In August 1972, President Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of Uganda’s Asian community. Their property and businesses were seized by the state, which the government justified as part of a “war of economic independence” aimed at empowering Black Africans after decades of oppression. Over time, however, this war expanded to target Ugandans across every sector of the economy. Shopkeepers were forced to sell goods at government-approved prices, and those who violated regulations were harshly sentenced. Some government officials took personal responsibility for enforcing these measures. By 1975, Governor Abdallah Nasur of Uganda’s Central Province was making regular tours of Kampala in search of potential infractions. Archived photographs show him standing over market displays in military uniform, lecturing vendors on economic self-determination.

Nasur is one of many figures profiled in A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda, the new book by Derek Peterson. Amin’s eight-year rule was marked by extraordinary violence, Peterson points out, but violence alone cannot explain why so many Ugandans devoted their lives to supporting the regime. Instead, he argues, historians must come to terms with Amin’s popular appeal among a generation of nationalists who saw his dictatorship as a means of achieving social and political liberation. To explore these ideas, the book traces the lives of the bureaucrats, broadcasters, academics and artists who lent their talents to Idi Amin’s government. It also considers how dissidents in western Uganda moved beyond these constraints to imagine a new and better world.

Derek Peterson is the Ali Mazrui Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Over the past sixteen years, he has supported pioneering initiatives to protect vulnerable archives in East Africa and has curated three exhibitions at the Uganda Museum. In this interview with Geeska, Professor Peterson reflects on how ordinary Ugandans navigated the Amin era and how the government sought to position itself in a changing world. He also describes the challenges and opportunities of conducting historical research in Uganda today.

Alex White: Your previous work has examined intellectual and religious life across East Africa. What first sparked your interest in Idi Amin’s Uganda?

Derek Peterson: My most recent book was on the East African Revival, which was a Christian conversion movement that caused a lot of trouble in East Africa in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. I ended it with a few pages about Amin as a kind of foreclosure in Uganda's religious history, and I knew, based on that research, that there was a whole pile of uninventoried, unorganised archives that had been left in attics or in basements around Uganda. I then set to work with students at the University of Michigan and colleagues at Kampala’s Makerere University to organise an inventory of Uganda’s endangered government archives. I also collaborated with colleagues at Mountains of the Moon University in Fort Portal to bring a government archive out of the attic where it was kept and onto the university's campus. They created the largest digitised archive of government documents in Africa, so far as we know. The material led me toward this new book on Idi Amin’s Uganda. It’s not a follow-on from my work on the East African Revival, but it builds on some of the archival infrastructure that was laid in the course of that research.

The provincial patriots of Idi Amin's Uganda were convinced that the things they were doing were historically consequential — that they were liberating institutions from outsiders’ control, and that their work marked a new start in Uganda's history and politics.

AW: Your book focuses on the men and women who worked within Uganda’s institutions throughout the Amin era. Why did you decide to place them at the heart of the narrative?

DP: It’s partly because they wished to be remembered themselves, and because they created such rich traces in the archives. The provincial patriots of Idi Amin's Uganda were convinced that the things they were doing were historically consequential — that they were liberating institutions from outsiders’ control, and that their work marked a new start in Uganda's history and politics. They documented everything, in part because they were convinced of their own importance, and in part because they felt themselves to be endangered by the violence of the time. They wanted to impress the authorities in Kampala by generating as much evidence as possible to show themselves to be vigorously invested in the work of building up Uganda’s sovereignty. So, both from a position of insecurity and also from a position of confidence, they documented all of their work abundantly. Their papers are the foundation on which this new book rests. It’s not that I’m uncritical of them. I don’t necessarily admire the people I write about, but I do try to understand why and how they felt themselves to be at the new edge of an era of sovereignty in Uganda’s history.

AW: The book doesn’t shy away from the violence that accompanied this new era. How did the people you study reconcile their idealism with the volatility of the Amin regime?

