusing the Asian minority of economic warfare against Uganda.14
Moghal characterised the Asian community’s own reluctance to take up Ugandan citizenship after 1962 as understandable given the short initial timeframe for them to apply to do so, their justified fears over anti-Asian sentiment, especially under Obote, who prevented existing applications from being processed. At the same time, he judged their faith that Britain would continue to act as their protector post-independence as naïve, as illustrated by the 1968 Immigration Act that pre-emptively inhibited their ability to move there. He pushed back against portrayals of Ugandan Asians as uniformly privileged, and against the idea of a uniform Ugandan Asian community at all, given the religious and ethnic divisions within it that he claimed led different sections of it to try to advance their own position, at the expense of others.15
Throughout these events, Lion of Africa depicts Moghal himself as an integral and farsighted figure in the major historical events it describes, personally familiar with leading Ugandan politicians, integrally involved in the high-level summits between Amin and the Asian community leaders, and aware prior to expulsion that they were living on borrowed time. The book contains multiple photographs from Moghal’s own personal archive of him fulfilling his official roles, including alongside Amin. As Moghal put it in the book’s introduction:
I lived through those times and those upheavals in Uganda, and it was as [Amin] rose to power that I had first had contact and meetings with him and also those around him who fell in his wake. This is a unique insight and telling of his story from someone who heard and saw the physical smashing of his way to power both by tanks and shells and by the brutal murders of opponents in the streets of Kampala.16
Moghal’s social standing and ethnicity afford him a privileged insider/outsider role in the book: he was not of Africa, but deeply familiar with it, and well-placed to explain Uganda’s complex ethnic politics to others. However brutal Amin was, it was a mark of Moghal’s importance that the dictator tried to have him killed, as much as it was that he then hosted him while in exile a decade later. It confirmed a status that Moghal would subsequently take a great deal of time to rebuild in a British context.
While prone to othering and even primitivising Amin and the Ugandans, especially in describing political violence and corruption, Moghal nonetheless had a strong sympathy with them vis-à-vis the British, taking vicarious satisfaction in their humiliating their former colonial masters, even when the Ugandan Asians were the unfortunate collateral in these confrontations. Perhaps in this regard his retrospective identification with Amin was strengthened by the latter being a Muslim, and by the climate of Islamophobia that existed in Britain in the 2000s, although Moghal himself was also a fierce critic of anti-Western strands of fundamentalist Islam. Yet perhaps it also owed something to the elite racism that Moghal witnessed in Britain after moving there. In his later interview for the ‘East-West’ project in 2023, he recalled an encounter with a middle-aged white woman at a public meeting in Leicester in the early 1980s on the subject of international aid:
After the Asian [community] leaders had spoken, she turned towards me and said in a low voice that Asians always spoke in a poor and ungrammatical English. My name was announced to come up to the stage and speak. I spoke extempore about politics in Britain and the poor developing countries and the need for international aid to help them. After I had finished my speech, I returned to my chair, and as I sat down, my neighbour the white woman who had earlier spoken to me was looking at me with her mouth open in amazement. She had not expected that any person not of her colour could speak English so well, in a place like Leicester.
Lion of Africa decried the worsening cronyism in Ugandan politics, and portrayed this as inherently connected with anti-Asian racism: Moghal’s position in Ugandan politics, the Asian position in Uganda, was one of merit; on the other side was the politics of resentment and unearned patronage. Likewise, Moghal insisted on his own merit as an advocate for his communities – Ugandan Asians, South Asians, Muslims, the developing world – in Britain. In this regard, Amin functioned in Moghal’s telling as an unlikely kindred spirit: a poor outsider who rose by his skill and cunning to rule Uganda, albeit viciously and ultimately ruinously, and who likewise had the capacity to astonish and outfox a complacently supremacist white British elite.
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Otherwise, please show your appreciation by sharing this post more widely, and referring the newsletter to friends.
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Estimate taken from ‘Uganda under President Amin (1971 to 1979)’, in Amnesty International, Political Killings by Governments (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1983), pp. 44–49 (p. 44).
I do wonder whether the timing of Moghal’s book has anything to do with the 2006 release of The Last King of Scotland, a Hollywood film providing a fictionalised account of Amin’s rule (with Forest Whittaker playing Amin) – though it is not a representation that I’ve read or heard Moghal himself reference.
Manzoor Moghal, Idi Amin: Lion of Africa (Milton Keynes: AuthorHouse, 2010), p. v.
Ibid., pp. 47–59.
Ibid., p. viii.
Ibid., p. vi.
Ibid., p. 161.
Ibid., pp. 164–166.
Ibid., p. 167.
Ibid., pp. 37–41.
Ibid., p. vii.
Ibid., pp. 90–96.
Ibid., pp. 81–82.
Ibid., pp. 83–96.
Ibid., pp. 68–80.
Ibid., p. vii.