Essay Questions

Is Garrigan responsible for Kay's death?

Being fatuous for a moment, it could be said that only the men who killed Kay are responsible for her death, but it would not be true; they are foot soldiers, Amin acolytes, and have a kill-or-be-killed mentality because they know that if they do not obey his orders Amin will order their deaths instead.

Amin gives the order to have his wife killed. She has had an affair, she has cuckolded him, and she must pay, in his eyes. Amin knows only one way to settle a score and that is by slaughtering the person he believes to have wronged him. Most men would divorce their wife in this situation but Amin is not like most men; he has only one reaction to a wrong against him, and that is to order the death of the one who has wronged him.

Is Nicholas responsible? In many ways, yes. After all, it is he who, knowing Amin's character, decided to embark upon an affair with a brutalized woman in a horrible marriage to a madman. It is he who arranged for her to have an abortion, only to be careless enough to run late and miss the appointment, leaving her defenseless. It is also he who has the opportunity and the backing from the British government to kill Amin, but chooses not to. There are many ways in which Nicholas could have avoided putting Kay in this predicament, but he chose a different course of action and ultimately bears a large percentage of the blame for her murder.

Why will the world believe Garrigan's eye-witness testimony about Amin, but not a Ugandan's?

Garrigan is not a Ugandan and this is why he will be believed; despite being one of Amin's trusted inner circle, he is still an outsider both ethnically and politically. Garrigan does not cover himself in ethical glory during his time at Amin's side. He could certainly have approached the British embassy sooner, as soon as he witnessed or learned of the first killings. He allowed his enjoyment of being "special" to Amin to cloud his judgement and allowed himself to believe Amin's logic about getting rid of the corrupt former legislation by killing them. He had many opportunities to alert the world to Amin's evil, but he did not, until his own life was threatened.

Ironically this lack of moral backbone makes him a believable and almost perfect witness. After all, he is not telling the world a story that is going to make him look good - he has covered up the psychopathy of an evil man. More than this, though, is the fact that he has no history within the country itself. As in much of Africa, in Uganda one group of corrupt leaders is replaced by another equally corrupt selection, so much so that the corruption becomes diluted after awhile. Much of the dissent is based on centuries-old tribal relationships and hatreds, which those in the west cannot really begin to understand, and so use to explain the almost constant state of civil war in the continent. Garrigan, on the other hand, has no ethnic or tribal affiliations, no perceivable ax to grind, and so his testimony is immediately more believable because of its lack of bias.