Idi Amin's fearsome regime is popularly known yet academically under-studied. While most accounts of the presidency of the Ugandan dictator focus on his erratic behaviour and the politics of his administration, Alicia C. Decker reframes his eight-year regime around the role of gendered ideologies and the experiences of Ugandan women. Decker argues that Amin deployed gendered rhetoric and militarized action strategically ‘to consolidate political hegemony and maintain a certain performance of power’ (p. 93). Rather than a deranged madman, Decker presents Amin as a savvy showman who used gendered discourse to elicit fear and respect, claim legitimacy on the international stage, and humiliate his opponents. However, Amin is not the only agent in this book. Decker shows Ugandan women as multifaceted and multiply situated, courageous actors who strategically navigated increasingly dangerous circumstances.
Each chapter begins with a vignette about a different woman living in Amin's Uganda to presage the key themes of the subsequent section. After introducing the topic and the broad strokes of Amin's rise to power in the introduction, Decker focuses on different manifestations of gender in the Amin administration. We learn about how a ban on miniskirts was used as a tool of social control and a way of defining femininity in a militarized state. We consider the paradoxical opportunities available to some women as entrepreneurs and economic actors in the wake of the expulsion of the Asian community in 1972 and the use of women as key political appointees in the context of International Women's Year in 1975. We see how disappearance was used as an act of militarized spectacle with profound impacts on women's lives. Finally, we bear witness to the dusk of the Amin regime, which was characterized by ‘violent displays of hypermasculinity’ (p. 146).
Decker pieces together this history through a range of sources despite a ‘lack of documentation about the regime's inner workings’ (p. 175). She carried out over 100 interviews, focusing on ordinary women from all walks of life. She also used newspaper articles, tracked down numerous court cases, and relied heavily on testimony reported in the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Disappearances of People in Uganda since 25 January 1971. The result of this multilayered research is an engaging and readable text that tells the story of life during the Amin years in a new way, giving centrality to women and their experiences while at the same time engaging with the political history of Amin and his military government.
By drawing on gender theorists Joan Wallach Scott and Judith Butler, Decker accounts for the actions of Idi Amin and the state apparatus that surrounded him in ways not previously considered. Gender was ‘a crucial organizing factor within Amin's military state, indelibly shaping who he was as a man and how he governed as a ruler’ (p. 5). Decker conceptualizes gender as ‘discourse, identity, and practice’ (p. 6) and provides manifold examples of gender operating in each of these spheres throughout the book. Most striking is the performativity of masculinity that Amin himself enacts. Constantly positioning himself as the father of the nation, or as a fearless warrior, or as a powerful statesman, Amin used his own gender performance to pursue his goals.
Rhetoric about femininity and the role of women in Uganda was also central to the Amin regime, though it was often conflictual. While women were to be keepers of traditional culture and morality, they had important responsibilities as mothers of the country and were increasingly given public acknowledgement as adept businesspeople. However, Amin also regularly used women as symbols of weakness and inadequacy within the political class that surrounded him. These contradictions point to Amin's strategic use of gendered expectations and aspirations as a means for achieving his goals.
Decker relies on a diverse set of Ugandan women as interlocutors, ranging from national-level figures to teachers, market women and petty traders from numerous parts of the country. She is attentive to structures of religion, ethnicity and age when she presents their narratives. However, one shortcoming is the lack of attention to regional and rural–urban divides. Although Decker includes rural women as subjects, the difference between their experiences and those of their urban counterparts is never explored directly. What were the differential effects of Amin's militarized regime for women in urban versus rural locations, and how did gender operate differently across spatial divides? For example, did the discourse of acting as ‘mothers of the country’ have different meanings for rural and urban women? More attention to these dividing lines would add complexity to the intersecting systems that Decker so capably analyses.
Through Decker's engaging book, we are given new ways to understand the violence and supposed chaos of the Amin years. With an attentive eye to detail, a deep knowledge of Ugandan history, and a useful engagement with feminist theory, Decker tells a story of a dictator who used gendered ideology to wield power, and of women who asserted power of their own – sometimes in concert with and sometimes in opposition to their president's ideas about gender. Amin may be long dead, but the gendered and militarized rhetoric of his era lives on in many ways. This book grapples with that history and allows us to contemplate its meaning for the future.
