They will believe you: you are a white man

 
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Is there anything that you have done that is good, Nicholas? You came to Africa to play the white man. But we aren't a game. We're real. This room is real. Your death will be the first real thing that has happened to you.

When Ugandan President Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) says these words to the badly beaten Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), he is unnervingly close to the mark. Garrigan is a chancer, an unsympathetic character who was desperate to escape the stultifying world of his father’s medical practice. This is brilliantly conveyed by the montage of opening scenes in The Last King of Scotland, based on the novel by Giles Foden. We are introduced to him as he jumps naked into a cold and grey Scottish loch with fellow medical graduates in 1970, symbolising his determination to cast off all restraint after enduring years of intense study and the watchful eye of family expectations. The next scene fixes him back at the family table, with Garrigan Snr. offering a lukewarm toast to his son’s success (while noting, to his wife’s dismay, that his own grades had been better). Later that night, Nicholas is in his room screaming in frustration at his captivity – and who can blame him? So he impetuously grabs a globe and spins it, vowing to travel to the first country his finger lands on. Comically, his first stab is Canada, but of course that’s not sufficiently distant or alien. Next stab is Uganda – a country he knows nothing about.

We then immediately see him immersed in the dazzling sights and intoxicating sounds of East Africa, as the titles roll. Director Kevin Macdonald brilliantly captures the exhilaration of the experience, one that anyone who is familiar with the region will instantly recognise. We see Garrigan travelling up-country on a Ugandan bus, gaping at the beauty and fertility of the landscape, but above all, relishing his new-found freedom. The shackles have now been truly cast off. He is a white man in Africa with all the possibilities that this entails, symbolised by his casual sex with a woman he’s met on the bus. ‘I’m a medical officer overseas,’ he shouts triumphantly, as if this, and not medical work itself, is the fulfilment of his African dreams. He’s an adventurer, out to have fun and be free.

Of course, Garrigan has arrived in a newly post-colonial Africa, where Africans are vying for control over their own future. But he is oblivious to that. As we quickly discover, he has no idea who Milton Obote was (the President ousted by his military chief, Idi Amin, in 1970), and naively presumes that Amin’s coup d’état must be beneficial. To give him his due, most of the world, including the British government at the time, would have agreed with him (for as the odious British agent, Stone (Simon McBurney), has it, ‘Amin’s one of us’, having been educated at Sandhurst and a devout servant of the crown when in the King’s African Rifles). But this hardly interests Garrigan. We soon doubt the sincerity of his desire ‘to make a difference’: when a bizarre sequence of events brings about an offer to become Amin’s personal physician, we are not entirely surprised that he takes little persuasion despite his initial reluctance. The hardships of up-country African life, not to mention the tragedies and traumas of a remote clinic, are simply no match for the pleasures of a beautiful bungalow in the presidential compound, being waited on hand and foot, and a lifestyle of luxurious influence.

Amin mesmerizes Garrigan. The President’s unpredictable but winning charm lures him into a confidence of sorts. Forest Whitaker is magnificent in the role (his Oscar clearly deserved). One never knows what will happen next: one minute, Garrigan is declared to be Amin’s ‘closest adviser’ and sent on bizarre errands (for example, deputizing for Amin at an excruciating meeting with various European Foreign Ministers and architects); the next moment, he is described as ‘a nothing’ by Amin, an insignificant appendage. This is most powerfully illustrated by the arguments about Amin’s infamous expulsion of the Ugandan Asians – Amin has entirely forgotten (or ignored) what advice Garrigan has offered him, proving that Garrigan’s position had never, in fact, been that significant. It takes Stone to bring him to his senses at the end when he is at his most vulnerable, saying, ‘You know what they are calling you? Amin’s white monkey.’

Garrigan is an ornament for the African dictator, still bitter about his treatment by white officers in the British imperial army. Possessing the Scottish doctor seems to be a little act of revenge in itself. There is a disturbing irony in this: on his arrival in Uganda, Garrigan is asked if they have monkeys in Scotland. His response is, ‘No, but if we did, we’d probably deep fry them!’ This is exactly what has happened to him.

Garrigan has been seduced by the President and fails, perhaps deliberately, to notice what was increasingly obvious to everyone else: Amin is a monster who is blithely destroying his country. Blinded by the dazzle of proximity to the throne, Nicholas successively destroys the lives of Ugandans he meets: Health Minister Wasswa, Amin’s wife Kay and Dr Junju (his predecessor and Kampala hospital colleague). Garrigan came to Africa to make a difference; well, he certainly did that. It has to be said that, from a characterisation point of view, his affair with Kay Amin (Kerry Washington), is a step too far: it is absurdly reckless, even for Garrigan (and, indeed, is one key change from Foden’s book). From that point, however, we know that the clouds are gathering, and the affair is the narrative catalyst for the film’s denouement.

