Scotland Under Erasure in Kevin Macdonald’s Adaptation of The Last King of Scotlandi

Lesley Marx University of Cape Town

I see the brown wings of a skua flap by the window, the great skua with the white patch, the robber-gull, which feeds by forcing other birds to disgorge. Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland, 344.

To a disenchanted viewer, the skua’s parasitical practices provide an apt image of the film version’s masticating of Foden’s novel. To begin so baldly is to confess at once to my own deep disappointment with the film, despite my cerebral celebrations of recent theoretical explorations in film adaptation that urge us to move away from naïve theses of fidelity. The infidelities practiced by the film are, however, sufficiently intriguing and open up such seminal questions around the politics of adaptation—broadly understood—that they warrant the time and energy of more formal analysis.

At the end of the director’s commentary provided by Kevin Macdonald on the DVD of his film, he moves from observations on the significance of Lake Victoria as the cradle of civilization and the source of the Nile, to commenting, as the final credits of the film roll up with historical facts and archival footage: “So now we go to the real history—what happened next, what happened to Amin.”ii He is moved by scenes of the “real people” celebrating the overthrow of Amin, after the “fictional or semi-fictional story” we have been through. The final scene is taken from Barbet Shroeder’s documentary: a close-up of Amin glancing uneasily from side to side. Macdonald describes the image as perfectly capturing Amin’s “watchfulness, paranoia, vulnerability and fear.”iii He then encourages us to explore the film’s website set up by Fox Searchlight, as well as the documentary, Capturing Idi Amin, on the DVD edition of the film. There are also, he tells us, many books that have been written about Amin which will enable us to find out more about the history and to compare the film to the real history. Indeed, Capturing Idi Amin not only bears an ironic title (how does one capture a figure so elusive? How can the documentary figuratively invert the historical acts of assault performed by its subject?), but includes actual footage of Idi Amin’s atrocious rule, calling into question, even subverting, the film’s fictionalised depiction. Macdonald’s acceptance that there are differences is noteworthy, but remains unexplored by him.

The tension between fiction and history implied above is seen, also, in the two acknowledgments that bookend the film. The opening titles tell us that “this film is inspired by real people and events,” while the final credits tell us that the film, while scripted by Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock, was “based on

1 the book by Giles Foden.” Macdonald’s documentarist record is legible in the former; his foray into fiction in the latter.iv

Adapting history; adapting novels

The argument that history as it comes to us via the written (or, indeed, the spoken) word is always a narrativised mediation of facts and events is, by now, a widely accepted one.v So, too, the exploration of the relationship of film to history has benefited from the work of Robert Rosenstone whose distinction between “true” and “false” invention in filmic treatments of history has gained wide currency. Underpinning his argument is the acceptance that film tells the stories of history through different means than do written accounts and that the difference of medium may either enlarge our understanding of the past or falsify and diminish it, depending on the narrative and aesthetic choices made by the filmmakers.vi To adopt a rigid and puritanical attitude towards filmed history is to misunderstand the complex signifying practices of film. Even when a film declares itself as a documentary, point of view, narrative sequence and camerawork mediate the events documented. Increasingly, as Stella Bruzzi has demonstrated, documentaries have adopted a postmodern self-reflexive, experimental style, often using dramatic reconstructions of events, that push the boundaries between fictional and observational modes.vii

Films about history, be they fiction or documentary, are adaptations of history. In the case of The Last King of Scotland, we have a film that is partly an adaptation of history and partly a bio-pic, that is, an adaptation of a man’s life, where, again, narrative choice and point of view, as well as casting, are crucial factors in the version of this life that will be represented. Moreover, the film is an adaptation of a novel which, itself, is an imaginative and inventive engagement with the history that is its subject.

Macdonald has been explicit about the fact that his film is a very particular kind of mediated history, neither a documentary nor a fiction film about Uganda or Idi Amin, and explains what attracted him to Foden’s novel:

“…I wouldn’t have made the story if it had just been about Idi Amin and Uganda. It’s up to a Ugandan or African film-maker to tell Idi Amin’s story, but the experience I understand is what it’s like to be a young Scot going to Africa, because I’ve done that myself. So the film is told from Garrigan’s point of view and is about the relationship between Britain and Uganda.”viii

Elsewhere, he insists: “This film isn’t about Uganda, it’s about the relationship between a Ugandan and a Scot.”ix But not just any Ugandan—a very specific Ugandan whose own life was the stuff of fiction. Giles Foden says as much:

2

“It is true that sometimes Amin did and said things that were so off the wall—like writing to Nixon and asking if he needed to come to Uganda for a rest, after the tribulations of Watergate—that I suspected people would think I was just making it up. A little of it I was, for structural, novelistic reasons, but the strangest things in the book are all factually true, even if they seem to be the stuff of fiction. Yet in some ways this fact-fiction debate too is engulfed by Amin’s charismatic effect: he thought of and presented himself as mythological, and long before I got to him was ‘already a novel,’ so to speak.”x

The film is confronted with already existing mediations that contest a frequently expressed desire by the filmmakers for “authenticity.” This desire is tied to Macdonald’s own stellar career in documentary—where he had, nevertheless, already shown an interest in dramatic reconstructions of the past that he was documenting, and in the creation of narrative suspense: both One Day In September (1999) and Touching the Void (2003) are, in effect, thrillers to which we already know the outcome, but that makes little difference to the visceral power they have as we watch.xi Macdonald’s documentary persona is especially notable in the director’s commentary on the DVD, even as he finally acknowledges the “fictional or semi-fictional” nature of his film—it is, surely, that qualifier “semi” that specifically complicates the relationship of the film to history. What kind of invention will “semi” produce? He reiterates time and again his excitement at finding sets and locations that had hardly changed since the seventies, seeing the chair that Idi used to sit in, the limo he drove in, the helicopter he flew in, the tanks used by his army, the musicians who played for him and the songs they played. The most-celebrated authenticity is that of Forest Whitaker, whose Method strategies have been well documented. In Foden’s words:

He had gone completely into character: learning some Swahili, sitting under a mango tree chatting with Amin’s brother, eating Ugandan food with his fingers. He even apparently spoke to his mum using his Amin voice on the phone. As Kerry Washington said … ‘It’s scary because he’s Idi all the time.’xii

The choice to film in Uganda (rather than South Africa) fed into Whitaker’s portrayal, as Macdonald stresses: “Forest Whitaker…was able to draw on Ugandan culture 24 hours a day. People were telling him all the time that they didn’t want a caricature and there were some good things about the man. It put a lot of pressure on him and made him raise his performance.”xiii

So, too, the film has been praised for the sensual reality of Africa that it captures. Stephen Hunter writes:

3 Possibly it’s that the place is so instantly charismatic that in merely pushing the camera button to On, any Westerner records the color, the music, the pulse, the dust, the tragedy, the doom, the grandeur, all the bewildering paradoxes that make the place unique on Earth. Or possibly, it’s that Macdonald’s cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle has the sensitivity to catch the mundane with the spectacular. Whatever the explanation, the movie has a powerful sense of what Africa looks and feels like; you can almost smell it.xiv

The film also used real combat soldiers. Notable, as Foden points out, is Michael Wawuyo, “who acted in the role of the lassoed air force commander … playing the part of a man who, in life, had killed Michael’s own father, then was killed himself by another in the echelons of violence that attended Amin.”xv This quest for the real, the authentic, the historically verifiable, the testament and witness is registered again in the director’s DVD commentary on the use of real photographs of Amin’s atrocities (in the scene where Stone reveals to Garrigan something of the extent of the violations taking place). He notes that he felt “uncomfortable” about using them “but,” he adds, “we are telling a true story in a way here, a story that actually happened to people in Uganda at the time,” and that these would make “the story more powerful,” have “more impact.” Authenticity in the service of fictional sensation, and not of documentary realism, then.

