Once installed as Uganda’s president, Amin played the common man writ large, albeit one who in Schroeder’s film appears in a variety of military uniforms. As was noted by one British foreign-affairs expert in the 1972 edition of the annual journal Africa Contemporary Record,Amin’s “extroverted personality and his penchant for ‘meeting the masses’” prompted comparison to “an American candidate in a presidential election campaign.” 1925–2003) had been underestimated, most of all by his British command officers, who, as one recalled, considered him “a splendid chap, though a bit short on the gray matter.” Amin’s first recorded words after taking power in a January 1971 military coup against his patron Milton Obote, himself a dictator-as well as the leader of Uganda’s independence movement-were “I am not a politician.” Yet he did have political instincts. “I always speak the truth,” he assures Schroeder with a smile.įor much of his life, and particularly as a colonial subject, Amin (ca. Frequently referring to himself in the third person, Amin was not only a shameless braggart but also an outrageous liar. With regard to his ideology, this jovially menacing former heavyweight boxing champ (six feet four and 240 pounds) might be described as a populist demagogue who, strategically xenophobic but essentially solipsistic, insultingly personalized his relations with foreign leaders.

Ugandan dictator Amin, the subject of Schroeder’s 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait, was a trash-talking, impulse-driven blowhard and an incorrigibly boastful performer, not without a sense of humor and a certain rough charm.

“He’s joking all the time if he feels he has an audience,” Barbet Schroeder said of Idi Amin in a 1976 New York Post interview.

Amin dada movie