DP: Violence was an inescapable part of public life in the 1970s. I don’t want to diminish the bloodiness and tyranny of Idi Amin’s government. One argument I make in the book, however, is that this violence had a political infrastructure. It wasn’t senseless — it was the outgrowth of the patriotic energy that Amin’s government sought to marshal. One of the chapters in the book focuses on Radio Uganda, which was an essential vehicle for communication that the authorities in Kampala used to set the tempo of public life. Receiving Radio Uganda’s signal was by no means easy in the 1970s. It took work to get hold of dry cell batteries, which were in short supply. The signal — even if you had a medium wave receiver — had to be carefully tuned: you had to point the thing in the right direction at the right time. Lots of people fell afoul of directives from the centre simply because they weren’t able to hear them, or they weren’t able to know what such directives might have been. Others found themselves rendered outside the bounds of Idi Amin’s decrees because their way of life or occupation was suddenly categorised as illegal. The Economic Crimes Tribunal, for example, criminalised previously uncontroversial aspects of Uganda’s economy. Making profits from arbitrage — from negotiating the value of goods across regional, linguistic or economic lines — was made illegal and punishable by death. All of this placed many people outside the bounds of legality and made them susceptible to the attention of army officers and others who wished to punish illegal behaviour.

AW: I was fascinated to learn about Amin’s interventions in religious life, including his campaigns against Uganda’s ‘minor faiths’ and his surprising collaborations with church leaders. What inspired these policies, and what did they look like in practice?

DP: Amin’s government was trying to decolonise everything. In the domain of religious life, as in the domain of the economy, the Amin government sought to extend supervisory oversight over aspects of human experience that had formerly been outside government officials’ attention. One chapter of the book centres on an effort to impose a new Department of Religious Affairs, whose task was to bring dissident religious traditions under supervision — that is, to ensure that novel religious ideas were subject to scrutiny and control by established organisations. Between 1973 and 1977, Protestant groups of various kinds, Bahá’ís, and a whole range of spiritualist organisations were rendered illegal. Their property was seized, their missionaries were instructed to leave the country, and the largest established institutions — the Anglican Church of Uganda, the Catholic Church, and the Muslim Supreme Council — were delegated to take supervision of their properties. This exercise in religious authoritarianism was abetted by John Mbiti, who is remembered today as the theologian behind the idea of African traditional religion. Mbiti didn’t see himself as a servant of the Amin government. He didn’t knowingly advance cultural or political violence, but he certainly saw Amin’s effort to supervise religious life as a good thing, insofar as it would impose a kind of order on diverse religious expressions and help define African Christianity as essentially African. And so he was, for a time, an eager ally of Amin’s effort to create government institutions that could supervise the practice of religion.

Amin's government was trying to decolonise everything. In the domain of religious life as in the domain of economy, the Amin government sought to extend supervisory oversight over aspects of the human experience that had formerly been outside government officials' attention.

AW: I was also interested to see how Amin’s ideas were expressed in continental politics. How did Ugandans think and rethink their place in Africa over the course of the 1970s?

DP: Amin's government was trying to decolonise everything. In the domain of religious life as in the domain of economy, the Amin government sought to extend supervisory oversight over aspects of the human experience that had formerly been outside government officials' attention. One chapter of the book hinges around an effort to impose a new Department of Religious Affairs whose task it was to bring dissident religious traditions under supervision – that is, to ensure that novel religious ideas were subject to scrutiny and control from established organisations. Between 1973 and 1977, Protestant groups of various kinds, Baha'is, and a whole range of spiritualist organisations were rendered illegal. Their property was seized, their missionaries were instructed to leave the country, and the largest establishment institutions - the Anglican Church of Uganda, the Catholic Church, and the Muslim Supreme Council - were delegated to take supervision over their properties. This exercise in religious authoritarianism was abetted by John Mbiti, who is remembered today as the theologian behind the idea of African traditional religion. Mbiti didn't think himself to be a servant of the Amin government. He didn't knowingly advance cultural or political violence, but he certainly saw Amin's effort to supervise religious life as a good thing, insofar as it would impose a kind of order on diverse religious expressions and help to define African Christianity as essentially African. And so he was, for a time, an eager ally of Amin's effort to create government institutions that could supervise the practise of religion.

AW: I was also interested to see how Amin’s ideas were expressed in continental politics. How did Ugandans think and rethink their place in Africa over the course of the 1970s?