The reason for Macdonald feeling uncomfortable is not explained, but may have something to do with producer Andrea Calderwood’s observation: “We couldn’t do a film about the human side of Idi Amin without showing some of the real brutality that happened. We had to show that as well as the more charismatic, humorous side that people also fell for” (Capturing Idi Amin). So, too, Forest Whitaker has reiterated both on the DVD and in interview, his desire to counter images of Amin as, simply, a monster. He describes him, rather, as “a man who did monstrous things,”xvi and sees him as being demonised “because he stood against colonisation” (Capturing Idi Amin). This desire to humanise Amin is a two-edged sword, with repercussions that mimic the moral labyrinth in which Nicholas Garrigan finds himself. Interestingly, the repetition of complicity in the making of the film in Museveni’s Uganda is admitted to by Macdonald:

“There are now undoubtedly human rights abuses going on under the new regime….You are there to make a film. You don’t want to listen and hear about possible negative things that are going on…. You don’t really want to know the truth. If things are going well for you, you’re benefiting – how much fuss are you going to kick up? And… also how hard is it really to find out what is going on?”xvii

Admissions such as this, after the film’s release, are too late, of course, to rectify the film’s unquestionably ameliorative representation of Amin, and

4 concomitant obfuscating of the horrors suffered under his rule. Is the Scottish filmmaker, his quest for authenticity notwithstanding, overcompensating in his desire not to replicate the colonisers’ proclivity for stereotyping African leaders? Foden’s novel quotes President Julius Nyerere on the subject of Amin: “Since Amin usurped power, he has murdered more people than Smith in Rhodesia, more than Vorster in South Africa. But there is a tendency in Africa that it does not matter if an African kills other Africans. Had Amin been white, free Africa would have passed many resolutions condemning him. Being black is now becoming a certificate to kill fellow Africans” (268).xviii

The same scene which elicits Macdonald’s ambiguous comments on using real photographs of Amin’s atrocities, yields a different, and lyrically articulated, level of documentarist excitement when he describes how he sought to develop “the motif of insects and moths that haunt Nicholas—an extrusion of his own mental state.” The director as documentarist becomes the director as visual poet when he celebrates the appearance of a huge moth that flew around Nicholas throughout the scene. “Coming from a documentary background,” says Macdonald, “you’re always looking around you for the little accidents, things that are going to be given to you for free by the world around you.” This is a happy coupling of happenstance and choice, which might stand as a metaphor for the implicit aim of the film: to bring historical event together with narrative rhetoric and a filmic aesthetic in order, as Aristotle urged, to please and to teach.

Given Macdonald’s eager documentarist appreciation of the various authenticities in his film, one might well ask why he did not simply make a documentary about Idi Amin, foregrounding himself as the Scot who comes to Uganda, and so allaying anxieties about his right or otherwise to engage this subject. Indeed, the degree of reflexivity used by recent forms of documentary, not only by revealing the presence of the filmmaker, but through stylistic choices celebrated in cinéma verité, for example, go some way towards complicating the filmmaker’s authority and, in a politically responsible manner, reduce the paternalism of “speaking for the subaltern.” Paradoxically, Macdonald’s intertextual use of Général Idi Amin Dada, Autoportrait suggests a validating of Barbet Schroeder’s documentary. The French director apparently allows Idi Amin to control his film (an “autoportrait” with its several instances of Amin foregrounding the presence of the cameras and informing the audience of what he will and will not allow to be filmed), yet the film is also obviously subjected to the real director’s editorial choices: a voice-over introduces some of the facts of Amin’s rule, Amin’s words are juxtaposed with images that contradict or ironise his statements, or, alternatively, he is simply allowed to ramble on and on in a slow undercutting of his own credibility, rendering him a buffoon—without, it must be admitted, fully exposing the horrors of his rule and without giving voice to other Ugandans.

5

Macdonald does not choose the documentary route, in however complex a mode. Instead, he takes on the adaptation of a novel whose title suggests one entry point into interpreting Idi Amin and into which he can, fortuitously, project his own Scottishness, but which will radically reconfigure the narrative function of Scotland as framing landscape in the novel, and almost completely jettison its geographical and psychological presence. The adaptation will also involve a convoluted imbrication of fact, fiction and genre. Producer Lisa Bryer tells how she loved the book for its “thriller aspect… set against a regime that existed” (Capturing Idi Amin). Indeed, the DVD case tells us that this is “a heart-thumping thriller,” while the edition of the book that emerged after the film was made describes it as “Giles Foden’s bestselling thriller.” The cover of the novel originally used an image of the historical Idi Amin, resplendent in bright green be-medalled uniform with bulbous cheeks and wagging finger against a pastel image of the Scottish Highlands. After the film, the book sports a cover bisected by St Andrew’s cross with Forest Whitaker peering darkly over the top, James McAvoy pointing a gun off-cover and Kerry Washington looking fearfully towards something we cannot see, with the sepia tints of the Ugandan countryside dividing the young couple. A clear indication then, not only of the thriller genre that will be deployed in this telling of the tale, but of the recomposition of the historical drama as tragic sex triangle. That “Scotland” appears only in the title and the Cross of St Andrew points to the way in which Scotland as idea, as myth, as memory and as signifying landscape, is excised from the film. That Nicholas appears as a gun-toting action hero points equally clearly to his radical shift of character.

If adapting Foden’s novel seemed the most attractive way of telling Uganda’s story under Idi Amin, and telling it from the point of view of a Scot, rather than (fraudulently) asserting an objective third-person narrative, then some fidelity to the richly imagined presence of Scotland and Scottishness in the novel might have been expected. This is not to flout the energetic arguments that have been presented in recent years against reading film adaptations in terms of their fidelity to their source texts or to deny the force of Robert Stam’s witty summary of some of the terms in which the fidelity thesis has been argued:

‘Infidelity’ carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; ‘betrayal’ evokes ethical perfidy; ‘bastardization’ connotes illegitimacy; ‘deformation’ implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; ‘violation’ calls to mind sexual violence; ‘vulgarization’ conjures up class degradation; and ‘desecration’ intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy.xix

Stam uses the term “multitrack” to highlight the multiple semiotic systems available to film simultaneously: words, sound, movement, actors, editing, camerawork and mise-en-scène. xx Christine Geraghty has given sustained

6 attention to how genre, too, plays a vital role in our appreciation of ways in which an adaptation creates meaning.xxi While this opening up of ways of examining film adaptation and the desire to free it from a too simplistic, circular and ultimately solipsistic attention to the similarities and differences between page and screen is welcome, the question of how far the adapter is free to make choices that diverge radically from the source text, whether that be a country’s history, a man’s life or a writer’s novel, is still a worthwhile one when moral and ethical issues are at stake. Adaptations that implicate the history of colonisation, abuse and tempestuous freedoms of Africa will invariably engage such issues. Lindiwe Dovey, in a very interesting analysis of Ramadan Suleman’s adaptation of Njabulo Ndebele’s Fools, uses the term “radical infidelity” to argue that the choices made by the filmmakers serve the valuable purpose of re-envisioning the source text in order to engage with the complexities of past and present. Especially in African adaptations, she argues, these infidelities offer a “reconstructing of identity which forestalls closure and invites us to think of Africa itself as potentially revisable and reconstructable.”xxii Radical infidelities come in different shapes and sizes, however.

Scotland and Nicholas Garrigan: Take 1, The Novel.xxiii

Giles Foden describes the “confused status” of his novel as “80% fiction, but mostly fact” (Capturing Idi Amin). His own background as a journalist gives him a family resemblance to Macdonald’s background in documentary and Richard Rathbone praises the novel as “scrupulously researched and terrifyingly real.”xxiv The fictional dimension of the novel is embodied in the invented doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, who provides a retrospective first-person narration. Nicholas tells how he grew up in a slightly repressive Presbyterian manse where his youthful energies found an imaginative outlet through “maps and stamps and adventure stories,” of “Hickock’s Wild West, Tarzan’s Africa, the Arctic of Peary and Nansen.” He observes: “And I, oddly, was always the Red Indian, the Zulu, the Eskimo…” (20). The stage is set, then, for an idealistic Nicholas, once he has qualified as a doctor, to seek employment in some exotic foreign locale, with a desire to serve the historically dispossessed. He is eager, but diffident, especially, as it turns out, in matters of sex. To his great delight, he is sent to Uganda by the British Civil Service, arriving on the eve of Amin’s coup. He escapes only eight years later when Tanzanian forces overthrow the tyrant. In the intervening years, Nicholas serves a brief term in rural Mbarara where he falls in love with beautiful Israeli doctor Sara Zach. She turns out to be a spy and disappears mysteriously, to be heard from later as the Israelis prepare their raid on Entebbe.

Called to serve Amin as his personal doctor, Nicholas becomes fascinated by his volatile patient—a dangerous enchantment that increasingly implicates Nicholas’s moral sensibilities. There are several key moments on his journey

7 towards a full revelation of the horrors of Amin’s rule: he is asked by his colleague, Dr Peter Mbalu-Mukasa to perform an abortion on Kay Amin, with whom the Ugandan doctor has been having an affair. Nicholas refuses, only to feel deep guilt at the consequences for Kay, murdered and dismembered, and Peter, who commits suicide. The Embassy official, Stone, shows him photographic evidence of Amin’s violations and puts it to him that he, as Amin’s personal physician, is in the perfect position to end Amin’s reign of terror—a sum of money has already been paid into his Scottish bank account. Again, Nicholas refuses. The climactic experience in the unveiling of the brutal realities of Amin’s rule takes place when Nicholas is summoned to Amin, told by him that the journal in which he has documented his stay in Uganda has been found, and that the plot to kill Amin is known. He is then guided down a secret corridor with cells revealing hideous tortures being perpetrated on Amin’s purported enemies. Nicholas is himself locked in one of the cells. His initiation into the brutal rites of Amin’s State Research Bureau finally awakens him to the desperateness of his situation, both physically and morally: “I longed to be in Scotland,” writes Nicholas, “cleansed of this place and its horrors” (244). The climactic confrontation with his own moral unravelling takes place when he realises that he has become so like Amin that he can “contemplate killing him for the sheer pleasure of it” (261).

