By Nyang’au Araka
History was never my favourite subject but as I age, I find it interesting, although sometimes it offers more questions than answers.
In school, they told us that Idi Amin was the “Butcher of Uganda”—an illiterate dictator, a ruthless killer, and a man who turned his country upside down.
The history books painted him as a clown in uniform, a man with nothing but violence in his head and blood on his hands, and this was rubberstamped in movies.
We read, memorized, and repeated those stories during exams, and to be honest, I never thought there could be another side to him.
But in recent days, videos of Amin have been circulating online, and they don’t match the man I carried in my head all these years.
I have watched clips of Amin chairing cabinet meetings with confidence, explaining government policies, donating to communities, and speaking about Africa in a way that shows he understood what was happening in the world.
He doesn’t come across as the buffoon that school history wanted us to believe, a man who eventually died in exile, became a laughing stock and was never accorded proper burial.
So, what really happened? Were we misled?
One thing that stands out in those videos is his decision to expel Asians and Europeans from Uganda in the 1970s.
In history class, we were told this was sheer madness, a reckless act that destroyed Uganda’s economy.
But when you listen to Amin himself, he argued that foreigners controlled almost all the businesses while Africans remained mere laborers in their own country.
His move, in his own words, was to give Ugandans “the economic keys of their nation.”
He feared the foreigners were banking their profits in their home countries, something that was likely to collapse Uganda’s economy.
Whether the decision worked or not is a different debate, but it shows a man thinking about sovereignty, not just swinging a machete.
Of course, I’m not blind to the atrocities linked to his regime.
Reports of disappearances, killings, and repression cannot just be waved away.
Yet, seeing him in these videos makes me wonder: did historians exaggerate some parts of his life and erase others?
Did they flatten his story into a single ugly headline—“the tyrant”—without allowing room for nuance?
History, after all, is written by those who win or those who shout the loudest.
Many of the books we studied were written with Western lenses, sometimes repeating Cold War propaganda.
To the West, Amin was a villain, especially after he aligned himself with Arab nations, challenged Britain, and ridiculed Israel.
His insults to Queen Elizabeth and other global leaders made him an international pariah.
Could it be that our classrooms borrowed this narrative wholesale, without asking what ordinary Ugandans saw in him at first?
After all, the man rose through the military, fought for Uganda’s independence, and at some point, had genuine support from the people.
How does someone completely evil rise to the presidency without some measure of trust from his countrymen?
I now find myself asking whether historians owe Amin an apology—or at least owe us, their students, a confession that they did not tell the whole story.
Maybe Amin was both: a man capable of grand mistakes and also capable of visionary ideas.
Maybe he was a product of his time, rough, unpolished, but still a leader trying to prove that Africa could stand on its own feet.
Watching those videos has left me unsettled. It reminds me that history is never a fixed story; it is a puzzle with missing pieces.
Sometimes, the “truth” we are fed is half-truth, sharpened to serve political ends.
Do historians owe Idi Amin an apology?
Perhaps not in the sense of clearing his name, but certainly in the sense of acknowledging that they told a lopsided story.
And maybe they also owe us an apology, for turning complex figures into cardboard villains without letting us wrestle with the contradictions of human leadership.
Amin might still remain a controversial figure, but I can no longer see him as the simple monster my history textbook drew.
History, it seems, owes us the courtesy of honesty, even if the truth is messy.
-Mr. Araka is a member of the Kisii Press Club.