Amin didn't treat his enemies as ideological adversaries-only as a physical threat.
We all cooperated, all of us, East and West, regardless of country, because the working conditions were really terrible.
Aesopian language was used by all of us. And of course, using this language meant having readers who understood it.
We always moved in groups from one coup d'etat to another, from one war to another.
We have such a mixture now, such a fusion of different genres.
Amin hid nothing. Everybody knew everything. Yet the American Senate only introduced a resolution breaking off trade with Amin three months before his overthrow.
When I went to Kampala, my colleague in Addis Ababa reminded me to take a light bulb along with me. This was helpful advice since there were no light bulbs in the whole of Kampala and the entire city was engulfed in darkness.
Without Amin nothing functioned, nothing existed.
When I started writing Imperium, I had a problem with my conscience, because if I wrote strictly from the point of view of this Polish experience, the book would be completely incomprehensible to the Western reader.
With time Amin fell into a mania of suspicion and he saw enemies almost everywhere. So he carried out repressions and he himself never spent the night in the same place twice.
Whiskey was something which was absolutely marvelous, because there was nothing: no cigarettes, no food. This was a group of highly specialized people. They were real Africanists