He eventually escapes, finding his tortuous way into the forest near Mbarara, where he suffers snakebite, eventually being rescued by the Tanzanian army. He returns to Britain only to find that he is suspected of having been party to Amin’s atrocities. Finally, he is free to make his way to the west coast of Scotland and the bothy bequeathed him by a great uncle. It is from this wintry isolated world that he writes his account of his experiences in Uganda, his memoir of the terror of his encounter with the heart of darkness, in effect the book we are reading. Key to his narrative is his attempt to come to terms with his mix of fear and loathing as well as his affection and fascination for Idi Amin. His sense that his affection has made him complicit in Amin’s monstrousness and his inability to act against Amin leave him wandering in a moral labyrinth. Notably, Nicholas’s betrayals are the result of inaction. With reference to the film adaptation, Nicholas’s inaction regarding Kay and Peter is central. Foden may have invented Nicholas to dramatise a complex point of view on Idi Amin, but he resolutely avoids meddling with the facts of history, insofar as they are available. Macdonald and his screenwriters, as I shall discuss below, are much less discreet—and much less responsible.

The complexity of Foden’s novel takes some of its strength from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, not least through the use of the frame narrative. The intertextual connection is instructive more for the differences than the similarities, however. Where Amin is massively present in his oppressive physicality—his body, his laugh, his voice—we encounter Kurtz already in a state of dissolution, scarcely more than a spectre. Perhaps most significantly, the kind and degree of recovery from the experience of “the heart of

8 darkness” is very different in each novel: Marlow tells his tale to a group of sailors on the Thames. The setting of the story is thus communal, oral, embodied. Nicholas writes his account from a place of extreme solitude, with an awareness of the risk that solitude will not enable a full confrontation with his past: “Can you tell the truth when you are talking to yourself? What is the truth about a man on an island?” he asks (22).

Where Marlow’s moral ambiguity is seen most evocatively in his lie to Kurtz’s fiancée, the overall sense of the novel is not that of a confession, more a complex meditation on power, evil and empire. Nicholas’s story is, at least partly, a confessional, an attempt to “face [himself] squarely” (339). His aim may be, as he tells us at the start, to publish his record of events, “not for the purpose of exonerating” himself, “but to provide a genuine eyewitness account” (19). Nevertheless, the final scenes of the novel have all the quality of a baptismal purgation. He rejoices increasingly in the purifying qualities of the cold northern sea: “…I feel cleansed and full of vitality: the voice of the sea, the amniotic rock of it, the burst of salt air in the lungs, they can do this to you. As if the old soul, the bad soul, had been changed into little water drops and fallen into the ocean, never to be found” (264). Given Uganda’s landlocked status, this paean to the sea takes on extra significance, as does the maternal metaphor, both recalling and displacing the complex and claustrophobic Oedipal dynamic that nearly suffocated Nicholas in Uganda. For all the empathy one might feel for Nicholas, however, this private purgatorial dimension of his narrative does suggest a deeply sceptical comment on the trope of the liberal white man in Africa: here, he is well- meaning but finally ineffectual, and flees to the edge of the world to nurse his psychic wounds with whisky and words.

By the end of his narrative, Nicholas may feel that he has “put it all down just as it happened” (339), documenting both Idi Amin’s story and his own, but, to his credit, he also acknowledges a failure to gain access to the whole truth: “I know about all those people who died—and yet also I do not know about them” (341). This acknowledgement of the provisionality and incompleteness of the history he has presented emphasises, again, the distance between novel and film: where Macdonald may acknowledge the difference between historical event and the film’s narrative in his director’s commentary, there is scant effort made to embed such an awareness in the diegesis itself, or, indeed in the cinematic style of the film.

Extending the postmodern qualities of the novel, Garrigan’s act of writing his trauma, of working through his past is pervasively reflexive: he gives his medical account of Amin in terms accessible to “the lay reader” (191); he wonders if his memoir will be published (253, 331); he lets us into his narrative strategies (92) and he makes use of several different genres in his attempt to make order of the chaos of his past: verbatim accounts from his journals, scholarly biography, realist description and passages that read like

9 incantations, especially as Garrigan’s sense of his own boundaries begins to blur and his obsession with, and revulsion at, Amin threaten to overwhelm him. One such passage makes use of anaphora in a particularly disturbing way as images of Idi accumulate in Garrigan’s mind. The images are drawn from the media and documentary footage such as that of Barbet Schroeder’s “autoportrait,” but become increasingly personal to Garrigan:

Him dancing a warrior dance, jabbing with a spear. Him showing the visiting dignatories the squadron of MiG fighters at Entebbe. Him with Castro, with Kurt Waldheim, with Tito…. Him with a baby. Him driving a jeep through jubilant crowds. Him alone. Him with me. (194)

Even more intriguing is a passage much later in the novel after the Tanzanian army has taken Kampala and Garrigan finds himself revisiting the secret tunnel that leads to the torture chambers of the State Research Bureau. Significantly, the tunnel exits from Idi Amin’s bedroom where Garrigan had ministered to the gross body of the child-monster in what he describes as a “genital light”: “And all around hung an animal smell: fox’s earth, badger’s sett—something, in any case, rank and bolt-holeish” (181). Now he reinhabits that moment of strange unnerving intimacy in a series of hallucinations that embrace Idi’s history, Idi as the spectre of Scottish history read from multiple points of view, Idi in Scotland:

I am Idi Amin at Holyrood. I am walking the echoing corridor.…. I am Idi walking with Cromwell in the stables of the Palace….I am Idi as Prince Charlie, carousing smoothly under these high roofs…. I am Idi Amin as Cumberland the persecutor, sword flashing silver in his hand…..I am Idi watching himself at the Filmhouse in Lothian Road – I am a real bit-part, a gun-happy mercenary in the film Zenga. Or I am Idi at Murrayfield…. I am Idi down in the schemes, walking among the poor, and I am Idi at Morningside. I wish I was somewhere else. I wish I was somewhere else because I am somewhere else. I am walking along the corridor between his bedroom and those other rooms… (305-6)

Through the use of Scottish history as metaphor, Foden has found a way to suggest the psychological jigsaw puzzle that is Amin: both Prince Charlie and Cumberland, both B-grade movie star and champion of the underdog. (The documentary, Capturing Idi Amin, is interesting not least for the way the interview material modulates from positive views on Idi as patriot, nationalist and “funny guy,” to Idi as brutal violator of Uganda and its people). As Foden explains in an illuminating article for The Guardian: “The hardest thing to understand about him is how he could be adroit and a buffoon at the same

10 time.”xxv Foden goes on to give an account of the writing of the novel that suggests close affinities with Nicholas Garrigan’s seduction by Amin:

People describe him as evil. It’s a view encouraged by his never- proven cannibalism and well-documented dabbling in ritual magic. Once, writing a murder scene in The Last King of Scotland late at night, I had a feeling of occult presence, a breath of evil at my neck as I tap-tap- tapped away in my Islington flat. It was probably just the breeze. Yet I still feel about the book that Amin’s miraculous tongue—those amazing sayings, always falling into farce by missing truth so narrowly—put me under an obligation to him. Never was a novel more dictated.xxvi

So, too, Garrigan describes Amin’s voice as “soft and deep, soft and deep, like you think an angel’s would be” (222). Even thousands of miles away in his bothy, Nicholas switches on the tapes of Amin speaking: “It is eerie, now, to press the button on the machine and hear his voice: I should not, I know, listen so long, so eagerly” (22).

