In Uganda, a U.S. actor and his movie conjure up the ghost of Idi Amin
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KAMPALA, Uganda: This year, the Oscar buzz has made it all the way to Kampala.
On Saturday, Forest Whitaker, a leading contender for best actor, parted a crowd of paparazzi in front of a chic hotel here in Uganda's capital and strutted down a red carpet for the official opening of "The Last King of Scotland."
Official being the key word. Because the movie, about the blood-soaked reign of Uganda's mercurial dictator, Idi Amin, actually arrived a few weeks ago, via bootlegged DVDs shipped in from China. It has already created quite a stir in Kampala's tin-roofed video halls.
Ugandans are struck by Whitaker's likeness to Amin — and moved by the scenes of an era they would like to forget. What is more, they are proud that one of this year's surprise Hollywood hits is about their country, was filmed in their country and, now, nearly five months after its release in the United States, is finally being seen here.
Some people, like Davis Kizito, the manager of an orphanage, have seen the film three times.
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"It was wonderful," Kizito said, as he left a showing on Friday night with a baby in his arms. "I'm going to watch it again."
Like others, Kizito said that after all the Rambo movies, Hindi films and second-rate European action flicks he had sat through, it was a joy to see his own country on film and to learn more about an era of Uganda's past, much of which is still shrouded in mystery.
Amin, a charismatic army sergeant and fearsome boxer, seized power in 1971, promising to shake off the vestiges of colonialism. But he plunged the country into a bloodbath, brutally eliminating his enemies — sometimes with a hammer — until he was overthrown in 1979. More than 300,000 people are believed to have been killed.
The movie tracks those events through a fictional relationship with a Scottish doctor, but one reason it seems to resonate with audiences here is because so much of it is true.
"This is not a bad attempt at history," said Henry Kyemba, the author of "A State of Blood," a book he published in exile in 1977 about his years as a minister in Amin's government.
The Amin family, meanwhile, is not so happy. Relatives said that the former president, who called himself the "Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea" and "The Last King of Scotland," among other things, was not the madman that Whitaker portrays him as being.
"I don't care what people say," said Taban Amin, the eldest of more than three dozen of Amin's children. "Whitaker doesn't look like my father. He's too short, and his teeth are wrong."
As for the festivities on Saturday, Amin seemed a little hurt that he was not invited.
"I mean, we're family after all," he said.
Some Ugandans said the attention surrounding the film was bittersweet, because many people in the West would now associate Uganda with a shameful period of its history.
But Uganda has made a sharp break with its past. It took some years after Amin was deposed (he died in exile in Saudi Arabia in 2003) for Uganda to pull itself together, but today it is one of the safest and most stable countries in Africa.
It is a leader in the fight against AIDS, and such a reliable Western ally that as soon as donor nations suggested sending African peacekeepers into chaotic Somalia, Uganda was the first to volunteer.
These days, instead of bodies bobbing down the Nile, there are European white-water rafters. Kampala is home to Western chain stores and several $300-a-night hotels.
"It's hard to believe that was our country," said Sisto Rwamafigi, 25, a clerk at a video store who saw the movie recently.
It was only because of Uganda's stability that the filmmakers from Fox Searchlight Pictures could bring a major entourage here to shoot on location.
That's not always the case with African movies. Take "Black Hawk Down," the big-budget action flick made about the infamous battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, in which 18 U.S. servicemen were killed. It was filmed in Morocco.
Originally, the makers were planning on making the Amin movie in South Africa, but after a research trip to Uganda, they decided to move production here. The director, Kevin MacDonald, said at a prescreening news conference in Kampala on Saturday that filming in Uganda was "the single best production decision we made."
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