the times | Saturday November 14 2020 1GR saturday review 17
The Fat
Controllers
really hated
each other
— chaining
the odd
engine to the
other’s track
Cathedrals
of Steam
How London’s Great
Stations Were Built
by Christian Wolmar
Atlantic, 337pp; £
pleasure
that if you pulled down the blinds of a
first-class compartment leaving Charing
Cross, you could get everything done in
the seven minutes it took to reach Cannon
Street — all for sixpence. This extracurric-
ular activity declined once the service was
diverted via Waterloo Junction. I felt a
particular pang for the lost continental
glamour of Charing Cross, which once
featured a soaring glass roof and boat
trains that could take you to Paris in six
and a half hours.
And those Fat Controllers really hated
each other. Edward Watkin, director of the
Metropolitan line, and James Staats
Forbes, director of the District line,
couldn’t be in the same room. Trouble was,
it fell to these two men to create the inner
ring that would link all the mainline
stations. When the forerunner to the Cir-
cle Line finally opened in 1884 (the Metro-
politan initially ran clockwise, the District
anticlockwise) they still weren’t averse to
chaining the odd engine to the other’s
track out of spite.
Wolmar is good on the long-term conse-
quences of station building. By the time
Liverpool Street was built in 1874, parlia-
ment was asking that some compensation
be made to the communities it upended.
So Great Eastern offered dirt cheap early
morning “worker” fares. Working-class
neighbourhoods duly bloomed down the
line from Liverpool Street in Hackney,
Tottenham, Edmonton, Walthamstow
and Enfield. The Great Northern route
into King’s Cross via Alexandra Palace was
twice the price — and remained respecta-
bly bourgeois.
I wonder if there’s some general law that
can be extrapolated from this? Civilisa-
tions inevitably take long-term decisions
when they are at their most aggressive and
thrusting. Consequently they will always
be haunted by ghosts from whenever that
period happened to be. The 21st-century
commuter is trapped in a Victorian board-
room squabble.
But there is much cause for optimism.
Even London Bridge looks spanking these
days — and unloved Euston will have its
second chance with HS2. During lock-
down, passenger numbers have been as
low as 5 per cent of usual capacity. A good
time to go and marvel.steamy Silver Link, an
A4-class locomotive, at
King’s Cross, London,
in 1938
More Trump than Pol Pot
F
lamboyant and unpredictable, he
played the media brilliantly. He
loved teasing western allies, send-
ing cables that left diplomats
puzzling over whether he
was nuts or merely winding them up.
His unabashed libido was part of his
public persona, wives and mistresses
followed in swift succession. Built on
outsize lines, he dominated any room
he entered and his driving energy
ensured he was always centre of atten-
tion. Many of his subjects loathed him,
but millions revelled in his readiness
to tell snooty outsiders to go hang.
As Mark Leopold acknowledges,
the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin bore
more than a passing resemblance to
the outgoing president of the United
States. The mind boggles at the
thought of the kind of tweets the man
who occasionally styled himself “Lord
of all the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes
of the Seas” would have sent, had he
only lived in the era of the smartphone.
The shock jocks would surely have had
his number on speed dial. However, in
contrast to Donald Trump — already
the focus of thousands of books —
comparatively little has been written
about the man who left an indelible
mark on the country he ruled from 1971
to 1979 and the African continent.
The best-known biographies, by the
scholars Mahmood Mamdani and Ali
Mazrui, date from the 1980s and 1970s.
A fresh look was overdue. But here the
complications start. The problem with
larger-than-life characters is that not only
are they happy to embroider their CVs,
their carelessness with the facts encourag-
es others to go one further. Exiles who fled
Uganda in the 1970s had every reason to
hype the regime’s atrocities. British colo-
nial officers invited to leave Uganda,
which gained its independence in 1962,
needed to prove how much better things
would have been if only they had stayed.
For other westerners, something deeper
was at play, Leopold correctly surmises.
Amin conveniently encapsulated the
“other” at its most grotesque: black,
brutish, buffoonish and oversexed. “He
fits, almost parodically, the longstanding
stereotype of African masculinity as
intrinsically violent, irrational, autocratic
and dangerous.”
And so the stories spread. Amin was not
just a mass murderer, he was also a canni-
bal who practised sordid blood rituals and
kept victims’ heads in his fridge. When one
of his wives died during a botched abor-
tion, he arranged for her dismembered
legs to be sutured on to her shoulders, herwas Milton Obote’s idea. Amin merely saw
it through.
The notion that Amin was clinically
insane, voiced by the US State Depart-
ment, doesn’t hold water either. He used
unpredictability and eccentricity as
weapons to great effect. The leader who
came up with the idea of a “Save Britain
Fund” and wrote to the prime minister
Edward Heath offering fresh Ugandan
produce to supposedly starving Britons
clearly had an impish sense of humour.
