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
Africas most notorious dictator.
S T O RY BY J U S T I N R O H R L I C H

Father

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, Amins 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 theres more to the man than the numbers. One of his most vocal
boosters is none other than Jaffar Amin, the 10th of the late dictators 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.
Ive always been interested in the private lives of dictators, and a couple of
years ago, after a quick search, I landed on Jaffars profile. I sent him a
friend request, along with a note asking if hed 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 Amin poses for a photo in Uganda in 2012.

Jaffar doesnt come off as some sort of evil dictators 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 calledHwansung, to tune in
to 88.2 FM, and to fly Qatar Airways.
Though I wouldnt 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, Jaffars 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, didnt 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 doesnt 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
Amins 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 wasnt so, says Jaffar. What of Jaffars
brother, Moses, who was allegedly killed and eaten by his father in 1974?
Hes actually alive and well in France, according to Jaffar.

Idi Amins family in Jinja, Uganda, 1965. Moshe Amin Dada, Idi Amins younger brother, is on the left. Idi
Amins father and Jaffars grandfather, Andrea Amin Dada, is seated. Idi Amins chief wife, Sarah Mutesi
Kibedi Amin, stands in the center.

And Jaffar says hes 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 anyones
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.
Jaffars turns of phrase often sound like theyre coming from an English
gentleman. He says he was exposed to Anglo-Saxon culture through
Ugandas British colonial history and what he describes as his fathers
obsession with everything British, while hating their exclusivity. But if Idi
Amin hated upper-crust snobbery, he certainly didnt mind the finer things
in life.
In the 1970s, Amin expropriated a property on the shore of Lake Victoria to
create, in Jaffars words, his own version of Balmoral or Camp David. He
called it Cape Town View. Amin also helped himself to Mukusu Island, a
23-acre piece of land in the lake not far from Kampala. He dubbed that one
Paradise Island.
Not everyone found the area so idyllic. Amin reportedly threw several of
his own ministers to the crocodiles that lived in the lake, with one local
fisherman telling theTelegraph in 2002, When I was fishing, I would see

many bodies, sometimes just parts of bodies, in the lake. They were
enemies of Amin and so he killed them. Then the crocodiles would eat
them.
Tales abound of Amins casual sadism, carried out during a reign that has
come to be synonymous with brutality. R, a former political
prisoner, remembers watching a lot of bad things, a lot of castration. They
cut people up and all kinds of stuff. Those still alive your job was to clean
it up. A university lecturer who displeased Amin was later found
beheaded by the side of a road. Henry Kyemba, one of Amins former
ministers, claimed in 1978that Amin admitted to him two separate times
that he had eaten human flesh, calling it saltier than leopard meat.
Jaffar doesnt spend too much time dwelling on the details of the grisly
accusations leveled at his father. In his reminiscences, Jaffar humanized his
dad, explaining that Amin was fond of gadgets. His father's collection
included an aluminum Polaroid camera wrapped in maroon leather, and
Betamax machines flown in from Dubai. (Meanwhile, Jaffar recently asked if
Id download an HD version of a Hungarian film onto a flash drive and FedEx
it to him in Kampala. I have never had a chance to watch this film
properly, he said, explaining that power outages were also making it hard
for him to access his email.) And according to Jaffar, his father also liked to
drive his Maserati around the country and turn up at parties, funerals,
village gatherings, and so forth, unannounced, delighting his surprised
subjects.

Conversely, those on Amins bad side who didnt find themselves dead
could instead face public humiliations. In July 1975, Amin had a group of
British businessmen, working in Uganda as guests of the regime, carry
him to a diplomatic reception atop a sedan chair. One of them was a
Kampala car dealer named Robert Scanlon.
What a spectacle it was! Jaffar wrote on his Facebook page last March.
Caucasian men, carrying a Black African! A hilariously true inversion of
roles!
Jaffar claimed the men were in on the gag, insisting, The Caucasians in this
jestful event were also laughing because they were not forced to carry dad.

