ALIAZON REVISTAS: In the Despot Archives

Helen Epstein, interviewed by Lauren Kane ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

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After Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin was ousted from power in 1979, his regime left behind mountains of paperwork generated by the state bureaucracy. Years later, the historian Derek Peterson painstakingly assembled it into an archive. As Helen Epstein writes in our January 15, 2026, issue, “crucial documents were buried under layers of old bicycles, junked photocopiers, and ancient dot matrix printouts. An intern found an unexploded bomb amid files stored at a police station, and valuable court records in another storeroom were being used as toilet paper by prisoners awaiting trial.” From this material, Peterson composed A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda, which, Epstein writes, tries to address the questions “What must it have been like to live under such a regime? And how do societies in general behave under such pressure?”

Helen Epstein;
photograph by Jacob Burckhardt

Epstein has been writing about Uganda for nearly thirty years, after working there in the early 1990s on a project to develop an AIDS vaccine. That involvement broadened into an abiding interest in Africa: for the Review, since 1998 she has written about history and politics in Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, South Africa, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, and Niger, as well as about public health, the Arctic, and Florence Nightingale, among other subjects. Epstein’s journalism and essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and The Lancet, and she is the author of the books Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda and the War on Terror (2017), The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa (2008), and Why Live: How Suicide Becomes an Epidemic (2025). She is Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Global Public Health at Bard College.

This week I e-mailed Epstein to ask her about Uganda’s past, present, and future.

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Lauren Kane: Your essay begins with a reference to moving to Uganda to work as a biochemist in the early 1990s. You were there working on HIV/AIDS research, which you wrote about in The Invisible Cure. What was the country like when you lived there, relative to how it is today?

Helen Epstein: Back then Uganda seemed like a ramshackle paradise, full of kind and interesting people. The humanitarian and development work that I and others were doing was intended to help the country become a modern democratic state with a capitalist economy, strong state-run health and education programs, and so on. At first I was only dimly aware of the problems facing Uganda, but I eventually came to realize that Western aid was emboldening Yoweri Museveni, a brutal dictator who distorted the truth, incited ethnic hatred, treated the legislature and the media with contempt, and appointed partisan judges who ignored the law while his security forces carried out arbitrary arrests, tortured and killed people, and ran amok in neighboring countries. Blatant corruption has meant that public services are now worse, by some measures, than they were under Idi Amin.

You write of Peterson and his historian colleagues: “The details of what they found, and especially what they didn’t find [in the archives], are fascinating.” Were there any documents or ephemera that they were unable to find that you wish they had?

Peterson was studying the Idi Amin period (1971–1979), which we know from contemporary eyewitnesses and the testimony of survivors was extremely violent. That the archives had been virtually cleansed of evidence of state-sponsored atrocities was, for me, his most striking finding, or non-finding. Historians need to ask themselves how common that is. Can we ever really understand the past any more than we can understand ourselves?

An underlying concern of your essay is the tendency of the historical record to downplay violence. You write, “Why do we, individually, and collectively as cultures and societies, repress the horrors we witness? Power creates a black hole for the truth, and our all-too-human impulse to erase and ignore makes it all too easy for evil to keep happening, again and again.” If you had to venture an answer to that question, what might it be? And how do we, both individually and collectively, work against that repression?

I don’t know! You have to ask Dr. Freud. But it’s weird, isn’t it? From time to time, I tried to talk to American and European diplomats about the problems in Uganda. They’d tell me about their programs to teach young people about leadership, to fight malaria, and so on. But when I mentioned the support Western governments had given to Museveni’s brutal security forces, the conversation would come to an abrupt and awkward conclusion. I thought, well, Uganda is a faraway country. This is just one of those things. But what alarmed me back then is now happening in the US: government officials routinely distort the truth, incite ethnic hatred, treat the legislature and the media with contempt, and appoint partisan judges, while security forces carry out arbitrary arrests, torture and kill people, and run amok in other countries. Corruption and deteriorating public services are growing problems here too. So instead of Uganda moving toward some modern ideal, the US and certain other Western countries are regressing to a state of despotism more like Uganda’s under Amin and Museveni. I think we need a psychoanalyst to figure this one out.

What do you see as the future for Uganda?

I worry greatly. Museveni is an old man. He’s expected to hand over power to his son Muhoozi Kainerugaba, a violent goon who currently oversees the military. Not everyone in the military is happy about that, so there could be trouble, just as there was in Ethiopia post–Meles Zenawi, in Sudan post–Omar al-Bashir, and in other countries where long-standing dictators have fallen. If violence breaks out, the diplomats will shake their heads and blame the supposed tribalism of Africans, conveniently forgetting their own responsibility for propping Museveni up for more than forty years, making pandemonium virtually inevitable when he leaves power. It may be too late, but if mankind ever gets the chance for a do-over, it needs to reread the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and stick to it, everywhere, this time.