The three of them are Obatala worshippers. I see the cripple first, dragging his bad leg behind him as he moves from car to car. I have seen him before. His voice is adjusted to make his body seem more frail. It’s an act, not completely invented, but embellished. I don’t like his act and I don’t give him money. Not long afterwards, when I get on the platform, I see the first of the two blind men. His long white stick ends in a tennis ball, and he sweeps it in a limited arc in front of him and to his side. He comes dangerously close to the edge of the platform. I go up to him and ask if I can help. Oh no, he says, oh no, I’m just waiting for my train, thank you. I leave him and walk the length of the platform, towards the exit. It’s confusing to see another blind man there, also with a long white stick that ends in a tennis ball, climbing the stairs. Obatala is the demiurge charged by Olodumare, the supreme deity, with the formation of humans from clay. Obatala was doing well at the task until he started drinking. As he drank more and became inebriated, he started fashioning damaged human beings: dwarves, cripples, people missing limbs, or felled by illness. This went on until Oduduwa usurped the role and finished the creation of humans. As a result, the people who suffer from physical infirmities identify themselves as worshippers of Obatala. This is an interesting relationship with a god. Not one of affection, or praise, but an antagonistic relationship. They worship Obatala in accusation. They wear white, which is his color, the color of the palm-wine he got drunk on. The long sticks the two men swing on the subway platform are white. The cripple wears dirty white sneakers.

Outside, it is dark. The time is 10 pm, and it is a Sunday night. I enter the bookshop to kill some time before my film starts. I have left behind my friends, and I’ve come to watch the film alone because there’s a compulsion in me to see it tonight, to wait no longer. I have thirty minutes to kill while waiting. The shop is a Barnes and Noble. It reminds me of the internet: it contains many good things, but there’s a lot of rubbish to sort through before the good can be found. This is unlike some of the small independent shops in the city, like Ivy Books on 95th, or Crawford Doyle on Madison, places where the books out front are interesting and of the best quality. These smaller bookshops are curated. Items are placed next to each other for the greatest resonance. I find it impossible to go into such places without making a purchase. It’s a strange effect, one that internet vendors have attempted to replicate by recommending books similar to the ones one is browsing. But nothing can compare to or replicate exactly the quiet environment of a small bookshop, the company of eccentrics, the reprinted classic or new release that catches your eye, and suddenly seems to you the most essential thing in the world. The chain stores are the opposite experience. The mass of magazines, coffee mugs, calendars, glossy-covered thrillers and romances, and other merchandise I have to wade through before getting to the literature section at Barnes and Noble usually leaves me disinclined, as it does tonight, to spend any money on books.

I walk the four blocks to the movie theater. It is a warm night, and I have a vague worry about how relentlessly warm it has been this year, all this way into October. I have rarely enjoyed the cold seasons, but there’s a rightness about them that I now feel uncomfortable about not having. The idea that the weather patterns are changing noticeably bothers me, even if there’s no evidence that this warm Fall isn’t a perfectly normal variation. I’m no longer the global warming skeptic I was some years ago, but I still can’t stand the tendency many people have of jumping to conclusions based on flimsy anecdotal evidence. Global warming exists, but that doesn't mean it explains why today is warm. But the way my thoughts return to the fact that it’s mid-October and I haven’t had occasion to wear my coat yet, makes me wonder if, already, I am one of those people. This is part of a bigger suspicion I have, a feeling that the structures of the society are making people less concerned about the rules of evidence, and more interested in forming opinions and picking sides, as if answers were more important than questions. People can no longer sit with a question. It makes brisk business for those who promise answers, whether they be politicians, scientists or priests of the various religious traditions. It works particularly well for those who want to rally people around a cause. The cause itself doesn't matter.

The crowd at the ticket counter is atypical, but this is expected: the late hour of the film, the fact that it is set in Africa. The ticket buyers are young, many of them black, dressed in hip clothes. There are also some Asians, and some New Yorkers of indeterminate ethnic background. The last film I saw here, about the Queen of England, had had an audience consisting almost entirely of white-haired white people. There are much fewer of them in attendance tonight. The great cave of the theater. What archetypal image does watching a film alone in a theater evoke? Not alone, exactly, in the company of a hundred others, but all are strangers to me. The lights go down, I am slouched in a plush seat, the dozens of souls around me are silent. A light emanates from the screen ahead. Womblike. And sudden delivery.