One criticism of the film in Uganda has, interestingly, been that it is not graphic enough about the atrocities and horrors of Amin’s decade. However, I think that the film can be defended on the grounds that it is a white man’s perspective on an African tragedy (while not of course denying that there should be many more African films). It is only as Garrigan becomes personally affected that his awareness grows and the film becomes more graphic. He doesn’t seem to believe Kay saying that, ‘things really are that bad’ as he lies in her arms; it is only as he descends into the mortuary (chillingly filmed as a hellish nightmare) to find Kay’s mutilated body on the slab that, at last, Garrigan is shaken out of his stupor. Only now does he penetrate the dazzle to see the monster casting his spells.

For Garrigan, however, one of the most chilling moments is not actually violent at all. He returns home to find his home ransacked; as he starts half-heartedly clearing things up, he spots an envelope. His hands start shaking when he realises the contents: a brand new Ugandan passport in his name. For the white man in Africa, this is a truly terrifying prospect. No longer does he have the adventurer’s safety net of a British passport. A few years ago, while living in Uganda, I read a fascinating account of Mobutu’s Zaire/Congo by journalist Michaela Wrong. Her description of travelling in the country’s vast jungles is very apt here:

When the motor-launch deposited me in the cacophony of the quayside . . . I was hit by the sensation that so unnerves first-time visitors to Africa. It is that revelatory moment when white, middle-class Westerners finally understand what the rest of humanity has always known – that there are places in the world where the safety net they have spent so much of their lives erecting is suddenly whipped away, where the right accent, education, health insurance and a foreign passport – all the trappings that spell 'It Can't Happen to Me' – no longer apply, and their well-being depends on the condescension of stranger.[1]

No longer is Africa Garrigan’s playground; it is his prison. This is profoundly ironic: Garrigan had fled to Africa precisely to escape the cultural and moral confines of Scotland, only to find that he had been captured and taunted by the would-be King of Scotland himself. From the clutches of one domineering father, he falls into the hands of a father who was even worse. After his affair with Kay, Amin reasonably declares that he has ‘grossly offended his father’. The film thus provokes big questions about where genuine freedom is to be found. One conclusion is obvious, though: it is not in the abandonment of a moral framework, since that is itself enslaving. The film does not offer an alternative – but then, how can it? The world simply does not know of any alternative to the paths of license or legalism; it takes a gospel of forgiving, but not cheap, grace to offer that (see Galatians 5).

Without a British passport, Garrigan is forced to swallow his pride and seek Stone’s help for the first time. This inevitably comes at a price – an attempt on the president’s life. He only complies because of his fury at Kay’s demise and when he realises that it is his only means of escape. So, even at this point, his action can hardly be described as an altruistic concern to ‘make a difference’ for Africa: it is a matter of revenge and personal survival. But it is his less-than-subtle attempt to kill Amin that leads to his final downfall and chilling conversation with his ‘father’. It is a gripping scene, with both characters speaking truer than they have throughout the film, hence Amin’s verdict quoted at the start. He is absolutely right. Nicholas has played the ‘white man’ and it was only when he lost the protection of a white man’s passport that he was forced to realise the precariousness of his position.

Interestingly, Garrigan speaks of Amin in equally astute terms: ‘You’re a child. That’s what makes you so f****** scary.’ Here was a man who had not grown up, but on whom the lives of millions depended. And that is the heart of the film’s tragedy. For this is no fiction: it is estimated that at least 300,000 Ugandans lost their lives during the Amin years. Most of the key narrative details of the film are historical: Amin’s coup, his obsession with Scotland, the expulsion of the Asians, the Entebbe raid and even the gruesome mutilation of Kay Amin’s body. Furthermore (as the contemporary footage of Amin at the end of the film indicates), Whitaker’s portrayal of this charming killer is all too accurate. The film works because Garrigan’s character is a fictional device to help us understand how such a monster could sweep people into his web and thereby retain power for so long. It has to be said that without Whitaker and McAvoy’s superlative acting, this film would never have convinced as much as it does. They manage to make both characters even vaguely attractive, despite their many flaws.

When discerning what Kevin Macdonald’s most significant statement might be, however, we must see this film as more than a penetrating analysis of warped father-son relationships (although it certainly works on that level), or even of the exploits of a playboy adventurer. He is actually exposing the residual attitudes and most tragic consequences of British colonialism. How do we in the west view Africa today, a continent that is increasingly lagging behind every other continent on the planet? What responsibility to do we share for that? This film suggests that we cannot simply dismiss this as ‘Africa’s problem’; but we will probably only appreciate the fact when we ourselves get swept up into the tragedies. It is his comprehension of this depressing reality that provokes the most intriguing of the minor characters, Dr Junju (David Oyelowo), into saving Nicholas’ life at the end of the film. His final, bitter words justify the whole film’s perspective: for would we, the audience, have taken it as seriously as we have done, if Nicholas Garrigan had been black?

Garrigan: Why are you doing this?
Junju: Frankly, I don't know. You deserve to die. But dead, you can do nothing. Alive, you might just be able to redeem yourself.
Garrigan: I don't understand.
Junju: I am tired of hatred, Doctor Garrigan. This country is drowning in it. We deserve better . . . Go home. Tell the world the truth about Amin. They will believe you; you are a white man.

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