Notable in these passages (both Foden’s “documentary” account of the writing of the novel and the writing in the novel) is the use of gothic imagery, of a piece with the elements of the supernatural that infuse the novel: Garrigan’s adolescent dreams are redolent of Scottish gothic narratives of guilt, pursuit and demonic doubling associated with Hogg and Stevenson. Later dreams of pornographic antique ornaments, and of Idi quite specifically as a primordial and shape-shifting image of destruction develop this strain of nightmare, as does the association of Archibald Weir, the sinister Scottish Major, with an old folk-tale Nicholas’s father used to tell him or with Pale Kenneth, the soothsayer. On a lighter note, jubilant Ugandans sporting crowns of banana leaves remind him of Green Man pubs. The Ugandan children who lead him to the clinic in Mbarara call good-bye: “There was tinkling laughter as they tumbled down the hill. I thought of elves” (57). More comically, since Amin’s coup takes place on Burns Night, Nicholas imagines that the rats that gambol in the streets of Kampala are “dancing strathspeys and reels” (47). The Scottish narrator of The Last King of Scotland has, thus, a leaning towards reading events through the lens of the non-realist genres of the fantastic, well suited to the attempt to fathom an experience and a gothic “hero” so resistent to rational explication. Scotland’s presence in the novel inflects not only this play with genre, but recurrently serves as a contrapuntal source of memory and longing. The media—radio and television—are key means to keeping the memory of home alive, be it hearing football broadcasts or watching Bruce Lee movies in Mbarara: “…I suddenly missed British television. Or perhaps I was really just missing Britain. Or Scotland, anyway. Home” (91).

11 More unequivocally redolent of Scotland are the incursions of memories of Fossiemuir, his home town. The link between a youthful memory of a suffering animal and Idi Amin’s Uganda is appallingly evoked when Nicholas is led into the secret passages of the State Research Bureau, ironically hidden behind the bookshelves housing the bound volumes of the Proceedings of the Law Society of Uganda (later, on his island, Nicholas will find out that the law societies of Scotland and Uganda are twinned). As he follows Amin down the tunnel, he hears “a faint yet piercing scream, or howl.” He recalls: “I’d only once heard anything like it before, when I’d come across a weasel caught in a snare in the pine woods above Fossiemuir” (237). The twinning of the Scotland of memory with the horror he is about to face acts as both warning and reenactment of trauma. Conversely, when Nicholas returns to Scotland, he will engage in a gruelling imaginative reenactment of his time in Uganda, albeit with the promise, however careful and tentative, of peace thereafter.

Memories of Fossiemuir specifically connected to his parents serve to illuminate more fully the family constraints that hedged his youth, but also suggest ways in which his time in Uganda enables him to come to terms with his family, more especially, as I shall explore below, the role of his father in his own moral and psychological maturation. Of several such instances, a memory that speaks significantly to Nicholas’s need to come to terms with his ambiguous sense of both comfort and alienation in the family home, and accept responsibility for his choices, takes place when he is being tended to by the forest tribespeople at the end of his sojourn in Uganda. The taste of the herbal remedy they give him is strong, “as if it had been reduced, like the mysterious caramelized sources [his] mother used to make over the stove in Fossiemuir” (275). He remembers her in “her rose-printed apron in that cold stone house,” and his father, “as impregnable as a strong-room door behind his newspaper in the lounge.” This image of family dis-ease is both invoked and rejected as an explanation for Nicholas’s failure of will: “I couldn’t blame them for this situation, I knew that; nor, in truth, for the closed-in, oblivious temperament that had got me into it. I knew it was simply myself, this casket of emotional defects and diffident, inward-turning passions….Not once, I thought, as I lay there in that stinking hut, have you snatched anything glorious or courageous from the world as it passed you by” (275). To the extent that this scene concerns the burgeoning self-understanding of the narrator, it (problematically) inscribes the novel into that genre that uses exotic locales as backdrops to the growth of the western protagonist. Foden, arguably, counters that threat precisely because of the passivity of Nicholas, the massive presence of Amin and the sustained engagement with “real” Ugandan history, to which Nicholas is finally an onlooker, albeit a profoundly affected one. Unlike the film’s Nicholas, he never takes centre stage.

12 The articulation and narrativising of Nicholas’s confrontation with his failures in Uganda has as its evocative setting a Scottish island and an increasingly allegorised landscape.xxvii In The Last King of Scotland, Nicholas and his Scottish world are brought into traumatic contact with Idi Amin, “the number one id” (18) and his Ugandan world. Like Conrad’s novel, this is a story of psychological and moral revelation as well as cultural collision. The shock of the encounter and how to deal with its effects mirror a more generalized Western fascination, horror and confusion in the face of the African “other.” Nicholas Garrigan has to come to terms with the darkness of his own desires, especially for power over life and death, the underside of the Hippocratic oath, but also with the fear of identification with “the heart of darkness,” a struggle that is by no means over once he has left Uganda. On the island, he writes:

I am no longer the thin dark paleface who arrived in Uganda— qualified in healing arts but not so very different from that boy who was mad for maps and stamps. All that is gone, or ripened into something else: I am transformed into a suppurating beast, someone with a smell of evil about his person. Yes, I have become him. Oh my Christ— (256)

Scotland—more specifically, Scotland “at the edge of the world,” the island— becomes the place of healing: its solitude, silence and austere beauty are repeatedly held up as the antidote to the tropics of Uganda. Again, Foden runs the risk of succumbing to an old stereotype of moral polarisation between north and south. This risk is suggestively resisted by turning, for his contrapuntal geography, not to the Thames, the centre of Empire, as Conrad does (with whatever complex ironies), but to a marginalised world with its own history of brutal oppression and dispossession.xxviii

As he works through his trauma, his narrative breaks down at key moments. When he tries to tell the story of Kay Amin, he writes: “My journal is confused, almost cryptic on these matters. Even I myself find it hard to decipher” (218). The narrative fragments even more decisively when he recalls his tour through the cells of the State Research Bureau: “… those sights I glimpsed as Amin led me past those cells—it takes … an almost physical effort to realize them, so deeply have I hidden them in my mind. So deeply have I hidden—” (238).

Finally, however, his writing is able to shape memory, to bridge the rupture in time and experience that is a consequence of trauma. The place of the island landscape in this process is tied both to its topographical and climatic characteristics, and to the growing power of the memory of his biological father, so sharply different from the demon father from whom he has escaped. In a curious moment, Idi and Nicholas’s father merge: Idi is showing off his new toy—a platform that emerges from the waters of the

13 swimming pool bearing him triumphantly: “Machines are the things for kings,” he announces. “He stamped on the metal, the funereal sound ringing out across the pool. I thought of my father and his Bell’s, and then of that old Jacobite toast: ‘To the king over the water…” (148). The risk of Amin displacing his father is never realised, however, largely due to the constant insurgence of memories of Fossiemuir and his Scottish Presbyterianism. At Amin’s wedding to Medina in the “over-ripe” (199) Catholic church, he feels the need to stand up and stretch but is unable to do so because he feels tied to Idi’s body, as in the Ugandan legend of the Keeper of the King’s Umbilical Cord (198). Here, Nicholas is both child and guardian to Idi as mythic androgynous mother, in an increasingly ambivalent bonding. In protest, he writes in the journal that he keeps while in Uganda: “CULTIVATE/The discipline of my native land/The focus of my profession” (224). This conscious, willed turn to his native land as source of discipline and healing evolves as an invitation, at the level of his unconscious desire, to a renewed bonding with his biological father, whom he remembers telling him, with “something close to fierce emotion in his eyes,” “The most important thing… is to minimize the harm you do to those around you” (275). Having been nearly killed by an explosion in Mbarara, he finally has a vision of Amin metamorphosing in ways both terrifying and comic: he is an elephant, a hippo, three rhinos, a peacock: “And then I see my father and I am free. He is reading the Scotsman. But the headline on the back says: ‘The road dark, the destination obscure’” (282). The mix of prose and prophecy here points to the balance of pragmatism and tortured self-discovery that will mark Nicholas’s via dolorosa on the distant island, in the bothy (inherited from his dead great uncle, suggesting the guardianship of the ancestors).

His journey to, and sojourn on, that island is described in increasingly mythic terms, proposing that this is a landscape of both retrospection and release, its gauntness, “the ridges of grass and heather broken by impressive slabs of rock” on Rannoch Moor offering a welcome respite from Uganda’s “ripe, relentless swaths of green” (334). On the ferry from Sconser on Skye, he feels “utter joy” as “Maelrubha’s mountain [comes] into sight through the mist, getting bigger every second, the vague outline of its ruins—the tall stone cross, the circle itself, the tops of the pine trees around it spearing the clouds behind them” (336). The mix of specific and imagined geography is telling. While we are informed that Nicholas inherited a bothy on one of the Western Isles (another name for the Outer Hebrides), the journey takes him to Skye and probably to Raasay, the destination of the ferry from Sconser. But the reference to Maelrubha’s mountain and the religious sites are more suggestive of Applecross and Loch Maree, with its sacred island of the moon (an interesting northern sister to Ruwenzori’s Mountains of the Moon). The sacred well on the Isle of Loch Maree is also a sanctified space associated with the moon and cures for lunacy.xxix This is an imagined Scottish landscape meant, then, to serve a symbolic purpose in Nicholas’s quest to make himself whole again.

