Right, thank you very much to Professor Dungy and to Twitter and to others who have made this visit possible.
It's a great pleasure to be here in Oxford and to get to talk about these things with such smart and interesting people.
So thank you for the invitation. Over the course of his eight years as president of Uganda,
Idi Amin was subject to hundreds of images of photographic that is images which were so clear.
Now I have one presentation on my screen, the other. And so.
It's something.
Converge. No one's moving here, so I guess justice will be served.
OK,
so Amin was followed around by a team of cameramen who worked with the Ministry of Information over the course of eight years as president of Uganda.
For decades, it was thought that the photographs and film that the men of the Ministry of Information had made were lost to posterity.
Destroyed. That is, during the tumult of the early 1980s or misplaced during subsequent relocations of the Ministry of Information Archives.
In 2015, archivists at the UBC, the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation, uncovered a filing cabinet, which was full of photographic negatives.
Each envelope is labelled with information about the date and subject of the photograph and all.
There are 85000 photographic negatives dating from the 1950s through to the 1990s.
In 2019 three in 2018, UBC launched a project to digitise this photographic collection with funding from the University of Michigan,
the University of Western Australia, and with the involvement of colleagues from the Kennedy University.
The team of archivists and curators has digitised 50000 images to date.
Amongst the people involved in this work is Dr Edgar Taylor.
As you can see, in 2018, a further collection came to light.
That is the Cinema Film Archive of the UPC, which had been kept in a back room at the corporation's headquarters in Kampala.
The Cinema Film Archive is much more difficult to deal with because cinema film
requires remedial attention that's beyond the capacity of any ordinary person.
So with the ABC's active encouragement, we've brought the cinema to film reels to an arbiter.
And over the course of the ensuing years, with funding little bits of funding from Michigan and from Spring Films,
which is a filmmaking company based here in the UK, we have digitised about 20 cinema films, most of them little cell cinema shorts.
There's another 100 reels that we're currently trying to illicit funds to digitise.
At the moment, it's quite expensive and difficult. The discovery of this profuse media archive raises all kinds of interesting questions.
For one thing, what was all this cinema film and indeed photographic film for?
I'll argue today very briefly that Idi Amin, who came to power in 1971, sought to frame his government as being revolutionary and anti-colonial,
but it was his misfortune to govern a place that is Uganda that was quite far from the Theatre of Anti-Colonial and anti-Apartheid Struggle,
which was largely in southern Africa.
In the absence of a shooting war means war against colonialism had to be fought and won against Uganda's own citizens.
Amin had claimed to be fighting on behalf of an oppressed black majority against ethnic and racial minorities within Uganda.
This is what made media essential.
If Uganda's government was to be seen to be revolutionary, if it were to be seen to be engaged in anti-colonial struggle against outside forces,
then there needed to be evidence that could dramatise the conflict and make liberation visible
in a place where religious and cultural communities were deeply interwoven and overlapping.
The mean government needed to make it seem as though Ugandans were actually partitioned into
racial and religious enclaves in a place where political hierarchy was barricaded and multiforme.
That means government needed to make it seem as though an oppressed majority were through government action, reclaiming its birthright.
And it was in a state run film, cinema, film, photography to some extent in radio that the Amin regime made its struggle visible.
It was through film that they sought to create evidence that could show Uganda to be on the path toward liberation.
Amin's regime used film to generate truth for citizens and for outsiders that could
represent the victories that had been world and the absence of military struggle.
Film was an enduring the useful medium concretise victories that were otherwise quite difficult to visualise.
The search for inspiring anti-colonial struggle took place in a range of spaces and in a variety of media,
the film was not the only space in which revolutionary struggle took place.
Monumental infrastructure was one media in which the Indian government tried to concretised its victories against colonial forces.
Amin was an inveterate builder of monuments.
I don't have time to talk much about this, but shortly after he came to power in 1971, Amin constructed a new monument in northern Uganda in Congo,
commemorating the place where in 1899 the anti-colonial leader baliga had been captured by British forces.
The site of the beleaguered monument was previously unmarked.
It lay along a minor road in a remote part of Uganda in a place that had never before been identified as historically consequential.
President Amin looted the British High Commissioner on a helicopter and flew to the site to lay the
foundation stone for a monument to baliga and another related monument to the capture of Malcolm Mhlanga,
which had taken place close by. He was convinced that there were lessons to learn on these humble and unremarkable sites,
as he said on this occasion, contrary to what might have one might suppose,
after reading foreign historians, Africans did have an important play in their own history, part to play in their own history.
If you go to us people had joined forces, then why could they not work together now present to me and said.
In the 1970s, a host of other hitherto unremarkable places and objects were made into evidence of Ugandans long struggle against British oppression.
There was a rapid repurposing of the built environment, for example, the renaming of streets.
In this instance, the renaming of Queen's Avenue into the Moomba Avenue shortly after a man came to power.
Other city streets around the country were likewise summarily remade over the course of a few months in 1972.
That's how revolutionary curatorship had to work.
