Of the cuts permanently lost from the film, the most unfortunate is a piece of voice-over narration which accompanied the film’s closing shot, an extreme close-up of Amin’s shiny, expressionless face, his eyes darting back and forth repeatedly. Schroeder later called the tactic “censorship by hostage,” but the changes were made. He rounded up every French citizen in Uganda, forced them into a hotel surrounded by armed military, and threatened Schroeder (a Frenchman) with the citizens’ lives if the director did not agree to make specific changes to the movie. Angered, Amin sought a solution to the problem in a fashion which suited his established reputation as a non-negotiating tyrant. Soon after Schroeder’s documentary was released in theatres throughout Europe and North America, the Ugandan leader discovered that Western audiences were receiving the film with extended fits of laughter (due, presumably, to Amin’s extended, eccentric monologues in the film). As portrayed in Barbet Schroeder’s “self portrait,” however, Amin emerges as a man whose life may well have been lived as a commentary upon all that is bizarre and shameful about Caucasian imperialism, even if Amin himself was not fully aware that he was providing so rich and hyperbolized a commentary through both his actions and his behavior. Typical readings of Amin describe him as a man-child and a fool, completely unaware of how ridiculous he was coming across to the rest of the world, even as he laughed and murdered his way through nearly a decade of brutality as Uganda’s leader in the 1970s.
Idi Amin is the kind of historical figure who makes post-colonial theorists drool at the mouth, his mixture of traditional African heritage and adopted modes of “Western” leadership style being just one sign of a complex identity crises resulting from years of trauma at the hands of his white oppressors.