Uganda is bleeding. Amin is in power, the army is out of control, and those who are able have fled. Four young exiles are meeting in London, planning their vengeance on the monster who plunged their homeland into chaos. Their target: Amin! The time: now! This is TARGET AMIN, and the clock is ticking!
Comparisons to Frederick Forsythe are front loaded but apropos, with only the very final burst of action dropping from four star perfection to merely-solid three star heights - otherwise, Target Amin can stand shoulder to shoulder with Day of the Jackal as a vintage assassination classic. The exiles are a cosmopolitan lot, at ease (but at arm's length!) in the UK, horrified at the chaos in Uganda, ashamed of Amin's clownish provocations to the foreign press. The Anglo characters are equally horrified, as Amin's former CO Donaldson explains: "he's a British product gone wrong," a deadly weapon loosed in the vacuum of decolonization. Our exiles employ a ripe piece of mercenary trash named Schulz, a fictional gun for hire with a CV a mile long that intersects with real life mercs like Rolf Steiner, "utterly seduced by the glamour of brutality," and though he's a citizen of the UK the boys at MI6 lament that of course "it had to be a bloody Kraut, didn't it," as they track the deadly plot and dither on whether or not to intervene ... but Amin, that canny crocodile, has resources of his own, and his State Research Bureau have sent their best men along to ferret out our exiles. The story is ripped from the headlines of 1977, and the tension ratchets up with every horrible revelation, until the final fiery climax. Konrad's portrayal of Amin is relaxed and lethal, a man who laughs easily and kills with a flick of the hand, as several of his real life cabinet learn over the course of this story. Eventually though, Amin makes it to the UK for a grandstanding tour, and our surviving exiles have a split second to pull the trigger - will they succeed? Does it really matter, for Uganda's future?
Pity poor Idi Amin. One time subject of exploitation films and tell-all exposes, he may have lived out the rest of his days in peace in Saudi Arabia, but his star has surely fallen from the heady days of dictator chic. The gonzo fascination with dictators seems to have faded since the passing of Kim Jong-il - though some of that is down to State Department emphasis on who exactly gets profiled as a crazy wild man. Regardless, Amin was a creature of the media from the very start of his rule, as Mark Leopold outlines in his 2021 text Idi Amin: The Story of Africa's Icon of Evil. And as Leopold's exhaustive timeline shows, many observers had Amin pegged from the very start as a festering byproduct of British presence on the dark continent: Amin earned high marks from his British superiors in the King's African Rifles as a reliable soldier who could be counted on for brutality when ordered, and when Milton Obote stumbled, Amin was there to take command. Foreign optimism quickly curdled and eventually we ended up with the classic image of Amin the buffoon, laughing in the canoe. But as John Dolan points out, Amin's colorful and chaotic rule wasn't nearly as genocidal as Obote's bookending regimes - Obote just happened to be beige enough that his mass killings faded into the background. Indeed, the outrageous expulsion of Asian Ugandan residents, claimed by Amin to have been inspired by a dream he had, was simply a bureaucratic carryover from Obote's government! And this serves as a premier example of Amin's power, his control of the narrative and the ease with which he played the clown to an audience of prejudiced Anglos. As a British bureaucrat says in Target Amin, while the governments of Zambia, Kenya, and Tanzania spoke out against Amin immediately, "we treated him as a Black buffoon, laughed at his antics." Only when it was too late did the West pull back with horror from Amin's government; only when Amin made the calculated switch from the UK and Israeli backing to the Arab states and the USSR did he become "Africa's Hitler."
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Writing in Joseph Conrad: Third World Perspectives, Uganda literary critic Peter Nazareth fingers an "in the know" Ugandan exile as the author:
Elsewhere, in The Writing of East and Central Africa, Nazareth expands upon the novel:
Personally I'd put my money on Konrad being some popular thriller writer of the time who didn't want their real name on such a gritty, potentially explosive title: the story is so damn slick and tight, the work of a real pro. Looking back, Mark Leopold finds plenty of cogent analysis of Amin by contemporary Anglo sources, before the veil of dictator chic and atrocity ogling muddied the waters. Whoever he/she/they were, Konrad was writing up to the minute, with the killing of Archbishop Janani Luwum and a subsequent massacre of students at Makerere University, and Amin's on again, off again threat of an embarrassing UK visit.
By the by, here's Catherine Ong's review of Target Amin in the Business Times, 12 November 1979:
Target Amin earns 4/4 stars for a riveting and wracking political thriller.
Sphere Books, 1977
