The Last King of Scotland and the White Gaze

I watched The Last King of Scotland this past week - a film about the rise and ways of Idi Amin, president of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. While Uganda is a good distance from Botswana, I'd be naive to believe that all my readers are up on their African geography, culture, history and politics and that they may fudge together the various distinctions into one composite opinion.

And what, pray tell, would that opinion be if you've only seen this film? Hard to say. If one equates Amin with Africa according to this film, then the country is jocular, but also menacing; large and plentiful, but immature and inefficient; loyal, but suspicious. In the end, Amin's regime installed by Western powers bypasses democracy and kills approximately 300,000 of his own people - an all too often told tale for the dark continent so it would seem.

The story is told from the point of view of a young Scottish doctor who has traveled to Uganda to do good, only to become one of Amin's advisers. The story comes to a head when Amin proclaims himself the father of Uganda only for his white Western adviser to call him a child. I wonder how this story would be different if Ngugi had written the script.

I've been skeptical of the West's ability to tell other cultures how they're wrong and what they should do to correct their situation ever since reading Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. In this book de Soto discusses how the West preached capitalism to former Communist countries (and South America) without taking into account the importance of the proper legal structure to support their new economies. This is kinda like telling someone to bake a cake, giving them pans, food and an oven, but not the recipe. I have a hard enough time with a recipe...

What does this film do for my book? Well, it reminds me that Western audiences still like to buy the African despot story rather than the Western stooge story. How can I use this to my advantage? Drop the occasional genocide joke, you say? Sure. Why not? Always fun to play on the naive assumptions of folks, ie that if you're not a dead African that you're a killer and incapable of being democratic. Then again, what good is democracy when the elected leader sees the vote of confidence as support for his/her will and not trust to do the will of the people?