The Last King of Scotland (1998)

Giles Foden

The Last King of Scotland

1998

Combining elements of the thriller noir with comedy, this novel is based on the macabre events of Idi Amin’s regime, ‘The Last King of Scotland’ being one of the many titles which the tyrant bestowed on himself. It is also about a young Scottish doctor who becomes involved in Amin’s administration.

I
did almost nothing on my first day as Idi Amin’s doctor. I had just come in from one of the western provinces, where I’d worked in a bush surgery. Kampala, the city, seemed like paradise after all that.

Back in my old neighbourhood, I’d seen to Idi once. On his bullying visits to the gum-booted old chiefs out there, he would drive a red Maserati manically down the dirt tracks. Walking in the evenings, under the telegraph poles where the kestrels perched, you could tell where he’d been – the green fringe of grass down the middle of the track would be singed brown by the burning sump of the low-slung car.

On this occasion, he’d hit a cow – some poor smallholder had probably been fattening it up for slaughter – spun the vehicle and been thrown clear, spraining his wrist in the process. The soldiers, following him in their slow, camouflaged jeeps, had come to call for me. I had to go and attend to him by the roadside. Groaning in the grass, Idi was convinced the wrist was broken, and he cursed me in Swahili as I bound it up.

But I must have done something right because, a few months later, I received a letter from the Minister of Health, Jonah Wasswa, appointing me to the post of President Amin’s personal physician – Medical Doctor to His Excellency – at State House, one of his residences. That was Idi’s way, you see. Punish or reward. You couldn’t say no. Or I didn’t think, back then, that you could. Or I didn’t really think about it at all.

I explored the planes and corners of my gleaming office, which stood in the grounds of State House and came with a next-door bungalow thrown in. I felt rather pleased with its black couch and swivel chair, its green filing cabinets, its bookshelves stacked with medical reports and back issues of the
Lancet
, its chrome fittings and spring-loaded Anglepoise lamps. My immediate tools – stethoscope, a little canvas roll of surgical instruments, casebook and so on – were laid out tidily on the desk. The neatness and the general spotlessness of the place were the work of Cecilia, my nurse. She was a remnant from my predecessor, Taylor. After suffering my attentions at the roadside, Amin had summarily dismissed him. I knew I ought to feel guilty about this, but I didn’t, not really. Cecilia made it quite plain that she didn’t like or approve of me – I reckon that she must have been half in love with old Taylor – and that she soon would be going back herself, back to Ashford, Kent.

Let her go, I thought, pushing aside a paper on disorders of the inner ear: my private study, my little problem. I was just glad to be out of the bush and to be earning a bit more money. The sun was shining and I was happy, happier than I’d been for a good many months. I stared out of the window at a cultivated lawn which swept down a hill towards the lake, glittering in the distance. A breeze moved the leaves of the shrubbery: bougainvillaea, flame-tree, poinsettia. Through the slatted blinds I could see a group of prisoners in white cotton uniforms, mowing the grass with sickles. They were guarded by a sleepy soldier, leaning on his gun in the dusty haze. Swish, swish, the noise came quietly through to me. I watched the prisoner nearest, slightly hypnotized by the movement of his cutter and the articulation of his bony arm. I shouldn’t think they were fed too well: a bit of steamed green banana or maize meal, some boiled-up neck of chicken if they were lucky.

Turning away from the window, I resolved, since there didn’t seem any likelihood of a presidential consultation that afternoon, to get a bus into town. I used to wear just shorts and shirt in the bush and needed to get a linen suit run up for tonight. The street-side tailors – there were whole rows of them – with their push-pedal, cast-iron Singers, their bad teeth and worse English, were just the fellows for the job. They could sort you out a suit in a couple of hours, while you looked round the market or went to one of the astoundingly understocked grocers. Not quite Savile Row, but good enough for here, good enough for Idi, anyway. Though he himself did wear Savile Row tailoring, with its luscious, thick lapels and heavy hem-drop. Zipped up in their polypropylene bags, the suits came in on the weekly flight from Stansted, hung on racks among crates of Scotch, golf clubs, radio-cassettes, cartons of cigarettes, bicycles tubed in cardboard, slimline kettles, sleek toasted-sandwich makers with winking lights. And plain things, too: sugar and tea – products that might well have come from here in the first place, swapping their gunny sacks for cellophane packaging on the return trip.

