This report describes the official photographic archives of Idi Amin’s government held by the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC). During his reign from 1971 to 1979, Idi Amin embraced visual media as a tool for archiving the achievements of populist military rule as his government sought to reorient Ugandans’ relationship with the state. Only a handful of the resulting images were ever printed or seen, reflecting the regime’s archival impulse undergirded by paranoia of unauthorized ways of seeing. The UBC’s newly opened collection of over 60,000 negatives from Amin’s photographers, alongside files at the Uganda National Archives, offers the first comprehensive opportunity to study the Ugandan state under Amin’s dictatorship through the lens of its own documentarians.

Under Idi Amin's government, institutions that served the public interest were dramatically under-resourced. An array of self-nominated, self-important, self-righteous people were empowered to take on administrative tasks that, in an earlier dispensation, had been the work of professionals. Businesses and institutions that had formerly been under the regulatory authority of credentialled experts were thrown open all at once for commoners to operate. Everywhere there were campaigns, as the new regime made obscure and technical issues into urgent problems demanding a resolution. Ugandans were called upon to defend cultures, to struggle against imperialism and racism, and to transform the architecture of the economy. That is how people came to see themselves as proprietors of public life. Their work allowed commoners to claim equity over resources and infrastructures. In their investments in the operations of public institutions, people became custodians, proprietors and petty authoritarians. Their proprietary sense of responsibility was a powerful inducement to self-sacrifice. It was also the fuel for demagoguery.

In May 2019 we launched a special exhibition at the Uganda Museum in Kampala titled “The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin.” It consisted of 150 images made by government photographers in the 1970s. In this essay we explore how political history has been delimited in the Museum, and how these limitations shaped the exhibition we curated. From the time of its creation, the Museum's disparate and multifarious collections were exhibited as ethnographic specimens, stripped of historical context. Spatially and organizationally, “The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin” turned its back on the ethnographic architecture of the Uganda Museum. The transformation of these vivid, evocative, aesthetically appealing photographs into historical evidence of atrocity was intensely discomfiting. We have been obliged to organize the exhibition around categories that did not correspond with the logic of the photographic archive, with the architecture of the Museum, or with the experiences of the people who lived through the 1970s. The exhibition has made history, but not entirely in ways that we chose.

This article uses E. P. Thompson's last book – Witness against the Beast (1993) – as an occasion to claim oddity, peculiarity, and nonconformity as subjects of African history. Africa's historians have been engaged in an earnest effort to locate contemporary cultural life within the longue durée, but in fact there was much that was strange and eccentric. Here I focus on the reading habits and interpretive strategies that inspired nonconformity. Nonconformists read the Bible idiosyncratically, snipping bits of text out of the fabric of the book and using these slogans to launch heretical and odd ways of living. Over time, some of them sought to position themselves in narrative structures that could authenticate and legitimate their dissident religious activity. That entailed experimentation with voice, positionality, and addressivity.