Snakepit

Rating:
Summary: The Decadence and Violence of Amin's Regime
Review: This superb novel of the final days of Idi Amin's despotic regime in Uganda captures the inhumanity of absolute power in horrifying detail. Bat Katanga, a graduate of Cambridge, returns to his homeland and a job at the Ministry of Power and Communication to seek his fortune. The man who hires him, General Bazooka, has done so to undo him, for Bazooka is sensitive about his own lack of education as well as Bat's privileged southern roots and wants to see Bat - and the part of Uganda he represents - to fail. Bat, of course, has no clue; he is more interested in the expensive house and XJ10 that await him. Unfortunately for Bat, Bazooka is as brutal as Bat is naive. When a third man, a white man named Ashes becomes Marshal Amin's confidante, Bat becomes a pawn in a battle of power-grubbing one-upmanship that puts everything he values in jeopardy. As author Isegawa takes the reader into the minds of these men and their lovers, family, and those who surround them, a full, unsettling picture of tyranny emerges. In this country ruled by murder and revenge, no one is safe.

Moses Isegawa writes with stunning clarity and force, faltering only slightly at the end with scenes that would be dramatic in any other novel but which are anticlimactic given what has occurred before. His most amazing achievement is the descent into the minds of brutes to make them understandable even if they are wholly despicable. The weaving of these multiple stories - Bat's, Bazooka's, and others - is seamless, as everything points toward the fall of Idi Amin's hedonistic and unforgiving regime.

I cannot recommend this novel highly enough. Its bold look at a country ruled by brutality adds a surprisingly human dimension to outright inhumanity. Readers of Nuruddin Farah's LINKS, which details an intellectual in the midst of Somalia's civil war, will find many similarities, although the two novels belong distinctively to their respective authors and homelands.