14

Where he constantly had recourse to memories of Scotland while in Uganda, he now, in a reciprocal movement, remembers images, events and acts associated with Uganda. The final passages of the novel foreground the imaginative dialectic of different landscapes that express Nicholas’s chronic sense of displacement:

For though I have heard the weird moanings of Afro-montane forest giants, and the terrible yelps of leopard and hyena, this island of sheep and rocks fills me with awe. Maybe I will get used to it; maybe it is simply that one alien vision determines another. (340)

The novel ends with a telephone call from Idi Amin, in exile in Saudi Arabia, to Nicholas, effectively in exile on his island. Nicholas puts the phone down on the voice, determining to pin up the falling honeysuckle in the porch. Il faut cultiver notre jardin, as another picaresque hero decided after weathering serial catastrophes. His quiet withdrawal into the solitude of the island may be seen as the resigned acceptance of his history and the resolution to do as little harm as he can for the time that is left him on earth, to be, rather, a tender of the earth. This may also be seen as a helpless cop-out, of course, a final expression of passivity. Giles Foden has commented on his novel’s delineation of the complicity of the passive observing expatriate and the extent to which mere observation implicates one morally.xxx Nicholas repeatedly asks whether he is a “spectator” or an “actor” (73), observer or participant (109) in the drama in Uganda, describing himself at one point as occupying a “ghastly ringside seat” (258). When it is too late, he castigates himself: “I should have known, that is the phrase of my life, its summing up, its consummate acknowledgment” (119).

Scotland and Nicholas Garrigan, Take 2: The Film

The Nicholas of the film is a very different conception from that of the novel. After celebrating graduation by means of a communal swim in Loch Lomond, he spins a globe and thrusts a finger at it—Canada apparently proving too unexciting, the next spin randomly produces Uganda as a destination, an escape from a (very briefly depicted) pompous doctor father and an abstemious home life. Nicholas arrives in Uganda looking for sex and fun in the sun. His meeting with Amin characterises him as a man of action who whips away Amin’s gun to shoot the bellowing cow whom Amin had knocked over. Relocating from Mbarara to Kampala as Amin’s personal physician, he is delighted to be given, not a van (the evidence of whose original Asian ownership must be painted over, as in the novel), but a gleaming convertible. Scenes of him frolicking with women find their apotheosis in his ill-considered (and graphically filmed) affair with Kay

15 Amin. He also takes it upon himself to report to Amin what he perceives to be a conspiratorial meeting between the minister of health, Wasswa, and an unknown white man. Wasswa disappears, to Nicholas’s discomfort—a feeling exacerbated when Stone not only tells him that the meeting he observed had to do with medical help to Uganda, but also shows him photographic evidence of Amin’s mounting atrocities. In a muddled attempt to make amends, Nicholas tries to poison Amin who turns out to have known all about his affair with Kay, to whose subsequently dismembered body we have been privy, and punishes the hapless doctor by having him beaten and strung up on meathooks by his chest muscles at the airport where the Entebbe hostage saga is playing out. The good doctor Junju tends to him and helps his escape on the plane leaving Entebbe with the non-Israeli hostages. The frame narrative of the novel is, thus, dropped, along with the reflexivity and interiority of its protagonist.

One approach to the Nicholas Garrigan of the book is that he “is too hapless, too peripheral, too ineffectual”xxxi (complete-review.com), while others see Nicholas, “the very essence of evasion and appeasement,” as the protagonist but not the hero and “therein lies the admirable risk” take by Foden.xxxii Foden himself has written of the objections of the filmmakers to Nicholas’s passivity: “It’s no good telling film people, as I did, that the greatest drama ever (Hamlet) has a passive hero: there is nothing they dislike more.” But, he tells us, “[Peter] Morgan …solved the ‘problem’ of Garrigan’s passivity by turning him from a self-absorbed son of the manse into a kind of African Bay City Roller, up for kicks in the bundu. A lad o’pairts, yes, but mainly one part. Priapism replaced passivity.”xxxiii A.S.H. Smyth, in more vitriolic vein, describes the film’s Nicholas as a “classic gap-year tosser …who says – in his excessively-sincere Scots accent – that he’s in Africa ‘to hailp,’ but shags the first native girl he meets who speaks enough English to flirt with him. Then he tries it on with his colleague and superior’s wife. Then impregnates the wife of the president.”xxxiv Smyth has reservations about the novel and its treatment of Ugandan history, but reserves his ire for the film which, in dropping the frame narrative, produces a simple linearity even more reductive of Uganda’s history and elides the moral consciousness enabled by Nicholas’s retrospective point of view. His closing objection has to do with the lack of responsibility to history. The severely truncated chronology of the film makes it seem as if the 300 000 deaths reputed to have been caused by Idi Amin were 3000.

In his celluloid incarnation, Nicholas turns out to be vain, materialistic, arrogant, smug and comes to represent for some “a young imperialist” (James McAvoy), the British Government (Philip Kemp), Faust (Macdonald and Kemp) and a “symbol of white colonialism” (Kim Voynar).xxxv This different Nicholas, no longer the narrator of the story, produces meanings other than those of the novel, arguably reducing, if not abandoning completely, his complexity as a moral focus. In itself, this may not matter, if we are not

16 encouraged overly to care for Nicholas who gets what’s coming to him, but also gets away at the cost of the good Dr Junju’s life in an unfortunate replay of the consolatory myth of black martyrs and white heroes. But the filmmakers have made choices to mesh fact and fiction in much more contentious ways than the novel does. The pressure to make Nicholas Garrigan more proactive yields radical plot changes as well as a shift in the focus on agency regarding Uganda’s history.

Macdonald, who knew the book well, having read it in manuscript form when he was working at Faber & Faber,xxxvi appears to have tossed it aside once the screenplay was in place. McAvoy recounts how he had reached page 100 of the novel and was enjoying it, when Macdonald forbade him to read any further. McAvoy then tried for the authenticity of his character as written in the script: “naïve,” “new,” “blind” are the adjectives he uses.xxxvii

Nicholas Garrigan is thus recast as an action hero who is caught up in events he is too callow and self-serving to understand, whose signal indication that he may have gained insight appears to come right at the end of the film, when Idi Amin tells his erstwhile advisor that his death will be the first real thing that has happened to him. Macdonald argues, more kindly, that Garrigan is “morally ambiguous” and that “[t]he heart of the film is the moment when Amin hugs Garrigan, tells him he can’t go home and that he’s one of his family, and Garrigan hugs him back. It’s like a warped love story.”xxxviii Macdonald notes, on the DVD commentary, that this is also the moment when Nicholas has to accept his culpability for the death of the Health Minister, Wasswa. The scene is central to confirming the young doctor’s Scottish identity and his desperation to go home to Scotland: “My name is Nicholas Garrigan,” he says. “I’m from Scotland. I want to go home.” When he returns Amin’s embrace, however, he implicitly confirms his earlier surrender of his Scottish identity in his first meeting with Amin when he exchanges shirts—his tee-shirt with “Scotland” emblazoned on it for Amin’s military shirt.xxxix

The representation of Nicholas as actor and participant, as initiator of events has consequences not merely for his characterisation, but for the way in which the film’s plot unfolds. Moreover, as the plot develops, the only sustained trace of Nicholas’s Scottishness is to be found in his accent (which Smyth may be sardonic about, but which was a deciding factor in the casting— Macdonald describes how he had always thought McAvoy was an “old Etonian, Oxbridge actor because he’s always played these snooty upper crust characters. I was surprised when he walked in with a Scottish accent. Instantly I thought he was the right person to play the role”).xl

If the centrality of Scotland in the novel as a place of ancestral roots, retreat, moral revisioning and fugitive rebirth is lost in the film, it is re-claimed, nonetheless, as fetish. Handing over the Scotland tee-shirt is of a piece with

17 the fetishisation of Scotland by the film’s Idi, seen also in the naming of his children Campbell and Mackenzie, and the singing of Loch Lomond by an African choir in his garden while he wears a kilt. If fetishised objects are substitutes for the fear of lack, then this use of traces of “Scotland” illustrates, however elliptically, Foden’s reading of Amin’s psychological make-up, “the mental roots of his behaviour”:

In writing The Last King of Scotland, I realised they were in part the psychological byproduct of his Oedipal relationship with the former colonial power….The request to visit Scotland goes to the heart of the matter. When Britain dropped Amin, his behaviour embarrassing his former sponsor, it was Scotland that provided him with an umbilical link back to the colonial mothership. He could sing Scotland’s praises and support its self-determination, while hating and hoping to split the UK. xli

(In this reading, when the novel’s Nicholas feels tied to Idi by an umbilical cord, he becomes the mother to Idi, in yet another permutation of their relationship). Idi’s own search appears to be for the lost mother as well as the biological father who abandoned him, figured in his colonial fathers of the King’s African Rifles, many of whom were Scottish. But we need Foden’s extra-filmic comment to read the traces of Scotland in the film in this way.