DP: This is one of the aspects of the book that I found most fascinating. In today’s politics, Uganda is often seen as a landlocked afterthought in international affairs — but in the 1970s, Idi Amin very actively sought to position Uganda at the forefront of the worldwide struggle to liberate Black people from colonial oppression and racism. As president, he took on a whole range of unlikely projects to support various oppressed minorities in the name of anti-imperial and anti-apartheid activism. Among other things, Amin equipped and trained agents of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). Its leader, Potlako Leballo, regarded Idi Amin as a collaborator with whom he could work to amplify the PAC’s efforts to mobilise and build up its reputation as a leader of anti-apartheid resistance. For the Amin regime, too, initiatives like these supported the claim that Uganda was not a marginal place — that it was, in fact, at the centre of everything. The 1970s were empowering not just because Amin was a blustering provocateur, but because of the serious efforts that he and the citizens of Uganda made to position their nation at the heart of a global liberation war. Ordinary Ugandans contributed to all kinds of projects intended to liberate their country and to free Africa from foreign oppression. I find much of this admirable. It chimes with our own political moment in the United States, as we seek to decolonise history and open up space for previously marginal accounts of the past to find a home at the centre of things.

AW: In the final chapter of the book, you mention that the current Ugandan government has been reluctant to acknowledge the nation’s difficult history. Why do you think this is?

DP: President Museveni came to power in January 1986. He positioned himself as a radical who wished to draw a line under all of Uganda’s history and start everything anew. That disposition, in turn, created a condition of official amnesia regarding what happened in the 1960s and 1970s. For Museveni, there was nothing to be learned from Uganda’s history. It had all been one long, embarrassing, divisive, violent chronicle that deserved only to be interred, not studied or valorised. There was a brief moment after Amin fell from power when Ugandan historians tried to pick over the bones of the regime to learn from what had happened. When Museveni came to power, however, everything was offloaded onto the shoulders of a commission of enquiry led by Arthur Oder, which was empowered to produce a report into political violence from 1962 up to 1986. The Oder Commission was organised around a number of commissioners — earnest, active, committed people who took their work seriously but were given very little resource. Their report, when published in the early 1990s, was almost entirely ignored. There has been no peace and reconciliation campaign, nor are there repositories of papers where students and researchers can uncover what happened in those years. It has taken organisational work, archival cataloguing, and a good deal of interviewing to bring to light the political history that my book tries to highlight. I don’t by any means see it as the final word. It’s not an exposé, nor is it meant to bring about peace and justice. What I try to do is explain why demagogues like Amin possess the power to convince people of the justice of their cause — and in so doing, warp politics in their own self-interest.

AW: At the end of the book, you point out that dictators and demagogues are not confined to history. What lessons can we draw from the Amin era for understanding our current political moment?

DP: The heroes of the book are the subject of one of the last chapters. They’re the rebels of what was called the Rwenzururu movement — the foremost architects of an alternative way of living that marginalised Idi Amin’s regime. Over the course of the 1960s and ’70s, the leaders of this separatist state lived on the margins of Idi Amin’s Uganda, high in the Rwenzori Mountains on the Congo border. They trained their people to listen sceptically to the dictates handed down from Kampala via Radio Uganda, and introduced to people in the mountains a way of thinking about themselves that set them outside the pale of the kind of campaigning politics that the Amin government wished to impose on the rest of the country. The Rwenzururu rebels fought a war of liberation for years on the border between Uganda and Congo and successfully earned their freedom for a time — a provisional freedom, but a freedom nonetheless. I find many reasons to be inspired by their unlikely movement. I don’t necessarily see Idi Amin as an analogue for Donald Trump or any other of the many demagogues who now inflict themselves on our public stage. I do think, though, that in Amin’s successful efforts to renovate Ugandans’ sense of place and time, in his use of new media to shape people’s apprehensions of where they stood in history, and in his efforts to instrumentalise people’s resentment against racial and ethnic outsiders, there are lessons for us about how demagoguery works in our own place and time. There are also lessons in the tools by which to resist it — perhaps in studying the surprising efforts of secessionists in Western Uganda to find an alternative media economy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.