Escaping Idi Amin review – there’s a happy ending to this awful tale … and it should be a lesson to us all

Four Britons describe the horrors they witnessed as children as thousands were expelled from Uganda – or killed – by the Ugandan dictator. The new lives they made should teach us something important

The contributors to Escaping Idi Amin hardly make any direct comparisons to the present day. They don’t say: look, this part of the story is what Britain is now heading towards. This part is where America is already. These are the same words you can hear across the western world in 2026. They don’t need to. The parallels are obvious and deeply shaming, and, in any case, the story of Uganda viciously expelling its Asian community in 1972 is a humbling terror on its own terms.

The star witnesses are four people who would become British citizens, but were Ugandans born and bred when, in 1971, army commander Idi Amin took control of a country that was the only home they had ever known. Bharti, Harminder and Paresh were aged between nine and 11; Maz, who has died since filming his interview for this two-part documentary, was in his early 20s.

They remember an idyllic everyday existence that didn’t immediately feel threatened when the sound of distant explosions and popping bullets heralded Amin taking power by force. But soon there was the spectacle of Amin’s political opponents being murdered and, later, mass graves. In August 1972, Amin announced that all Asian Ugandans, about 80,000 people out of a national population of 10 million, were obliged to leave the country within 90 days.

Uganda’s singular social history meant that life was extremely rough as an impoverished African Ugandan in this era. Indian immigrants had become a comfortable middle class of doctors, shopkeepers and white-collar workers; at Ugandan golf clubs, the Asians were members while the Africans carried the bags. Simply driving the blameless Asians out, however, rather than doing the hard work of creating a country where all citizens had a chance to prosper, was inhumane, and Amin did it not to help his people but to shore up his dictatorship by scapegoating a minority.

In the UK, toxic debate raged. The economic issues of the time were dominated by unemployment rather than the crisis of inequality and living costs of today but it is embarrassing to see how little has changed. Far-right demagogues, led by Enoch Powell, had convinced a section of the populace that immigrants were the cause of their woes; those people were enraged at the prospect of thousands of Ugandans arriving, and not swayed by the idea that, because the UK had transferred Indians en masse to Uganda when the latter country was a British colonial protectorate, Asian Ugandans were British passport-holders and owed sanctuary. Nor were they convinced of a moral obligation to help fellow human beings, regardless of their links to Britain; or even that a bunch of highly educated professionals and entrepreneurs might be an economic boon. When the government finally agreed to rescue a proportion of the expelled Ugandans, it did so while taking heavy flak.

In Uganda, the anatomy of a racist purge was on display. It started with harassment of Asians in the street, then came checkpoints and curfews. Harminder’s father was taken away for questioning by soldiers who came to their family home; he eventually returned, but many who were imprisoned were never seen again. Amin’s secret police became even more lawless and brutal than the regular army.

Long before the 90-day deadline arrived, Asian families realised they were in mortal danger and would have to flee to join the queues of desperate people at the British consulate in the capital, trying to obtain settlement papers and a ticket out. Escaping Idi Amin revolves around two awful reminiscences, by Bharti and Paresh, of what they saw on the road to Kampala when they were stopped by Amin’s soldiers. Both tales involve the children of fleeing families being subjected to barbarity so extreme that it is, on one level, incomprehensible, although on another too easy to comprehend because such cruelty had happened before, has happened since and is happening again. Paresh in particular is visibly broken by the memory of what he saw through the window of the bus taking him to safety, aged nine: “Every time I talk about it, it destroys me a little bit.”

There is a happy ending, of sorts. Bharti, Paresh, Harminder and Maz never stopped missing the country they were born in, but they made a new home in Britain, and they made Britain better: it would be hard, for example, to calculate the size of the debt we owe Bharti for her 40 years as a social worker safeguarding children in care. Every minute of Escaping Idi Amin contains an urgent lesson to learn.