Word: amins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Amin somehow seems more gigantic, more ridiculous and more murderous than any other real-life figure; if he did not exist, a novelist could scarcely invent him. As it happens, Big Daddy has already inspired what amounts to a budding literary subgenre. In Britain, two small satirical paperbacks by Punch Columnist Alan Coren, The Collected Bulletins of President Idi Amin and its sequel, The Further Bulletins etc., have sold 750,000 copies. Within the past year, at least four fictional thrillers (Target Amin, The Killing of Idi Amin, Excellency and Crossfire) and a play (For the West, by Michael Hastings...
This fall several nonfictional studies of the Ugandan dictator are to be published in the U.S. One, Idi Amin: Death-light of Africa (Little, Brown; $8.95), was written pseudonymously by a white civil servant who spent 20 years in Uganda; another, Idi Amin Dada: Hitler in Africa (Sheed Andrews and McMeel; $7.95), is by Thomas Patrick Melady, the last U.S. ambassador in Kampala, and his wife Margaret. In his short I Love Idi Amin (Fleming H. Revell; paperback, 95?), an African clergyman, Bishop Festo Kivengere, has written of the trials of the church and churchmen in Amin's Uganda...
...book most likely to attract attention to Amin is A State of Blood (Grosset & Dunlap; $10. Paperback, Ace Books; $2.50) by Henry Kyemba. He sought political asylum in Britain last May after serving Amin for six years as principal private secretary and later as Minister of Health. Written with the help of a former Reuters correspondent, John Man, A State of Blood is full of sensational detail. Kyemba reports for instance that Amin has experimented with cannibalism. "I have eaten human meat," he once remarked. "It is very salty, even more salty than leopard meat." Although Amin's bizarre...
Kyemba sheds some new light on the deaths of Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum and two Ugandan Cabinet ministers last February. At the time, Amin claimed that the three had been killed in a traffic accident shortly after he had denounced them as traitors at a mass meeting. In reality, Kyemba writes, the three were killed by Amin's dread secret police. Kyemba, as Health Minister, was asked to arrange for the arrival of the bodies at a local mortuary. "As I expected," he writes, "they were bullet-riddled. The archbishop had been shot through the mouth and had three...
Perhaps the ugliest tale Kyemba offers concerns Amin's own family. In March 1974 the dictator suddenly divorced three of his four wives; the three, says Kyemba, had been unfaithful, as Amin found out. Five months later, the dismembered body of one of the former wives, Kay, was found in Kampala. For once, Kyemba exonerates Amin: "I do not believe, as I first did, that Amin had a direct hand in Kay's death." Instead, he writes, she died during an abortion that was being performed by her lover, a doctor. Kyemba speculates that the doctor dismembered...