I needed a suit quickly because this evening Idi was to host the Ambassadors’ Dinner, the annual beanfeast at which he entertained Kampala’s diplomatic corps, assembled local dignitaries, senior civil servants, the wealthier concessionaires (Lonrho, Cooper Motors, Siemens), the top figures from the banks (Standard, Commercial, Grindlays) and tribal chiefs from all over the country. Wasswa, the Minister, had told me that His Excellency had given specific orders that I should attend. “As you know,” he had said (I had read Amin’s medical records, such as they were – chaos really, since His Excellency insisted on editing them himself), “President Amin occasionally suffers from a slight gastric difficulty.”

As I shut the door of the office behind me, the draught from the corridor set the blinds tinkling, like little cymbals. The noise reminded me of something I once saw on holiday in Malta – a set of tiny, shiny knives hung up like wind chimes outside a knife-grinder’s shop. ‘Aeolian sharps’, as a friend remarked at the time.

∗

On my return from town, I took a shower in the concrete-lined cubicle in the bungalow. The big steel rose spurted out only a single stream of tepid liquid, under which I held up my hands, sending it spattering, planing down my back. Afterwards, as I went through the rough archway that separated the steamy bathroom from the sweltering bedroom, it was like going from one dimension to another. Fresh sweat mixed with the runnels of shower water.

I then found myself, irritatingly, needing to defecate, which I always hate doing just after a shower – it seems like a form of sacrilege. As usual, I contemplated what I had produced: it was the easiest way of determining at an early stage the presence of a parasite, which could take hold in that fetid climate in a matter of hours. This evening’s offering, I was worried to notice, was paler than usual, suggesting that bacteria had been absorbed into the bowel. I made a mental note to run some tests on myself in the morning.

The effort of expulsion had caused me to perspire even more, so when I put on my new suit I was already wearing what I used to call my African undertaker’s outfit: the envelope of moisture which covers the body day and night. This tropical monster, ghostly presage of a thousand sallow malarial deaths, squats on one’s shoulders and then, trickling down, concentrates its peculiar force in the hollows of the knees and ankles.

It was in this morbid state that I strolled across the lawn to State House itself- hair brushed and shining none the less, a blue, short-sleeved shirt and natty green tie under the cream suit. On my way, I saw that the sicklemen were being herded into the lorry that would take them back to the gaol on the outskirts of town. One by one, the mowers disappeared through the canvas flaps, throwing their cutters into a wooden box below the tow-bar as they did so. Their guard lifted a short stick, acknowledging me as I passed.

A marabou stork was poking about nearby in a pile of rubbish, and I gave it a wide berth. These birds, the height of a small child, stood on spindly legs, their large beaks and heavy pinkish wattles making them look as if they might topple over. They were urban scavengers, gathering wherever there was pollution or decay. I hated them, yet I found them intriguing; they were almost professorial in the way they sorted through the heaps of rotting produce scattered all over the city, the organic mass mixed in with mud and ordure, scraps of plastic, bits of metal.

Going through a gate in the wall, I walked to where the big black cars of the ambassadors, the Mercedes of the richer merchants, and various white Toyotas and Peugeots with a smattering of dirt about the wings were beginning to pull up outside the main portico. An official in a red coat with brass buttons (it was too tight for him, the buttons strained to close the gap) ushered them into parking spaces, smiling and inclining his head.

Once inside, Wasswa, the Minister, beckoned me impatiently from the top of a wide staircase. He and various other ministers and senior army officers were waiting there to greet the guests and progress them through the great ebony-panelled door into the main hall, where the banquet was to take place.

