Adam Seftel

There's a lot of protesting too much here--a lot of sleazy old post-colonial Jim Bailey, the publisher of Drum, a pan-African newsmagazine of the kind that contains real stories but puts hot girls on the cover, a lot of Jim curating with a heavy hand, showing appropriate but overdue shame about the way his magazine sucked up to Obote and coddled Amin so as not to get banned in Uganda and keep speaking truth or making money or whatever. On the other hand, they did speak some truth, and in the end they hit Amin pretty hard, which is laudable even if it only came after atrocities that'll turn your bones to ash if you think about them too much. And these collected articles are valuable documents of their times, especially since Uganda wasn't exactly overserved with high-quality print newsmedia at the time. So I learned a good fair bit about Uganda's squandered promise--nobody wanted Amin, of course; what they wanted was to keep engaging in small-minded ethnoreligious politics spiced up with the occasional murder but everybody else making money and going home to their kids--and then Obote cheated a little on that political consensus (which makes him murdering, dictatorial filth too, don't misunderstand me) and because people often like to overreact, especially in a place that admires genial bullies who do sports and isn't too sold on the sanctity of representative democracy, they welcomed Idi in.

And he ruined everything, a reminder that along with trauma and death always comes destitution, disease, breakdown of all kinds, that tribulation is infinitely convertible. And what we don't often remember/understand in the west, that the post-Amin period was as vicious and dangerous as the Amin period--just less Gothically grotesque. And so you have to tip your cap to Museveni--damn it--and wonder if the reason he won't leave now is just that he's haunted by the idea of it all falling apart and doesn't have the imagination to envision anything in between himself and the horror show. He's no Amin or even Obote, of course, but it mustn't be forgotten that he is also a genial bully (in a sweet hat).… (más)