It’s also hard not to smile on reading
about the panicky precautions drawn up by
the Home Office, Metropolitan Police and
air traffic control to ensure Amin, who
announced he would attend the Common-
wealth heads of government meeting in
London in 1977, never got off the plane. “Of
course Amin never turned up, and prob-
ably never intended to,” Leopold writes.
When it comes to Amin’s image as a
uniquely bloodthirsty African leader, any
Ugandan will tell you that Obote, seen
in London for far too long as a safe pair
of hands, was responsible for far more
deaths during his disastrous second
term. The death toll during the Amin
years could have been anywhere
between 12,000 and 500,000 — a
spread that renders the estimate
almost meaningless — while Obote is
routinely blamed for 500,000 deaths.
That the soldiers under Amin’s com-
mand tortured and raped is not in dis-
pute, but was their president a cannibal
with a creepy line in fridge contents?
Sheer fabrication, Leopold concludes.
The book’s reliance on declassified
British cables is frustrating, given that
people who lived through the Amin
era and can remember it in terrible
detail are available for interview in
Uganda. I could have done with fewer
opinionated — occasionally racist —
commentaries from former British
officials and American diplomats
and far more testimony from Ugan-
dans who know first-hand Amin’s
massive impact on their society.
Busy stripping away the layers of in-
vention that shroud Amin, Leopold
leaves a rich and complex African nation
looking strangely exsanguinated and
pallid. Any book about Uganda that fails to
convey how one of the continent’s most
staggeringly beautiful countries smells,
looks and tastes has surely missed a trick.
But this book performs the essential task
of challenging established stereotypes and
querying a host of lazy assumptions, the
prime duty of a historian. In the age of pop-
ulism we all need to better understand how
and why charismatic politicians connect
with their grass roots, and a first step —
mainstream media take note — must sure-
ly involve dropping the kneejerk labels.
Ousted when Tanzanian troops and
a coalition of Ugandan rebels invaded in
1979, Amin settled in Saudi Arabia, where
he spent the next 24 years in a grace-and-
favour villa provided by the government,
surrounded by his wives and children. He
hoped that the Ugandan authorities would
one day recognise that he was a man much
misunderstood, but died aged 78 with that
hope unfulfilled. Today no doubt he would
be waiting for the phone to ring and a
Hollywood agent to offer him a role in the
next series of The Apprentice.
Do Not Disturb: The Story of a
Political Murder and an African
Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong
will be published in Marcharms to her pelvis. Policies came to him in
dreams. Psychotic and sadistic, he had
inherited his witch-doctor mother’s
powers. And so on.
Sizing up the challenge of separating
fact from fiction, Leopold adopts a novel
approach, abandoning straightforward
biography in favour of a meticulous
examination of the reliability of the
various accounts written as Amin rose to
prominence. An anthropologist by train-
ing, he is as intrigued by the motives of
those who first put pen to paper on the
topic as he is with the man himself.
Intellectually speaking, it is a supremely
honest approach, but in the first quarter of
the book at least, its worthiness threatens to
sink the project. As Leopold compares one
conflicting account of Amin’s roots and par-
entage with another — he was a member of
the minority Kakwa ethnic group, his
father was probably a policeman, his
mother likely an army camp follower with
healing skills — the eyes start to glaze.Idi Amin was less
crazy and bloody
than his lurid image,
says Michela Wrong
bloodthirsty? Idi Amin in 1976Idi Amin
The Story of
Africa’s Icon of Evil
by Mark LeopoldYale, 350pp; £I
T
A
bYleaves
bloodthirsty?IdiA i i 1But as the book moves from the hazy
territory of childhood into better docu-
mented adulthood, the narrative begins to
bite. The youngster who signed up with the
King’s African Rifles, the force Britain
established to police East Africa, won the
admiration of his officers, who were
impressed by his physique — he stood over
6ft 4in and was unbeatable in the boxing
ring — and his willingness to please. As
Britain’s pullout from Africa loomed, he
was fast-tracked for promotion. The man
was none too bright, they concluded, but
definitely loyal to the old colonial master.
He would be easy to manipulate.
Leopold picks off the myths, one by one.
Far from being stupid, Amin, appointed
commander of Uganda’s army in 1965,
proved supremely politically skilled.
Seizing power while President Obote was
at a conference in Singapore in 1971, he
swiftly learnt how to play off Uganda’s
factions against one another, exploiting
the suspicion between southerners and
northerners, Catholics and Protestants,
Acholi and Langi, to ride the tiger. As for
Amin’s infamous expulsion of the Asians
in 1972, one of the moves that permanently
soured relations with London, the policySSPL/GETTY IMAGES