1001 Nights Cast

For a long period I was kept in solitary confinement. Everything occurred within a large concrete building. I was lodged, fed, and interrogated there.

I discovered rapidly that I had no secrets hidden from my interrogators. My banking secrets had been uncovered one by one: they were detailed in a heavy document. They impressed on me the difficulty of the task, an entire team of agents put to work over a period of several months. I had cost the American taxpayer a considerable amount of money, and now it was my turn to pay up, for I was, after all, the terrorist banker.

The problem was that when I told them in all good faith, for that was all that I had left, that they knew everything there was to know, that the terrorist banker notion was unfounded conspiratorial fancy, they did not believe me. They submerged me in boiling water and yanked me out, setting the air conditioning howlingly cold. They sent in men and women who rubbed the intimate areas of their bodies against my own, in the hope of humiliating me into speech. I found this neither intolerable, nor did it bring me creature comfort in some instinctive, human way. All I felt was how my bones, my frame, my mind were eroding under the killing onslaught of boredom.

One day they told me that they had a surprise for me. They said ‘shut your eyes…’ and without thinking, I did. A door opened. I was pushed through. I opened my eyes wide. The lights were out. It was black dark, as black as a Murder Party. The lights came on, a brief fluorescent flicker and then a flood of light. The shutters were closed, and it seemed absurd to me, this artificial pallor when I could feel just beyond the steel walls of the room, the remnants of the tropical sun reverberating upon the pale gravel compound, the view of the sea beyond the barbed wire locked within an inscrutable veil of heat. ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen’, the thought came to my mind, fleetingly: I was a little boy in a theatre in Ramallah…

And there he sat before me, behind the iron table, the maddest Englishman of them all, Mr Idi Amin Dada himself. My agent had told me that he had lost weight: this was no longer the case, captivity in an American prison had transformed Idi’s body into a sedimentary repository of hamburger grease. He was no longer seated, for he had seen me and he clearly had an axe to grind. He leapt to his feet, capacious palms straining towards my throat, as he shoved the table over and cleared it in one graceful bound which demonstrated that despite his new found weight, he had not been neglecting his physical condition. I pushed back into the door. The chain linking Idi’s leg irons to the floor was only so long and it reached its full, taut length just as his feet cleared the upper edge of the table. His forward sally was abruptly interrupted, and his heavy frame crashed to the floor, face bashing into the concrete with a dull crack. His whole body floundered in a shrill of pain, only his ankles raised in the air, suspended from the chain stretched over the edge of the table. I could hear uncontrolled laughter from beyond the wall, the guards had seen it all through the surveillance cameras. I pummelled the door. It opened. An arm grabbed and extracted me, leaving Idi to his pain and humiliation.

Weeks passed by, I saw no sign of Idi. He might just as well have disappeared.

One evening the guards came. I would be having a tête-à-tête dinner I was told. With no further ado I was taken into a large room, table in the centre, a large detail of guards ringing the periphery, and there sat Idi. Was it the same man?—the thought crossed my mind. He appeared calm and affable, but his eyes were glazed, he was drugged to the gills. I was seated, my handcuffs removed, leg irons chained to the ring under the table, next to Idi’s. Standard issue food items were placed on the table before us.

Idi was chummy. ‘Yes,’ he told me, ‘I dined with the camp commander, last night in his residence, on his verandah facing the water. We all gorged ourselves. There was buffalo meat and lion for starters, in a curry sauce. There was crocodile, served with cheddar and peaches in syrup. The commander told me how he understood our fight for freedom, but over whiskey, he explained to me that freedom could not come at the expense of Empire.’
Now Idi was confidential, I was to be privy to his deepest secrets. He had managed to send a message to Fidel Castro on his deathbed.

‘How?’, I whispered.

‘Via one of the Spanish guards.’

I wondered whom. All Manny ever spoke about were the girls he made out with on furlough in Miami. And Horatio was too much of a brute to even comprehend the concept of Fidel Castro. Idi was not to be discouraged. Che Guevera himself was coming for him: Fidel had seen to that.

Now Idi was raging, his mood had soured. He was berserk, rearing and gesticulating above the table like some terrifying Transylvanian construction. ‘My money,’ he shrieked, ‘You took away all my money!’ He was sobbing as he lunged in my direction. I fell backwards off my chair. The guards were upon him, they had unsheathed their electric shock prods, they were zapping him over and over, as if he was some rampaging bull. But Idi would not calm nor go down, he kept on rising up like Rasputin. The guards redoubled their energy, they pounded his head with their weapons, and with a shudder he collapsed. And thus, Idi Amin Dada died for the second time, but this time terminally and definitively, in Guantánamo.