What emerges much more explicitly in the film is Nicholas’s need for Amin as a surrogate father. Where, in the novel, Nicholas’s real dead father, associated repeatedly with Fossiemuir and childhood memories of “home,” becomes a powerful haunting presence who eventually gains sway over his son’s moral landscape, in the film the Scottish father is almost completely elided. He is presented unequivocally as a repressive, condescending man in the brief opening sequence (note his sparing use of sherry, as opposed to the sad, repeated, but prophetic bon mot about Bell’s in the novel: “Ask not for whom the Bell’s tolls; it tolls for you” jokes the Presbyterian minister). We do encounter the father vestigially later in the film: when, in the aftermath of Amin’s diabolical embrace, Nicholas loses himself in drink at the “amazing party sequence… a moral sink of Hogarthian proportions”xlii he starts hallucinating and we see and hear his father’s, now heavily ironised, words: “A family doctor—it’s a fine life you’ve chosen.”

Again, when Nicholas returns from the party, having had sex with Kay Amin, he finds his dwelling trashed, his passport stolen and replaced with a Ugandan document, and the glass protecting a photograph of him and his father cracked. If we read the sequence from Amin’s embrace to the image of the damaged photograph as the story of Nicholas, he has mimed Amin’s psychodrama, replacing one father with another. Beyond that, however, we have the key alteration to both novel and, more shockingly, history, for Nicholas has acted on his priapic instincts: he looks at Kay, says “Fuck it” and does so, in an extraordinarily and unbelievably rash act, even for someone as

18 gormless as the film’s Nicholas. The party context for the sexual misadventure is also ill-conceived in terms of narrative credibility—we see the couple being seen as they search out a hideaway. The invented relationship nevertheless feeds into the film’s riff on the Oedipal theme. Nicholas’s fear, in the novel, of turning into Idi here undergoes various permutations: the rejection and betrayal of the father, the reconciliation with the father, the suffocation by the father, and the assumption of the authority of the father in the last encounter when Nicholas, bruised and bloodied, but yet to face his final torture tells Amin, “You’re a child—that’s why you’re so scary!”

If Kay is read literally as “it” at the moment Nicholas decides to act on his desires, her symbolic value, rather than her value as a woman, is clear. She is the occasion for Nicholas’s oedipal revenge against the father, as well as the occasion for some of the most egregious objectifying of a woman’s body that we have in the film (led up to by the topless dancers of the party). Macdonald’s prurient delight in commenting on Kerry Washington’s naked bottom in his commentary merely exacerbates what is already a deeply disturbing use of Kay Amin. When we witness her severed body, clumsily sewn back together with the limbs reversed, we also witness the accruing betrayals of history as the betrayal of the black woman. The filmmakers have sought to justify this scene. Andrea Calderwood tells us (in Capturing Idi Amin) that they wanted to show how close the violence was to Amin and that they decided that it was “such a powerful moment to dramatise Idi’s frame of mind and the way that Idi operated—it was valid to use it,” that they “weren’t just being gratuitous about it.” The documentary does include Henry Kyemba’s observation that “people have been too clever by half” about what happened to Kay’s body. As Minister of Health at the time, he gives the assurance that her limbs were not sewn on in the grotesque reversals of the film. Whitaker also comments on how this most distressing scene in the film is a sham.

That the film transgresses historical fact, engages in such reckless “radical infidelity,” such “false invention,” is the subject of further commentary in the DVD documentary. The voice-over tells us that the “filmmakers use the myths around Kay for dramatic effect by placing Dr Garrigan at the centre of her story.” Just so. Macdonald assures us that this is “the only time in the film where Garrigan actually is inserted [sic] into historical event and that historical event is shifted to make room for him.” He makes no excuse. McAvoy, interestingly, comments that he had to assume that the script dealt with reality, that it was important for him not to know everything as he would have wanted to cut material from the film. As the actor called on to perform the character as written, this is understandable, although he ends up replicating the complicity of the character he plays.

19 The “insertion” of Garrigan is of a piece with the desire to make him more active, and to see activity as resolutely sexual from the moment he arrives in Uganda (as Smyth so acerbically notes). The insertion of Garrigan into history also serves the needs of the thriller plot, which follows its course precisely because of Garrigan’s affair with Kay. From that point on in the film, the questions are not about Nicholas coming to awareness of the horrors being perpetrated by Amin and certainly not about the suffering of Ugandans or the motives of Amin in causing such suffering. The focus is on whether Amin knows what Garrigan has done and what will happen to Garrigan. In the words of Stephen Hunter, “In the end, Amin has disappeared from his own movie…”.xliii The focus on Nicholas as hero of a thriller becomes much stronger in the climax. Not only is he tortured and thus pays penance for his misdemeanours, but is rescued by Dr Junju, at the cost of the Ugandan doctor’s own life, so that he may carry the word to the West. The intervention of another African state, Tanzania, that actually ends Amin’s reign is elided.

What we have instead is more sensationalist violence in the “Man-Called- Horse” sequence, with its prolonged close-ups on McAvoy’s pale, bloodied chest. The film’s brutal climax destroys any vestige of political or moral subtlety and deploys cinematic tricks to match. As one reviewer comments:

Macdonald’s attempt to up the danger quotient with random zooms and general shaky-cam prove he’s trying too hard for all the wrong effects (overwrought editing, pandering thriller music, and shock-tactic violence deepen the impression). Meanwhile, we long to plumb Amin’s depths and investigate the shifting tides of public opinion— except for Amin and a sainted doctor who’s a foil to Garrigan, the Africans are extras. Whitaker’s striking work aside, The Last King of Scotland, is obvious movieland history.xliv

The film thus offers a fractious marriage between the desire for authenticity and realism on the one hand, and the convolutions of the plot and increasing aggressiveness of style dictated by the genre.xlv

The depiction of Garrigan has further repercussions for our reading of both the British and Amin. Given his mix of arrogance, naivety and proclivity for unthinking action and interference, Nicholas is bound to get his come- uppance. In the case of his unwitting betrayal of Wasswa and his failure to appreciate the extent of Amin’s brutality, he is forced to eat humble pie when he pleads with Stone to help him escape. Stone (described by Peter Bradshaw as “reptilian”),xlvi the English target of Nicholas’s overplayed Scots antipathy, has been proved right, and by extension so has the British Government. When he embarks on his affair with Kay, Nicholas similarly surrenders the high moral ground to Amin, who accuses him of having betrayed his father in their climactic encounter at the end of the film. Whether father or no (and the film is at some pains to drive home this reading of the relationship), Nicholas is

20 spectacularly guilty of betrayal. The “love triangle” also plays into the minimalising of Amin’s crimes against his country, objected to by critics. Instead of showing us evidence of this (as does the documentary, Capturing Idi Amin), we have only Kay and Nicholas subjected to gruesome violence, an adaptation of history to domestic melodrama, Freud’s family romance under the sign of baroque sensationalism. The putative murder of 300 000 Ugandans and the brutality of the State Research Bureau are converted into two scenes of violence perpetrated against individuals who betrayed Amin. This synecdochal treatment of Amin’s reign of terror is profoundly inadequate to the task of revealing his monstrosity and errs, instead, on the side of humanising him beyond what may be ethically allowable.

Abetting this shift in perception is the elision of Amin’s own history (omitting the biographical material provided by the novel, he steps fully grown into the plot). The plot changes thus enable the film’s rehabilitation of Idi Amin’s image, at odds certainly, with history’s perception of him. David Martin wrote of him back in 1974:

He has done more to confirm the prejudices of the white racialist about the black man than any African in the past turbulent decade. In Amin, South Africa has a black ally that her enormous resources spent on propaganda could never have achieved. Breathing a mixture of brotherhood and brimstone his outrageous utterances and actions have shocked and amused a world which in its civilized inertia has turned a bland face to his savagery and Uganda’s suffering.xlvii

It might also be argued that the power of Forest Whitaker’s performance ameliorates the historical Idi. Repeatedly, his performance is praised, even when the film as a whole is seen to be deeply flawed. Peter Bradshaw is possibly the most ecstatic, but also very astute in terms of the audience’s complicity: “In the lead role of a lifetime, Whitaker treats the audience to a full-throated, technically accomplished cadenza of pure acting exuberance that you feel ashamed for enjoying quite so much.”xlviii And, of course, the Oscar helped no end.