There was a revision of historical memory, turning unremarkable places into monuments to anti-colonial struggle.
Built in stone monuments were an apparently permanent reminder and evidence of Africans victories over colonialism.
But what about things that could not be seen?
What about areas of conflict that in material economics, diplomacy, policy and other areas of government work?
And his regime was campaigns in a whole range of immaterial domains.
Perhaps the most famous campaign was in liberation of Uganda's economy.
In 1972, in August, the president announced that some 50000 Ugandan Asians were summarily expelled from the country,
given three months to tie up their affairs, businesses and buildings that they'd owned were handed over to African proprietorship.
It was called the economic war. It was supposed to be a war of liberation.
I mean, argued, as you all have already learnt, that the expulsion of the Asians was a way of empowering the black majority against Asian outsiders.
It was, as he said, meant to emancipate the Ugandan Africans of this republic,
and it was meant to go down in history, says the president is one of the greatest achievements of this century.
In practise, the liberation of Uganda's economy was a straightforwardly bureaucratic exercise involving the reallocation
of thousands of properties formerly owned by Asians into the hands of black Ugandan proprietors.
It was an exercise in property management. There were reams of paper that had to be filled out.
Departing Asians had to fill in declarations declaring the properties they vacated.
African applicants had in turn to turn in applications for the businesses they wished to claim.
None of this was particularly dramatic. Bureaucracy in its operation is not inherently interesting.
There is no military confrontation. There was no blood spilt in the economic war.
There were no martyrs to him. There were no heroes to lionise.
And while you can see government photographers struggling to find a subject by which to picture the victories that were being won in Uganda in 1972,
in this particular photograph, Ernest officials sought through reams of forms allocating Asian properties under Amin's watchful eye.
There's several photographs like this that seem to picture the operations of bureaucracy at work.
Here again, like Ugandans, queue up to take possession of properties that agents have vacated.
There are a few staged photographs that lend. What do you call it?
Drama, seriousness and a sense of occasion to the whole economic war.
Here's one such photograph. Let's see.
I have to scroll forwards. This particular photograph is titled Money in the Mosque in the UBC Archive In pictures
A Ugandan of Asian descent on the floor in the Aga Khan mosque surrounded by money,
cash money that is which she had accumulated, having been given it by Ugandan Asians upon their departure.
The storyline, which was published on the basis of this event of the discovery of these this profuse
amount of money was that the money was meant to be smuggled out of the country,
thereby undermining Uganda's economy. This particular photographic occasion was very exciting.
It gave Ugandan photographers something to work with,
and there was a whole series of pictures showing that the photographers and the military men around this Asian man piled up the cash,
rearranged it, made it impressive, dispersed it. Over the course of it seems quite a long time.
The whole thing was staged in a way that was meant to were looking for pictures that could in some sense dramatise the stakes here.
Finally, it was evidence to show what the economic war looked like. The most thorough,
ongoing effort to create a heroic narrative around the expulsion of Asians of Uganda's Asian community was the 1972 film titled The Economic War,
which I'm going to try now to show you.
This is one of the several of the 20 odd films we have recently scanned, and ideally it will have cinema will have.
Let's see whether this actually works. Watch the screen here.
OK, so I'll briefly describe the content of the film, perhaps we'll be able to watch it, perhaps we won't.
So it's a film titled The Economic War.
It's set to stirring and uplifting martial music shot in colour, professionally produced by a Kenyan filmmaker named So Gamba,
who was employed by the Uganda Television by the Uganda Film Unit, Gomba had been trained in Poland.
He had come to Uganda in the early 70s to take up the job of documenting the early years of Amin's government.
The interesting thing about that? Well, there's a bunch of interesting things about the film.
General Amin never speaks in the film with his halting English.
It may perhaps have been an embarrassment to the filmmakers, I think. Indeed, there's no original sound at all.
Instead, one gets the polished voice of the narrator who describes the victories that General
Amin had won over Ugandan Asians in expelling them and uplifting black men of commerce.
The text is drawn entirely from Amiens published speeches, which the narrator reads out with solemn profundity.
There is no deviation that is from the official script.
Like many other Ugandan journalists, these filmmakers seem to have been very circumspect to make sure that they didn't,
in some sense, offend against the official rhetoric by adding or detracting from what the president said.
The scenes in which the camera focuses are entirely generic.
That is, there street scenes. A public festival. Images of people dancing.
It seems intense. So these are stark scenes that probably were taken at some other time,
which were repurposed through the magic of filmmaking into evidence of public enthusiasm from Amin's programme.
So, you know, there's actually no evidence in the film itself to show that anybody was celebrating the economic war.
What it is is people dancing around in some public occasion, which we don't know what it is,
which is labelled by the filmmaker as evidence to show people's unanimity behind government policy.
There is only one singular historical event that's pictured in this 27 minute film.
That's the occasion on the 8th of August 1972, when General Amin summoned the diplomatic corps to come to Colorado to his headquarters
at Command Post as he called it to announce the decision to expel the agents.
This is the one part of the film where Amin is shown to be in some sense engaged in a kind of diplomatic confrontation.
Here he talks to the sceptical Indian High Commissioner, to the Pakistani ambassador and three Richard Slater, who is the British High Commissioner,
who sit behind him beside him, rather at lunch on the on the terrace in his command post, talking about the Asian expulsion.
The terms on which they were to be expelled, et cetera. Now in the film,
the events of eight August 1972 are described as a kind of heroic revelation
of Amin's campaign to liberate Uganda like Ugandans from Asian domination.
In fact, the event of eight August was only a preface for what was actually quite a complicated legal and bureaucratic exercise.
Over the course of the month of August alone, the terms on which the Asian expulsion was transacted shifted quite dramatically.
That means government could never quite decide what category of persons was to be expelled.
And there were ongoing realignments and change deadlines and numbers over the course of those weeks.
Nonetheless, the film made it seem as though eight of August was the definitive moment in Uganda's victory over outsiders.
The rest of the film offers sort of staged scenes showings African showing Africans delight at the expulsion everywhere.
There are cheering crowds at the very end. There's pictures at the airport.
On this occasion, the airport in Entebbe,
not the airport and neutral in which Asians carrying their packs are getting on aeroplanes after a new life abroad.
There's no evidence of contention trauma difficulty.
The trials that Ugandan Asians went through to get to the airport, which itself is a dramatically difficult experience for many of them.
None of that's visible from the film. Instead, the Asians are all smiling,
and the narrator tells us that they were quite happy to be packed off to Britain because many of them had looked forward to going on holiday.
That's actually the line that the narrator uses at the end, so there's no victimhood at all.
As it turns out, according to this film's rendition of 1972, and it's at its inhumanity,
this was one of many media in which the Indian government sought to transform the illogic of the Asian expulsion into a heroic victory,
one for black nationalism in its assembly.
The footage portrays filmmaker's efforts to locate images that could actually represent Ugandans victory over imperialism.
In this instance, they had to rely on a sonorous narrator to tell the audience that scenes that had no particular connexion to the economic.
Or were, in fact, evidence of enthusiasm, support and victory.
The search for a suitably impressive visual imagery was to continue right through the rest of the 1970s.
The curators of Amin's Revolutionary Wars were always looking for images that could speak
for themselves that could unambiguously present Uganda's victory over foreign powers.
So pretty out of time. Let me just briefly sort of conclude that over the course of the 1970s,
the Indian government was always looking for whether cinema or still photography or images that could,
in some sense concretise the victories that Uganda was winning against outsiders.
There's another film which I was going to show you, but again, the time is short,
depicting the visit of Sir Chandos Blair to Uganda in 1975 and July to plead for the life of Denis Hills.
Then his skills, you may know, is a British author who had written a book that Amin had intensely disliked amid his sentence.
The author that is hills to an unhappy execution, and I just wanted to show you these images anyway.
Hills had been sentenced to death by a Ugandan military court. So Chandos Blair came to Kampala to plead for his life.
It's not clear to me whether this is working anyway, so.
And basically, the Uganda government keeps General Blair sitting in Kampala for about a week.
Well, they seem to invent ever more embarrassing occasions,
which they can create on cinema film to document the general's humiliation in the hands of Ugandan actors,
culminating in a fantastic scene which I am not going to have time to show you in which the visiting general is
helicoptered to Burma and where he meets General Amin in a house which has been specifically constructed for the occasion.
Some of you may know this story, but it was a house built just near the airport at Arua,
where there was an overhanging thatch that came down quite close to the ground on the cinema film.
General Blair economist defiantly walks up to the house and then has to crouch down very low to get in the door once he's inside the door.
General Amin is inside wearing for some reason a sombrero and the cinema throne rolls as General
Blair and General Amin discuss their shared deliberation over the fate of the author Denis Hills.
In this and other instances, it seems as though the cinema film is being used to create heroic imagery that could,
in some sense, demonstrate Amin's success in humiliating this emissary of the British government.
That indeed, that's the point that newspapers. The next day he carried these stories, which are.
Which let's see. Yes. Your spirit is on boys, Neil Faremine, that's the headline in the Ugandan press.
And indeed, the same story is picked up in the New York Times,
which describes that is the British pleading before General Libya, all of which is meant to demonstrate.
The point I want to make is that the revolutionary imagery in Amin's Uganda was always in short supply.
I mean, it means Uganda was far away from the front lines in the global war against racism and apartheid.
It had to create its own liberation wars by targeting racial or ethnic minorities that could be labelled as treasonous enemies or plotting terrorists.
Editors, filmmakers, photographers and other image makers had to struggle to ensure that the material they created was meaningfully revolutionary.
Cinematic opportunities had to be manufactured, organised and curators infuriated the Asian expulsion with one such occasion for cinema.
It was an opportunity to create visible evidence dramatising the liberation that Amin's regime sought to win.
That's what I have to say something about the technological difficulties and thank you for your time.