They did it willingly. Scanlon disappeared in 1977. That year theObserver,

citing an anonymous Ugandan official, reported that he was arrested and
then sledgehammered to death by Amins henchmen.
His body has never been found. Since Scanlon isnt around to give his side
of the story, I got in touch with his daughter Chrie, now 51. She is a registered
nurse who runs a mobile dermatology clinic in Blackpool, England. Chrie
was 14 years old at the time her father went missing. Unlike Jaffar, she
doesnt look back on the episode with a great deal of mirth.
My aunt told me my father was under great duress to do it, she told me in
an email. There was a threat to the lives and safety of other expats if my
father did not cooperate. The other men worked on contract with/for my
father. I am in contact with one of them. I understand that the chair was
brought from the Masonic lodge. My father was a Freemason.
Less than two years after Scanlons disappearance, dissent within Uganda
and Amin's ill-fated attempt to annex the Kagera province of Tanzania led to
a war. The following April, Amin was ousted by Tanzanian troops and
Ugandan opposition fighters.

J
affar Amin and his brothers Moses, Lumumba, Machomingi, and Geriga, at the White House Inn, a hotel in
Kabale, Uganda, in 1976, while Idi Amin was president.

Amin went into exile with Jaffar, who was 12 years old
at the time, along with an entourage of some 80-odd government
ministers, military officers, and family members. The group moved to Libya
as guests of Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi, who had been a loyal Amin ally.
But about a year into their stay, Amin became offended when the politically
ambitious Qaddafi began allying himself with Tanzanian President Julius
Nyerere, the man behind Amins fall. Amin viewed this as nothing less than
a betrayal. In 1980, he relocated to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Jaffar, along with
a small handful of siblings and associates of his fathers, went with him.

(The others wound up scattered between Paris, Kinshasa, and Britain.)

As longtime BBC Africa correspondent Brian Barronexplained in 2003, The
Saudis had been staunch allies because Idi was a Muslim convert who
ordered mosques built across Uganda when he was in power. The deal the
Saudis made with Amin in return for safe haven was clear: Our door is open,
but stay out of politics and keep your mouth shut.
Upon the arrival of Amin and his entourage, the House of Saud provided
Amin with sanctuary as well as a stipend. (Jaffar says it was more than
$26,000 a month.) Insisting he could trust no one but his own children,
Amin eventually ordered the bulk of his hangers-on to leave. Jaffar soon
found himself serving as the proverbial errand boy, cook, housekeeper,
banker, driver, bodyguard, and etcetera.
Idi Amins life in exile sounds less like that of a bloodthirsty madman
waiting to die than one of a retiree trying to stay busy in West Palm Beach.
Jaffar describes days spent shopping, with the supermarket being one of his
fathers favorite destinations. In Saudi Arabia, Dad loved to shop, Jaffar
explained in one of the reminiscences he sent. So we made a lot of trips to
the mall, especially the Safeway.
Amin often took his lunch at a local Pakistani restaurant, which seems a
curious choice for a man who stripped Ugandas prosperous 80,000-odd
South Asian residents of their businesses and property during 1972s racebased economic war before expelling them from the country. (He left the
controversy to Allah, but he always felt he needed the world to know that

he compensated the British Asians, recalled Jaffar.)

After lunch, it was off to the Corniche for Amins regular dip in the Red Sea.
The day would close with a return home with bags full of groceries for the
sagging freezer and the frost-free fridge for the delicate stuff, followed by
seven oclock prayers and dinner.

I
di Amin at a fruit market in Mecca, Saudi Arabia with his family, his Saudi bodyguards, and children from the
market in 1983. Jafar is in the center, wearing sunglasses.

Jaffar recently sent me some new memories of life in exile with his dad,
describing a serendipitous meeting with the Nation of Islams Louis
Farrakhan at the Jeddah airport, in 1989. Jaffars kid brother Moses was

