Idi Amin made himself out to be the ‘liberator’ of an oppressed majority – a demagogic trick that endures today

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Derek R. Peterson, University of Michigan

(THE CONVERSATION) Fifty years ago, Ugandan President Idi Amin wrote to the governments of the British Commonwealth with a bold suggestion: Allow him to take over as head of the organization, replacing Queen Elizabeth II.

After all, Amin reasoned, a collapsing economy had made the U.K. unable to maintain its leadership. Moreover the “British empire does not now exist following the complete decolonization of Britain’s former overseas territories.”

It wasn’t Amin’s only attempt to reshape the international order. Around the same time, he called for the United Nations headquarters to be moved to Uganda’s capital, Kampala, touting its location at “the heart of the world between the continents of America, Asia, Australia and the North and South Poles.”

Amin’s diplomacy aimed to place Kampala at the center of a postcolonial world. In my new book, “A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda,” I show that Amin’s government made Uganda – a remote, landlocked nation – look like a frontline state in the global war against racism, apartheid and imperialism.

Doing so was, for the Amin regime, a way of claiming a morally essential role: liberator of Africa’s hitherto oppressed people. It...