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Notes on the Cuts Made to General Idi Amin Dada Autoportrait

by Barbet Schroeder, 1975

While Schroeder noted in his 1976 interview that he relinquished very little control of his film, Idi Amin did request that a series of cuts be made, and even threatened to harm a group of French citizens living in Uganda if Schroeder did not agree to them. In total, more than two minutes of footage were removed from the film, though all but the very last cut mentioned here were later restored when Amin was removed from power. What follows is the text that Schroeder presented to audiences when the film was shown in its cut form.

Pursuant to the threats regarding the safety of 150 French citizens residing in Uganda, Barbet Schroeder conceded to making the three cuts in his film Général Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait (totalling 2 minutes and 21 seconds) which President Idi Amin Dada demanded. This has now become a film by Idi Amin Dada, with Barbet Schroeder as an assistant. Indeed, all the French citizens, including women and children, residing in Uganda, were assembled in the capital as the General waited for the modifications he demanded to be made to the film. General Idi Amin Dada is very satisfied with the film as a whole but did not appreciate certain comments or complimentary information brought to the film by the director during editing. The cuts are three:

First Cut: 62 seconds The public execution scene with the narrator mentioning the thousands of disappearances of public figures since General Idi Amin Dada’s coming into power. The General affirms that many of the missing are actually hiding in London. He also remarks that there are no political prisoners in his prisons. In actuality, the most conservative estimates (International Commission of Jurists) suppose that 25,000 to 80,000 persons have gone missing during the past four years.

Second Cut: 12 seconds During the scene of the ministers’ assembly, the Foreign Affairs Minister is harshly criticised. The shot in which he is shown was cut out. It was accompanied by the narrator’s comment that said: “Fifteen days later, the body of Michel Ondaga, Minister of Foreign Affairs, was discovered in the Nile River. He was replaced by a former model, Princess Bagaya.” The General notes that Princess Bagaya is the recipient of a Law Degree from Oxford and declares that the Foreign Affairs Minister was killed by enemies of General Amin who wanted to make it seem as if he had committed the crime.

Third Cut: 67 seconds A sequence in the film where a telegram sent by General Amin to the President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, is made mention of. It reads as follows: “I want to assure you that I love you very much and if you had been a woman I would have considered marrying you although your head is full of grey hairs. But as you are a man that possibility does not arise.” This telegram was actually an insult and General Amin Dada does not wish to revive hostilities with a neighbouring country. Finally, the last sentence of the narration, which in fact attempted to explain the character and sought to avoid racist nuances in the film, was eliminated. The sentence read as follows: “After a century of colonisation, let us not forget that it is partially a deformed image of our own selves that Idi Amin Dada reflects back at us.” Amin considers himself an authentic African nationalist.