Derek R. Peterson’s A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda: A Review

Idi Amin has a long afterlife in the global imagination: a cartoon monster in uniform, a shorthand for postcolonial horror. Around the time his government collapsed in 1979, the stories came fast and loud—memoirs, exposés, diplomatic accounts, lurid rumours dressed up as reportage. In that flood, Amin becomes less a ruler of a real country than the star of a grotesque genre. Uganda turns into a stage set. And the people who lived there—worked there, filed papers there, ran shops there—fade into the background as extras.

That’s the habit Derek R. Peterson’s A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda tries to break.

Not by denying brutality. Not by rehabilitating a dictator. But by asking a question that sensational storytelling almost never asks: who kept the lights on? Who stamped the forms, collected the fees, taught the classes, issued the permits, ran the businesses, wrote the memos? In other words: what did the regime look like when you stop staring at the monster and start watching the machinery?

Contents

Moving the camera away from the freezer

Amin’s “usual” narratives—both nonfiction and fiction—often lean on shock. They circle the palace, the torture chambers, the rumours of cannibalism, the crocodiles, the theatrical threats. They are stories designed to leave you with one dominant feeling: disgust.

Peterson’s book is a deliberate revision of that tradition. It pushes the spotlight away from the spectacular and onto the ordinary: clerks, bureaucrats, teachers, businessmen, the workers of paper and procedure. The argument is uncomfortable precisely because it’s plausible: even a violent, chaotic state still depends on daily routines. Forms still get filed. Money still changes hands. Schools still attempt to run. People still try to impose “order,” even when the wider atmosphere feels like it’s cracking.

This is what Peterson describes as a kind of “government of action.” The phrase matters. It suggests that Amin’s Uganda wasn’t only a regime of terror; it was also a regime that did things—sometimes competently, sometimes desperately, often inconsistently, but still through systems that required human labour.

And that leads to one of the book’s sharpest ironies: in the middle of the violence of the 1970s, many ordinary Ugandans did not experience Amin only as a butcher. They could also see him, Peterson notes, as a “hero of cultural and economic liberation.”

If that makes you flinch, good. That flinch is the point. It forces a more complicated reality: authoritarian regimes don’t survive on fear alone. They also survive on belief, hope, opportunism, habit, and the simple need to get through tomorrow.

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Authoritarianism has a workforce

One of the most useful things about this approach is that it makes authoritarianism feel less like an alien episode and more like a social relationship.

When we picture dictatorships, we tend to imagine a pyramid: one man at the top, a few enforcers beneath him, and an oppressed mass at the bottom. Peterson’s focus on “infrastructure” turns that pyramid into something more like a web.

A state needs clerks to keep records.
It needs bureaucrats to translate orders into procedures.
It needs teachers to keep institutions functioning.
It needs businesspeople to keep goods circulating and revenue flowing.

None of those roles automatically makes someone a villain. But they are the roles that allow a regime to be more than a gang with guns. They are the roles that make a dictatorship govern.

The uncomfortable implication is that ordinary people can become part of the operating system—not necessarily because they love the ruler, but because their lives are entangled with the state’s survival: jobs, safety, access, food, family, status, possibility.

That’s not a moral excuse. It’s an explanation attempt. And it’s also why the book’s lens matters beyond Uganda: if you want to understand authoritarian power anywhere, you have to understand the people who make it routine.

The book’s tension: refusing judgment, then judging anyway

There’s a catch, though. The review points out a tonal tension in Peterson’s writing.

On one hand, Peterson claims he does not make judgments about the people he studies. On the other, he eventually describes many of them as chauvinists, misogynists, and busybodies.

Maybe both can be true. You can try to avoid turning your subjects into cartoon villains while still describing what they believed and how they behaved. But the phrasing matters, because the moment you reach for moral labels, you risk flattening the very complexity you set out to recover.

If your mission is to find the “ordinary people” inside a regime, you have to treat “ordinary” as a real category—not as a polite word for “petty.”

The bigger missing piece: why did they do it?

The sharper criticism is this: motivation.

Even with a rich base of sources, the book (as described in the review) often leaves the reader asking: why did these people keep the wheels turning? Why did thousands participate in building and maintaining an infrastructure that enabled Amin’s rule?

There are many plausible answers—fear, ideology, careerism, genuine belief in reform, ethnic or regional loyalties, survival, the momentum of institutions that predate Amin, or simply the lack of alternatives. But if those answers remain hazy, the picture risks becoming too state-centred: Uganda reduced again to “Amin’s Uganda,” as if the country’s people had no life outside the regime’s frame.

That’s the paradox of writing “a popular history” of a dictatorship: if you focus too much on the state, you end up reproducing the dictatorship’s own claim—that it is the centre of everything.

Uganda’s people were never fully Amin’s. Any history that tilts too hard toward government infrastructure risks missing the other infrastructures—family networks, religious communities, informal economies, local solidarities—that shape how people actually live under authoritarian rule.

The argument’s real value: it fights propaganda from both sides

There’s a modern echo to all of this. During Uganda’s 50th independence commemorations in 2012, debates about Amin’s legacy resurfaced in public conversation. One argument was that the “Amin story” had been recycled in simplistic ways—sometimes to make later governments look better by comparison, or to exaggerate their own achievements against a deliberately distorted past.

That’s where Peterson’s book lands as a political intervention, not just a historical one.

Getting the story “right” doesn’t mean sanitising Amin. It means resisting two easy narratives at once:

The sensational narrative: Amin as pure monster, Uganda as helpless victim, history as horror cinema.
The self-serving narrative: Amin as a useful straw man, a dark backdrop that makes later leaders look bright.

By focusing on the people who made the regime functional—however imperfectly—Peterson invites a harder, more adult question: what does it take for authoritarian power to become normal? Not normal as “acceptable,” but normal as “woven into daily life.”

And once you start asking that, you’re no longer studying a uniquely “African” pathology or a single dictator’s madness. You’re studying a general human problem: how systems of domination recruit participation, manufacture legitimacy, and persist through the labour of people who may not see themselves as political actors at all.

That’s a disturbing lesson. Which is exactly why it’s worth reading.

Buy the book on Amazon: Derek R. Peterson’s A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda