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Right, thank you very much to Professor Dungy and to Twitter and to others who have made this visit possible.

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It's a great pleasure to be here in Oxford and to get to talk about these things with such smart and interesting people.

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So thank you for the invitation. Over the course of his eight years as president of Uganda,

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Idi Amin was subject to hundreds of images of photographic that is images which were so clear.

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Now I have one presentation on my screen, the other. And so.

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It's something.

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Converge. No one's moving here, so I guess justice will be served.

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OK,

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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.

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For decades, it was thought that the photographs and film that the men of the Ministry of Information had made were lost to posterity.

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Destroyed. That is, during the tumult of the early 1980s or misplaced during subsequent relocations of the Ministry of Information Archives.

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In 2015, archivists at the UBC, the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation, uncovered a filing cabinet, which was full of photographic negatives.

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Each envelope is labelled with information about the date and subject of the photograph and all.

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There are 85000 photographic negatives dating from the 1950s through to the 1990s.

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In 2019 three in 2018, UBC launched a project to digitise this photographic collection with funding from the University of Michigan,

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the University of Western Australia, and with the involvement of colleagues from the Kennedy University.

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The team of archivists and curators has digitised 50000 images to date.

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Amongst the people involved in this work is Dr Edgar Taylor.

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As you can see, in 2018, a further collection came to light.

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That is the Cinema Film Archive of the UPC, which had been kept in a back room at the corporation's headquarters in Kampala.

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The Cinema Film Archive is much more difficult to deal with because cinema film

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requires remedial attention that's beyond the capacity of any ordinary person.

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So with the ABC's active encouragement, we've brought the cinema to film reels to an arbiter.

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And over the course of the ensuing years, with funding little bits of funding from Michigan and from Spring Films,

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which is a filmmaking company based here in the UK, we have digitised about 20 cinema films, most of them little cell cinema shorts.

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There's another 100 reels that we're currently trying to illicit funds to digitise.

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At the moment, it's quite expensive and difficult. The discovery of this profuse media archive raises all kinds of interesting questions.

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For one thing, what was all this cinema film and indeed photographic film for?

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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,

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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,

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which was largely in southern Africa.

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In the absence of a shooting war means war against colonialism had to be fought and won against Uganda's own citizens.

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Amin had claimed to be fighting on behalf of an oppressed black majority against ethnic and racial minorities within Uganda.

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This is what made media essential.

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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,

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then there needed to be evidence that could dramatise the conflict and make liberation visible

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in a place where religious and cultural communities were deeply interwoven and overlapping.

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The mean government needed to make it seem as though Ugandans were actually partitioned into

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racial and religious enclaves in a place where political hierarchy was barricaded and multiforme.

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That means government needed to make it seem as though an oppressed majority were through government action, reclaiming its birthright.

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And it was in a state run film, cinema, film, photography to some extent in radio that the Amin regime made its struggle visible.

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It was through film that they sought to create evidence that could show Uganda to be on the path toward liberation.

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Amin's regime used film to generate truth for citizens and for outsiders that could

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represent the victories that had been world and the absence of military struggle.

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Film was an enduring the useful medium concretise victories that were otherwise quite difficult to visualise.

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The search for inspiring anti-colonial struggle took place in a range of spaces and in a variety of media,

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the film was not the only space in which revolutionary struggle took place.

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Monumental infrastructure was one media in which the Indian government tried to concretised its victories against colonial forces.

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Amin was an inveterate builder of monuments.

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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,

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commemorating the place where in 1899 the anti-colonial leader baliga had been captured by British forces.

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The site of the beleaguered monument was previously unmarked.

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It lay along a minor road in a remote part of Uganda in a place that had never before been identified as historically consequential.

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President Amin looted the British High Commissioner on a helicopter and flew to the site to lay the

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foundation stone for a monument to baliga and another related monument to the capture of Malcolm Mhlanga,

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which had taken place close by. He was convinced that there were lessons to learn on these humble and unremarkable sites,

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as he said on this occasion, contrary to what might have one might suppose,

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after reading foreign historians, Africans did have an important play in their own history, part to play in their own history.

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If you go to us people had joined forces, then why could they not work together now present to me and said.

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In the 1970s, a host of other hitherto unremarkable places and objects were made into evidence of Ugandans long struggle against British oppression.

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There was a rapid repurposing of the built environment, for example, the renaming of streets.

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In this instance, the renaming of Queen's Avenue into the Moomba Avenue shortly after a man came to power.

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Other city streets around the country were likewise summarily remade over the course of a few months in 1972.

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That's how revolutionary curatorship had to work.

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There was a revision of historical memory, turning unremarkable places into monuments to anti-colonial struggle.

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Built in stone monuments were an apparently permanent reminder and evidence of Africans victories over colonialism.

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But what about things that could not be seen?

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What about areas of conflict that in material economics, diplomacy, policy and other areas of government work?

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And his regime was campaigns in a whole range of immaterial domains.

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Perhaps the most famous campaign was in liberation of Uganda's economy.

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In 1972, in August, the president announced that some 50000 Ugandan Asians were summarily expelled from the country,

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given three months to tie up their affairs, businesses and buildings that they'd owned were handed over to African proprietorship.

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It was called the economic war. It was supposed to be a war of liberation.

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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.

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It was, as he said, meant to emancipate the Ugandan Africans of this republic,

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and it was meant to go down in history, says the president is one of the greatest achievements of this century.

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In practise, the liberation of Uganda's economy was a straightforwardly bureaucratic exercise involving the reallocation

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of thousands of properties formerly owned by Asians into the hands of black Ugandan proprietors.

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It was an exercise in property management. There were reams of paper that had to be filled out.

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Departing Asians had to fill in declarations declaring the properties they vacated.

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African applicants had in turn to turn in applications for the businesses they wished to claim.

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None of this was particularly dramatic. Bureaucracy in its operation is not inherently interesting.

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There is no military confrontation. There was no blood spilt in the economic war.

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There were no martyrs to him. There were no heroes to lionise.

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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,

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in this particular photograph, Ernest officials sought through reams of forms allocating Asian properties under Amin's watchful eye.

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There's several photographs like this that seem to picture the operations of bureaucracy at work.

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Here again, like Ugandans, queue up to take possession of properties that agents have vacated.

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There are a few staged photographs that lend. What do you call it?

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Drama, seriousness and a sense of occasion to the whole economic war.

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Here's one such photograph. Let's see.

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I have to scroll forwards. This particular photograph is titled Money in the Mosque in the UBC Archive In pictures

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A Ugandan of Asian descent on the floor in the Aga Khan mosque surrounded by money,

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cash money that is which she had accumulated, having been given it by Ugandan Asians upon their departure.

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The storyline, which was published on the basis of this event of the discovery of these this profuse

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amount of money was that the money was meant to be smuggled out of the country,

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thereby undermining Uganda's economy. This particular photographic occasion was very exciting.

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It gave Ugandan photographers something to work with,

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and there was a whole series of pictures showing that the photographers and the military men around this Asian man piled up the cash,

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rearranged it, made it impressive, dispersed it. Over the course of it seems quite a long time.

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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.

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Finally, it was evidence to show what the economic war looked like. The most thorough,

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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,

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which I'm going to try now to show you.

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This is one of the several of the 20 odd films we have recently scanned, and ideally it will have cinema will have.

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Let's see whether this actually works. Watch the screen here.

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OK, so I'll briefly describe the content of the film, perhaps we'll be able to watch it, perhaps we won't.

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So it's a film titled The Economic War.

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It's set to stirring and uplifting martial music shot in colour, professionally produced by a Kenyan filmmaker named So Gamba,

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who was employed by the Uganda Television by the Uganda Film Unit, Gomba had been trained in Poland.

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He had come to Uganda in the early 70s to take up the job of documenting the early years of Amin's government.

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The interesting thing about that? Well, there's a bunch of interesting things about the film.

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General Amin never speaks in the film with his halting English.

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It may perhaps have been an embarrassment to the filmmakers, I think. Indeed, there's no original sound at all.

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Instead, one gets the polished voice of the narrator who describes the victories that General

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Amin had won over Ugandan Asians in expelling them and uplifting black men of commerce.

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The text is drawn entirely from Amiens published speeches, which the narrator reads out with solemn profundity.

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There is no deviation that is from the official script.

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Like many other Ugandan journalists, these filmmakers seem to have been very circumspect to make sure that they didn't,

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in some sense, offend against the official rhetoric by adding or detracting from what the president said.

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The scenes in which the camera focuses are entirely generic.

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That is, there street scenes. A public festival. Images of people dancing.

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It seems intense. So these are stark scenes that probably were taken at some other time,

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which were repurposed through the magic of filmmaking into evidence of public enthusiasm from Amin's programme.

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So, you know, there's actually no evidence in the film itself to show that anybody was celebrating the economic war.

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What it is is people dancing around in some public occasion, which we don't know what it is,

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which is labelled by the filmmaker as evidence to show people's unanimity behind government policy.

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There is only one singular historical event that's pictured in this 27 minute film.

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That's the occasion on the 8th of August 1972, when General Amin summoned the diplomatic corps to come to Colorado to his headquarters

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at Command Post as he called it to announce the decision to expel the agents.

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This is the one part of the film where Amin is shown to be in some sense engaged in a kind of diplomatic confrontation.