There is a poignant moment at the end of Capturing Idi Amin, where Abby Mukiibi, who plays Amin’s chief henchman, proposes that people should be reminded that Uganda is bigger than Idi Amin. The history that the film teaches does no service to the country and its people. Moreover, while the title is taken from Foden’s novel (and Foden even appears in the film as one of the journalists), the “Scotland” of the film lacks resonance because there is no sustained imaginative connection to a complex Scotland. Only tartanry, Scotland fetishised, filling a lack in Idi, the great id.

Scotland’s role in recovery for Nicholas is abandoned, as is Nicholas’s reflective role in mirroring and unveiling the complexity of Idi Amin. In the

21 novel, Amin’s bewildering contradictions are manifested through the struggle undergone by Nicholas to come to terms with his eight years in Uganda. Instead of the plot release of the film, we have the ruin that Nicholas (almost) becomes, the desolation and the fugitive hope of the last pages of the book. The final scene in the film, by contrast, is of beautiful, scenic Lake Victoria— and a wounded Nicholas in flight.

Scotland’s plenitude of meaning in the novel is reduced to simple (and simplistic) visual and aural motifs—a football tee-shirt, Idi in a kilt, an African choir singing Loch Lomond, and Nicholas’s accent. It could perhaps be argued that Scotland’s political resonance—victim of centuries of English colonising and empire-building ambition, her warrior spirit rising in repeated revolt against oppression—is present in Nicholas’s encounters with the sinister English official, Stone. Nicholas’s first meeting with Idi, and the exchange of Idi’s military shirt for Nicholas’s Scotland tee-shirt, propose that it is the young doctor’s Scottish (and therefore ant-imperialist) identity that wins favour with Idi and leads, ironically, into the moral labyrinth of Oedipal identification with Idi as father surrogate. When Nicholas tries to extricate himself from Amin’s hold on his life and imagination, he declares that he is Scottish, that he wants to go home, symbolically severing the increasingly dangerous and dubious tie between them (figured ambiguously in the novel, via the Ugandan myth of the king’s umbilical cord). These possible readings are, however, compromised by the fatuousness of Nicholas’s character, the implausibility of such a character becoming Idi’s chief advisor (as he is termed), the simply incredible affair with Kay Amin, and the gratuitous travesty of her story as presented in the film. These flaws damage the film as film. In addition, they truncate the possibility of serious, provocative and politically responsible questing into the heart of darkness—of both Nicholas and Idi Amin.

Early in the novel, Nicholas confesses to a shocking moment when his attempt to help a fellow bus passenger who has been attacked by Amin soldiers is rejected. The wounded man accuses Nicholas of failing to use the power that his whiteness is perceived to bestow on him:

I stood for a moment, looking at him there, the flap of skin hanging on his bleeding face, embarrassment and confusion rising in mine. And then I thought—I’m almost too ashamed to put it down—I thought of reaching over and pulling the damn thing off, pulling it off his face in one swift, uncompromising movement. As if I were removing a plaster. I don’t know what came over me, I really don’t…. (53)

This admission of unconscious reserves of anger and cruelty (and hopeless failure to act on his father’s ethical precept that all one can do in this world is to “minimize the harm you do to those around you”) contribute to an

22 understanding of the ambivalence that Nicholas feels towards Amin: “But there was, I conceded it to myself again, something in me that actually liked the man, monster though he was” (231). In addition, Foden’s protagonist is aware of the ways in which he feels not only fear and fascination for Amin, but for Africa. Early on, the South African pilot, Swanepoel, assures Nicholas that “Coups in Africa are normal, they just come around, like the rainy season and the dry season” (34). Nicholas’s first reaction is to think that this must be a generalisation: “…I mean, there are plenty of peaceful places in that big continent, aren’t there?” “Though,” he adds, revealing an unnerving imagining of Africa, “it has often struck me that it looks, cartographically, like a gun in a holster” (34). Africa, naturally, essentially, inevitably, a killing field—a representation abetted by films like Zulu, remembered at the end of Nicholas’s time on the continent, as he rides with the invading Tanzanian army. The Colonel waves a spear and Nicholas recalls Michael Caine shouting, “Don’t throw those bloody spears at me!” He adds: “That old vision of Africa I’d had, the same that led me there and doomed me: it returns like a spectre” (285).

A moment that self-consciously addresses “Africa” takes place in the film when Nicholas challenges Stone, accusing him of not being able, as an English imperialist, to accept that Idi’s Uganda might be a successful example of African independence. If we are meant to read Stone as the antagonist and, for the nonce, Nicholas as the politically correct protagonist, then we have to find a way to deal with the next moment. In a particularly embarrassing example of the film’s ideological confusions, Nicholas adds: “This is Africa. You meet violence with violence. Anything else and you’re dead.” So the liberal view segues into the “old vision of Africa” without missing a beat. But then where is the political point of view here? To make the cringe factor worse, this is the sequence where Nicholas, that muddled, unreflecting and unreflective spokesperson for Africa’s inherent violence and Africa’s capacity for remaking herself, discovers that he has been the cause of the disappearance of health minister Wasswa, a foreshadowing of the more fully dramatised “insertion” of the fictional Nicholas into the historical Uganda, an earlier example of “false invention.” What appears to be contradiction may have been rescued by paradox in a more delicately written Nicholas and a more deftly handled denouement, but the gory climax of the film eradicates complexity and merely ushers in relief (presumably) that foolish, battered Nicholas escapes. In contrast, it is precisely the acknowledgement by the novel’s protagonist of his own mediated understanding, his admission of the culpable flaws in his responses to “Africa” that help to make Foden’s Nicholas interesting and the novel’s engagement with Ugandan history, through Nicholas, an exemplary case of “true invention,” egregiously lacking in the narrative, stylistic and generic choices made by the filmmakers in an adaptation that missed its moment.

23

Notes i I have been asked if this title was intended as a witty reference to the Saltire. Alas, I did not think of that, but accept its applicability, especially given the cover of the paperback edition of the novel that followed the film’s release. The title refers broadly to the notion that Scotland as place, idea and narrative strategy in the novel is both vestigially present and emptied of moral meaning in the film. This double play may have resulted in a progressive challenge to the possibly conservative moral geography of the novel, but, in the event of a film vexed by the reactionary constraints of genre and box office assumptions, has yielded, instead, a severe reduction of the meanings of Scotland as they are deployed in the novel. ii Kevin Macdonald (dir.), The Last King of Scotland DVD (Fox Searchlight Pictures et al, 2007). iii Barbet Schroeder (dir.), Général Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait (Figaro Films, Mara Films, Television Recontre, 1976). ivThe funding for the film came from several sources: Fox Searchlight, DNA Films, FilmFour, UK Film Council and Scottish Screen, suggesting its allegiance with a less obviously commercial brand of filmmaking. (Fox Searchlight is associated with projects like The Namesake (2007), Bend it Like Beckham (2002), Titus and Boys Don’t Cry (both 1999). DNA was co-founded by Kevin Macdonald’s brother Alan, and Duncan Kenworthy; FilmFour, UK Film Council and Scottish Screen are all associated with the promotion of diverse film creativity. v Hayden White’s seminal intervention in the debate began with his Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1973). vi Rosenstone argues that “ ‘true’ invention” “engages the discourse of history,” while “ ‘false’ invention” “ignores the discourse of history” in Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 72. vii Stella Bruzzi. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). viii Ali Jaafar, “Warped Love Story,” Interview with Kevin Macdonald, Sight & Sound 17, no. 2 (2007), http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/issue/200702 ix Bruce Munro, “James McAvoy and Kevin Macdonald Interview,” Future Movies. http://www.futuremovies.co.uk/filmmaking.asp?ID=198 x Bold Type: Interview with Giles Foden. http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1298/foden/interview.html xi Kevin Macdonald (dir.), One Day in September (Passion Pictures, Arthur Cohn Productions, BBC et al), 1999. Kevin Macdonald (dir.), Touching the Void (Darlow Smithson Productions, FilmFour, Pathé, UK Film Council), 2003. See Philip Kemp’s review in Sight & Sound where he comments on Macdonald’s predilection for reconstruction (17, no. 2, 2007) http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/issue/200702. See also John Williams, who argues that The Last King of Scotland’s thriller aspirations are flawed by the fact that we know who the killer is: “…we’re in the position of watching a slasher movie set in a glass house” (“Take My Word, I’m a Madman Don’t You Know: The Last King of Scotland” http://www.pajiba.com/last-king-of-scotland-the.htm