heading back to school in Paris, and the family had gone to see him off.
While his father killed time at a nearby soda fountain, Jaffar spotted
Farrakhan with his entourage and walked over to say hello. According to
Jaffar, it tickled Leonard Muhammad, Farrakhans son-in-law and chief of
staff, that he was listening to MC Hammer.
I said, I am a discerning dancer and to my mind he is the only one who
could beat me in a dance competition.
When he was 18, Jaffar left Jeddah and his fathers life in exile to
matriculate at Irwin College, a 300-student, sixth-form school in Leicester,
England. In what came as a surprise to the new student, the town was
the primary destination for Ugandan Indians his father had kicked out of
their homes a decade and a half earlier. Given this, it isnt surprising that
Jaffar made an effort to mask his identity while there. In fact, so determined
was Jaffar to fly under the radar, that his father signed all correspondence
to him with a pseudonym, Abu Faisal Wangita.
When he completed his studies at Irwin in 1989, Jaffar returned to Saudi
Arabia. But the next year, when he was 24, fear of the impending Persian
Gulf War gave Jaffar the motivation he needed to return home to Uganda.
He didnt foresee a problem. More than a decade had passed since his
father was ousted from power. Though Jaffar does not believe Amin would
express remorse or regret for anything he had done, he felt Uganda had
had enough time to turn the corner.
I was curious to know if this truly was the case. Idi Amin was warned by the

government that replaced him that if he ever returned to Uganda, he would

face charges for war crimes. He never stepped foot in the country again
before his death in 2003. But at least three of his sons have returned to live
in Uganda, one of whom was convicted of murder for beating and stabbing
a man to death in a London gang fight. Whatever family money once
existed is apparently gone, and now, nearly 36 years later, the remaining
Amins have settled into fairly routine existences. So, have they been
welcomed, or are they viewed with scorn? Are they hated? Tolerated?
Something in between?
Rebecca Severe, from Ugandas Karamoja region, saw most of her family
wiped out by government troops in a 1971 massacre shortly after Amin
seized power. She was 8 years old at the time and she has never spoken
about what she saw until now.
After a Ugandan Army soldier came out on the losing end of a dispute with
a local person in Karamojas Moroto district, Severe remembers soldiers
descending on the town, where they did their work. Savere was handed a
saucepan for protection by her aunt and sent to hide in the house.

Jaffar poses wearing a signature jersey of Uganda's national football team the Cranes in October 2011.

Indelible as the murders carried out by Idi Amins men were, Severe, now
52, didnt flinch when she met Jaffar at a marathon in Kampala a few years
back. We Ugandans dont see the children as the problem, said Severe,
who now splits her time between California and Uganda, and was
introduced to me by a mutual acquaintance. We view the parent as the
problem.
Gawaya Tegulle, a columnist and political commentator in Kampala, also
saw his share of brutality and killings carried out by Amins forces. For him,
the memories have been a bit harder to shake.
Those of us who actually witnessed the atrocities of Mr. Amin do have a bit
of trouble relating with them, Tegulle told me from his office in Kampala. I

have fathers of my childhood friends that were killed by Amin. We watched

some of them being carted off to their death, beaten all the while. We have
kids who screamed in terror as their fathers were being tortured, while
being taken away. I lived in fear of my own dad never coming back home.
Every time I see one of them Amin kids, or even hear about them, I'll be
frank with you I freak out, he continued. A cold shiver goes down my
spine. It's so hard. And I have nothing against them. But we tend to see
them in the light and context of their father before them. And I know many
of my peers who share even deeper sentiments than mine.
In 2006, Jaffars brother, Taban Amin, was appointed to a senior position in
Ugandas state security services by President Yoweri Museveni (something
Tegulle said he still finds hard to stomach). Another brother, Hussein, has
publicly announced his intention to run for a seat in the Ugandan
parliament in 2016. Though he hasnt yet acted on it, Jaffar told me that he
has entertained the idea of running for office.
Its not outside the realm of possibility that an Amin will once again lead
Uganda. The countrys population is the worlds youngest about 78
percent of Ugandans are under 30 and thus have no firsthand memories
of the Amin years. And if its not Hussein or Jaffar, there is also the
somewhat surreal possibility that Uganda could one day again find itself
with a leader by the name of Idi Amin.
Said Jaffar, I will be my second son Idi Amins No. 1 cheerleader when he
stands for high office 40 years from now, inshallah.

In the meantime, he still has lots to say. When I told Jaffar this article would
finally be running, I got an email back saying, You forgot about our book
commission already!