He was definitely one of the solemn ones, Wasswa, his sharp young face (he couldn’t have been much older than me – under thirty, anyway) frowning with the burden of office.

“Ah, Garrigan, you have arrived. I was hoping that you would be here in good time. You must be on hand if any of the guests are becoming unwell.”

“Of course,” I said, obligingly.

He looked ridiculous, my boss – somehow he’d got hold of a dress suit, but the sleeves were too short, and his cuffs, fastened with twisted bits of fuse wire, stuck out like the broken wings of small birds.

Already a long queue had formed down the stairs as the dignitaries waited for a handshake from Idi. He was wearing a blue uniform today – air force, I supposed – with gold trim and lacy epaulettes. He looked splendid.

Wasswa propelled me into a knot of three in the straggly queue. One of them was Stone, the fair-haired official at the British Embassy who had logged me in his book when I first arrived in the country, before I went into the bush. The other couple, I guessed, were the Ambassador and his wife. She was small but sinewy, in a dress printed with flowers. Coming closer I studied her covertly from over Wasswa’s shoulder; then her eyes, long-lashed in a composed but unsmiling face, surrounded by a dark bob, were suddenly meeting mine, and I had to look away. Her mouth was pursed like a little fig, and her face had momentarily registered some expression as she looked at me. Not a totally unpleasant one, I thought.

She was a bit younger than her husband, who was standard Foreign Office issue: plastered-down hair, a large body shifting in its bristly suit, round glasses in a round face – a sponge of official easing-along, ready to soak up whatever discord the world threw at him.

Wasswa introduced us. “Ambassador Perkins, you have met our new doctor at State House, Nicholas Garrigan?”

“I haven’t, in fact, but Stone here has told me all about his good work out west. So you’ve come to keep things in order back up here? We’ve been a bit lost since Doctor Taylor went, I can tell you.”

He looked meaningfully at Wasswa.

“This is my wife, Marina. And Stone you already know.”

Stone lifted his nose up in the air. Even then, there was something in his manner that irked me.

“Hello, Mrs Perkins,” I said.

She held out a hand to me, leaning her head to one side, her teeth showing slightly through her lips as she spoke.

“It’s good to have a doctor nearby again. One gets so terribly worried.”

When it was the turn of our little group to take its salutations from Idi, he clapped me on the shoulder with one great hand and waved the other in front of my face.

“So you see, Doctor Nicholas, I am fully recovered from my tumble. But although I am as strong as lion, I have some small wounds in my belly which you must fix for me.”

Greeting each of us in turn, relaxed and charming, he chuckled as we moved past, beneath the twinkling chandeliers. There were some loathsome tribal masks on the walls, and also a line of stiff, heavy portraits of governor-generals from the colonial era: several had mutton-chop whiskers, and one looked slightly like my father. We searched out our seats at the long mahogany table, which was already nlling up with grim-faced army officers and assorted civilians. There were a couple of journalists dashing around with notebooks, and also a photographer, his camera hung round his neck on a broad canvas strap. Some of the guests were in dinner jackets and evening gowns, some were in linen suits, cotton dresses, safari suits, saris; some (though by no means all) of the chiefs were in traditional clothes, and several matrons wore wraparound frocks of colourful cloth. One young Ugandan woman – a princess, it was later pointed out to me – was wearing a trouser suit that seemed to be fabricated entirely from pink cashmere. But she didn’t, under those whirring hardwood fans, appear to be any hotter than the rest of us.

The company hovered, ill at ease, behind the tall chairs, waiting for the greetings to come to an end and the meal proper to begin. I discovered my own label. Name spelt wrong, in uneven type: Doctor GARGAN. Mrs Perkins was next to me on one side, Wasswa on the other. Perkins and his American counterpart, Todd (‘Nathan Theseus Todd’, if you please), faced us. Beyond – the Italian, Bosola, the East German, Lessing, the Portuguese, Dias. All were fat, or fattish, and full of savoir-faire; they must make them in the same place, these ambassadors.