24 xii Giles Foden, “The King and I,” The Guardian, January 6, 2007, http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1983051,00.html xiii Ali Jaafar, op. cit. xiv Stephen Hunter, “The Last King of Scotland Usurps the Story of Idi Amin,” Washington Post, October 4, 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2006/10/03/AR2006100301617.html?nav=emailpage (Mantle was the cinematographer on Dogme director Lars von Trier’s Dogville and Harmony Korine’s Dogme-influenced julien donkey-boy). xv Giles Foden, op.cit. xvi Evan Smith, Interview with Forest Whitaker, Texas Monthly, Vol. 34, Issue 12, December 2006, http://www.texasmonthly.com/2006-12-01 xvii Rebort, “Last King Shall be First,” Interview with Kevin Macdonald, iofilm: film inside out, http://www.iofilm.co.uk/io/mit/001/kevin_macdonald_last_king_of_scotland_200610 16.php xviii Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland (London: Faber and Faber, 1998). Parallels with the current crisis in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe are obvious. xix Robert Stam, “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,” in Literature and Film, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 3. xx Stam, op.cit. 17. Crucial to film is, of course, its production context: it depends on ensemble work, technology and must answer to economic demands linked to audience expectations. xxi Christine Geraghty, Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008). xxii Lindiwe Dovey, “Politicising Adaptation: Re-historicising South African Drama through Fools,” in Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship, ed. Mireia Aragay (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 166. xxiii At the risk of being laborious, it seems appropriate to offer synopses of both novel and film, in order to ensure that key points of contrast become clear. xxiv Richard Rathbone, “Sympathy for the Devil,” History Today, Vol. 48, Issue 7, July 1998, Reviews Section. xxv Giles Foden, “My Brutal Muse,” The Guardian, July 24th 2003, http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1007412,00.html£arti cle_continue xxvi Ibid. xxvii Conrad’s Heart of Darkness uses place in similarly allegorical ways. Its frame narrative is set on the Thames and its flashback in the Congo. Idi and Kurtz are also both the product of Western civilization. xxviii Nicholas is also attuned to the violence ravaging Britain: “Back in the UK, a labour MP was warning of ‘another Ulster’ in Yorkshire following the death of a picketing miner. There was a committee of inquiry into the coal dispute, and another Bloody Sunday. Better to be here, I thought” (111). xxix Philip Coppens, “The Sacred Island of the Moon,” http://www.philipcoppens.com/lochmaree.html xxx Giles Foden, “The King and I.” xxxi The complete review’s Review of The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden, http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/fodeng/lastking.htm

25 xxxii Michael Upchurch, “President for Life,” Review of The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden, The New York Times, June 30, 2008, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpgae.html?res=9A01E7DC123EF936A25752C1A96 E958260&n=Top52Ffeatures%2Fbooks%2Fbook%20Reviews xxxiii Giles Foden, “The King and I,” op.cit. xxxiv A.S.H Smyth, Review of The Last King of Scotland, by Giles Foden; The Last King of Scotland, Directed by Kevin Macdonald, The Social Affairs Unit, January 23, 2007, http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001361.php xxxv Bruce Munro, op.cit.; Philip Kemp, Review of The Last King of Scotland, Sight & Sound, vol. 17, no. 2, February 2007, http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/issue/200702.; Ali Jaafar, op.cit.; Kim Voynar, Review of The Last King of Scotland, Telluride Review, September 3, 2006, http://www.cinematical.com/2006/09/03/telluride-review-the-last-king-of-scotland/ xxxvi Rebort, iofilm, op.cit. xxxvii Bruce Munro, op.cit. xxxviii Ali Jaafar, op.cit. xxxixThis is also the scene, of course, where Nicholas grabs Idi’s gun and shoots the bellowing cow, an image transposed more cryptically to the cover of the paperback and edited in the trailer of the film to make it seem as if Idi might be the target. xl Bruce Munro, op.cit. xli Giles Foden, “My Brutal Muse,” op.cit. xliiGiles Foden, “The King and I,” op.cit. xliii Stephen Hunter, op.cit. xliv Groucho Reviews, www. xlv Generic pressure is central in changing the pacing and the build-up to a thriller/horror climax and brings the film into line with the genre of Afro-pessimist films made by Western directors, what Dave Calhoun calls the category of “White guides/Black pain”: Catch a Fire, Blood Diamond, Shooting Dogs, Tears of the Sun, The Interpreter, Sight & Sound, vol 17, no.2, February 2007, http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/issue/200702. xlvi Peter Bradshaw, Review of The Last King of Scotland, The Guardian, January 12, 2007, http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,1987792,00.html#article_continue xlvii David Martin, General Amin (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 11. xlviii Bradshaw, op.cit. He is generally positive about the film. For views that praise Whitaker in spite of the film, see John Williams, op.cit., Kim Voynar, op.cit., Dana Stevens, “King and Queen: Two Royal Portraits: The Queen and The Last King of Scotland,” Slate, September 27, 2006, http://www.slate.com/id/2150311, and Ryan Gilbey, “A String of Mangled Opportunities,” New Statesman, 15 January, 2007, 43.

Bibliography

Bold Type: Interview with Giles Foden. http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1298/foden/interview.html Bradshaw, Peter. Review of The Last King of Scotland. The Guardian, January 12, 2007. http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,1987792,00.html#article_cont inue

26

Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Calhoun, Dave. “White Guides/Black Pain.” Sight & Sound 17, no. 2 (2007) http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/issue/200702. Conrad, Joseph. Youth. Heart of Darkness. London: J.M Dent and Sons. 1902. Coppens, Philip. “The Sacred Island of the Moon,” http://www.philipcoppens.com/lochmaree.html Dovey, Lindiwe. “Politicising Adaptation: Re-historicising South African Drama through Fools.” In Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship, ed. Mireia Aragay, 163-179. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Foden, Giles. The Last King of Scotland. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. -----. “The King and I,” The Guardian, January 6, 2007, http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1983051,00.html -----.“My Brutal Muse.” The Guardian, July 24th 2003, http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1007412,00.ht ml#article_continue Geraghty, Christine. Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. Gilbey, Ryan. “A String of Mangled Opportunities,” New Statesman, 15 January, (2007): 43. Groucho Reviews, http://www.grouchreviews.com Hunter, Stephen. “The Last King of Scotland Usurps the Story of Idi Amin,” Washington Post, October 4, 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2006/10/03/AR2006100301617.html?nav=emailpage Jaafar, Ali. “Warped Love Story,” Interview with Kevin Macdonald, Sight & Sound 17, no. 2 (2007) http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/issue/200702. Kemp, Philip. Review of The Last King of Scotland. Sight & Sound 17, no. 2 (2007) http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/issue/200702. Martin, David. General Amin. London: Faber and Faber, 1974. Munro, Bruce. “James McAvoy and Kevin Macdonald Interview.” Future Movies.http://www.futuremovies.co.uk/filmmaking.asp?ID=198 Rathbone, Richard. “Sympathy for the Devil,” History Today, Vol. 48, Issue 7, July 1998. Rebort. “Last King Shall be First,” Interview with Kevin Macdonald, iofilm: film inside out, http://www.iofilm.co.uk/io/mit/001/kevin_macdonald_last_king_of_scotland_ 20061016.php Review of The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden, The complete review, http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/fodeng/lastking.htm Rosenstone, Robert. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Smith, Evan. Interview with Forest Whitaker, Texas Monthly, Vol. 34, Issue 12, December 2006, http://www.texasmonthly.com/2006-12-01 Smyth, A.S.H. “Review of The Last King of Scotland, by Giles Foden; The Last King of Scotland, Directed by Kevin Macdonald.” The Social Affairs Unit, January 23, 2007, http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001361.php Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” In Literature and Film, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

27

Stevens, Dana. “King and Queen: Two Royal Portraits: The Queen and The Last King of Scotland,” Slate, September 27, 2006, http://www.slate.com/id/2150311 Upchurch, Michael. “President for Life: Review of The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden.” The New York Times, June 30, 2008. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpgae.html?res=9A01E7DC123EF936A25752 C1A96E958260&n=Top52Ffeatures%2Fbooks%2Fbook%20Reviews Voynar, Kim. Review of The Last King of Scotland, Telluride Review, September 3, 2006, http://www.cinematical.com/2006/09/03/telluride-review-the-last-king- of-scotland/ White, Hayden. Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1973. Williams, John. “Take My Word, I’m a Madman Don’t You Know: The Last King of Scotland,” http://www.pajiba.com/last-king-of-scotland-the.htm

Filmography Macdonald, Kevin (dir.) One Day in September. Passion Pictures, Arthur Cohn Productions, BBC et al, 1999. -----. Touching the Void. Darlow Smithson Productions, FilmFour, Pathé, UK Film Council, 2003. -----. The Last King of Scotland. Fox Searchlight Pictures et al., 2007. Schroeder, Barbet (dir.). Général Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait. Figaro Films, Mara Films, Television Recontre, 1976.

This is an earlier version of the essay published as “The Last King of Scotland and the Politics of Adaptation.” Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Vol.3, No.1 (2011): 54-74.

28