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Here he talks to the sceptical Indian High Commissioner, to the Pakistani ambassador and three Richard Slater, who is the British High Commissioner,

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who sit behind him beside him, rather at lunch on the on the terrace in his command post, talking about the Asian expulsion.

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The terms on which they were to be expelled, et cetera. Now in the film,

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the events of eight August 1972 are described as a kind of heroic revelation

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of Amin's campaign to liberate Uganda like Ugandans from Asian domination.

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In fact, the event of eight August was only a preface for what was actually quite a complicated legal and bureaucratic exercise.

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Over the course of the month of August alone, the terms on which the Asian expulsion was transacted shifted quite dramatically.

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That means government could never quite decide what category of persons was to be expelled.

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And there were ongoing realignments and change deadlines and numbers over the course of those weeks.

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Nonetheless, the film made it seem as though eight of August was the definitive moment in Uganda's victory over outsiders.

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The rest of the film offers sort of staged scenes showings African showing Africans delight at the expulsion everywhere.

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There are cheering crowds at the very end. There's pictures at the airport.

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On this occasion, the airport in Entebbe,

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not the airport and neutral in which Asians carrying their packs are getting on aeroplanes after a new life abroad.

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There's no evidence of contention trauma difficulty.

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The trials that Ugandan Asians went through to get to the airport, which itself is a dramatically difficult experience for many of them.

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None of that's visible from the film. Instead, the Asians are all smiling,

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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.

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That's actually the line that the narrator uses at the end, so there's no victimhood at all.

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As it turns out, according to this film's rendition of 1972, and it's at its inhumanity,

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this was one of many media in which the Indian government sought to transform the illogic of the Asian expulsion into a heroic victory,

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one for black nationalism in its assembly.

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The footage portrays filmmaker's efforts to locate images that could actually represent Ugandans victory over imperialism.

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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.

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Or were, in fact, evidence of enthusiasm, support and victory.

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The search for a suitably impressive visual imagery was to continue right through the rest of the 1970s.

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The curators of Amin's Revolutionary Wars were always looking for images that could speak

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for themselves that could unambiguously present Uganda's victory over foreign powers.

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So pretty out of time. Let me just briefly sort of conclude that over the course of the 1970s,

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the Indian government was always looking for whether cinema or still photography or images that could,

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in some sense concretise the victories that Uganda was winning against outsiders.

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There's another film which I was going to show you, but again, the time is short,

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depicting the visit of Sir Chandos Blair to Uganda in 1975 and July to plead for the life of Denis Hills.

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Then his skills, you may know, is a British author who had written a book that Amin had intensely disliked amid his sentence.

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The author that is hills to an unhappy execution, and I just wanted to show you these images anyway.

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Hills had been sentenced to death by a Ugandan military court. So Chandos Blair came to Kampala to plead for his life.

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It's not clear to me whether this is working anyway, so.

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And basically, the Uganda government keeps General Blair sitting in Kampala for about a week.

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Well, they seem to invent ever more embarrassing occasions,

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which they can create on cinema film to document the general's humiliation in the hands of Ugandan actors,

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culminating in a fantastic scene which I am not going to have time to show you in which the visiting general is

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helicoptered to Burma and where he meets General Amin in a house which has been specifically constructed for the occasion.

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Some of you may know this story, but it was a house built just near the airport at Arua,

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where there was an overhanging thatch that came down quite close to the ground on the cinema film.

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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.

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General Amin is inside wearing for some reason a sombrero and the cinema throne rolls as General

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Blair and General Amin discuss their shared deliberation over the fate of the author Denis Hills.

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In this and other instances, it seems as though the cinema film is being used to create heroic imagery that could,

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in some sense, demonstrate Amin's success in humiliating this emissary of the British government.

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That indeed, that's the point that newspapers. The next day he carried these stories, which are.

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Which let's see. Yes. Your spirit is on boys, Neil Faremine, that's the headline in the Ugandan press.

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And indeed, the same story is picked up in the New York Times,

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which describes that is the British pleading before General Libya, all of which is meant to demonstrate.

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The point I want to make is that the revolutionary imagery in Amin's Uganda was always in short supply.

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I mean, it means Uganda was far away from the front lines in the global war against racism and apartheid.

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It had to create its own liberation wars by targeting racial or ethnic minorities that could be labelled as treasonous enemies or plotting terrorists.

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Editors, filmmakers, photographers and other image makers had to struggle to ensure that the material they created was meaningfully revolutionary.

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Cinematic opportunities had to be manufactured, organised and curators infuriated the Asian expulsion with one such occasion for cinema.

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It was an opportunity to create visible evidence dramatising the liberation that Amin's regime sought to win.

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That's what I have to say something about the technological difficulties and thank you for your time.