Dr nicholas garrigan real person

Why was idi amin called the last king of scotland

If you haven't seen the film, you really should. I don't want to give away the plot--if you're super-sensitive about people not telling you anything, you should probably stop reading now, go see the movie, and then race back home to read the rest of this blog--but I did leave the theater with some questions about how much of story is actually true.

My first question: Was there really a Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, played in the movie by James McEvoy? As it turns out, no, there wasn't. If Garrigan is based on anyone, he's based again, very loosely on Bob Astles, a white former British soldier who became one of Amin's closest advisers. Like Gerrigan, Astles left Britain for Africa seeking adventure.

Unlike Gerrigan, he actively sought to get involved in local politics. And ultimately he became--as Giles Foden, author of the book version, describes him--"part of Amin's apparatus of repression" that killed at least , people. When Amin's regime collapsed in , Astles faced criminal charges for his role in the Amin government. He served six and a half years in prison, and moved back to London in , where he lives today.

Nicholas garrigan death

Astles continues to deny any wrongdoing. Amin was abandoned by his father, grew up with his mother, and was recruited to the British colonial army. He served for eight years, and then--feeling abandoned again, this time by the British--joined independent Ugandan politics through the military. He was promoted to commander of the Ugandan army by President Milton Obote--and when Amin heard Obote was planning to arrest him for the way he spent military money, Amin launched a military coup while Obote was on a foreign trip.

Initially, Amin encouraged Western countries by freeing political prisoners and disbanding Obote's secret police. Amin's paranoia led him, at first, to hunt down and kill all of Obote's supporters--and then to exile or imprison or murder, as the movie shows, an ever wider circle of people, all of whom he felt were threatening him.