The film starts with a jaunty credit sequence and good, idiomatic music. The music is from the right time period, but not from the right part of Africa. But I don't mind. I’m prepared to like some things about this, and I expect that some other things will annoy me. A film, last year, about the crimes of large pharmaceutical companies in East Africa, left me feeling frustrated, not because of the plot which, of course, is not far from reality, but because of how closely the film itself hewed to the convention of the good white man in Africa. The convention sickens me, I have seen it too often, it’s no longer interesting or helpful. And so, sitting in this cavernous womb to experience “The Last King of Scotland,” I am prepared to be angry, again, at a white man, a nobody in his own country, who thinks the salvation of Africa is up to him. The King the title refers to is Idi Amin Dada, the murderous dictator of Uganda in the 1970s, whose hobbies included decorating himself with spurious titles. I know Idi Amin well. He was an indelible part of my childhood mythology, and I remember the many hours I spent at my cousins’ watching a gory film called “The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin,” in which no detail was spared to present the callousness, insanity and sheer excitement of the man. I was nine years old, and those images of people being shot and stuffed into car trunks, or decapitated and stored in freezers, have stayed with me. We have nothing to do. Let's watch "The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin" again. And we would. For the most part, “The Last King of Scotland” avoids such images, and concentrates the story, instead, on the relationship between Idi Amin and the briefly-innocent Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, that he presses into service as his personal physician. The film is based on Giles Foden’s excellent novel of the same title from several years ago. As in the book, the film is essentially a vehicle for Idi Amin’s off-kilter psychology. In him, the classic traits of dictatorship are given extreme form: anger, fear, insecurity, charm. Idi Amin murdered three-hundred thousand Ugandans during his rule, he expelled the large community of Ugandan-Indians and destroyed the country’s economy. For a moment, my mind wanders to an uncomfortable meeting I had in an opulent house in Madison, Wisconsin a few years ago. My host that evening was a rich Indian surgeon. He and his family, he told me that night, had been expelled from their homes and lands by Idi Amin. I was taken aback at his undimmed anger, anger which, I couldn't help feeling, was partly directed at me. I was in the presence of a man who had lost all trust in Africans. I don't know why I feel some relief that the film doesn't avoid the expulsion of the Indians. I think part of my host's anger was about how their part of the tragedy had been forgotten.

Idi Amin hosted the most wonderful parties, and spoke eloquently about the need for African self-determination. This nuance in his personality would no doubt bring a bad taste to the mouth of my host in Madison. The actor in this film, Forest Whitaker, is so persuasive as Idi Amin that I forget, several times, that this is an American actor. His face contorts with rage one moment, and becomes docile and needy in the next. His mien is ursine, and almost likeable. His speech is torrential, unhinged and delivered in a faultless East-African accent. It impresses even my finicky African ear. He is present in most of the scenes, and this translates, as I watch the film, into two hours of discomfort, as the character of Idi Amin thickens into the consciousness. Watching Whitaker in the role, I begin to understand how Idi Amin could have assured himself that his murderous spree was all for the best. He (Amin, not Whitaker) is not the fool. He is playing the fool. He is not evil. He is a lovable bear of a man inhabiting the role of evil, just as the actor inhabits the role of the dictator. There is no safe ground.

The Scottish doctor, played by James McAvoy, is small, white, good-looking, a stark contrast to Whitaker’s presence. He seems as if he's wandered over from a daytime soap opera. But the power of this film is in showing exactly how an innocent-seeming, fun-loving doctor from Scotland can find himself handmaiden to atrocity. It’s a perfect illustration of another, and more welcome, convention: how spectacularly stupid people can be in unfamiliar environments. The film's mood is schizophrenic. I am still dealing with the violence of one scene, when another starts, full of beautiful African women, Afrobeat music, gorgeous camera work. The village scenes raise my hackles. Some brittle pride in me prefers to see urban Africa, in all its flawed glory, rather than the village Africa of stereotype, the simple-minded Africa that most filmmakers prefer. The city, thrumming and vital, makes me miss Lagos. The music is beautiful and the camera seduces me, even as Dr Nicholas Garrigan is seduced, by the power around him, by the women, by the inchoate desire in him to "make a difference." Like him, I am convinced that there’s a way out of the maze. The bad Africans in the film, Idi Amin’s henchmen, know there is no way out. The good Africans, such as the doctor Garrigan befriends and Idi Amin’s wives, know that things will end badly. I wish to believe that things are not as bad as they are. This is the part of me that wants to be entertained, that wishes not to confront the horror. But that satisfaction doesn’t exist. Things end badly. I wonder, as Coetzee does in “Elizabeth Costello,” what the use is of going into these awful recesses of the human heart. Why show torture? Isn’t it enough to be told, in imprecise detail, that bad things happen? We wish to be spared. A foolish wish as no one is spared. Not even Idi Amin's young son, who is convulsed with epilepsy. Epileptics, too, worship Obatala. The boy is called MacKenzie. His brother is Campbell. Two Scots-Ugandans caught in Idi Amin's nightmare, and in Obatala's carelessness.

Idi Amin is Whitaker. The relationship, for the duration of the film, is that simple. He consumes the role whole. As I watch him, I know that Whitaker will, without the faintest shadow of a doubt, be nominated for an Oscar for this role. He might even win it outright, if the Academy doesn't get caught up in racial politics again. The film itself is strong, a subtle treatment of an unsubtle subject. In several places in the film, I have to keep my anger in check, because I am hypersensitive to bad portrayals of Africa. But, ultimately, I find the work grotesque, appalling and thoroughly fair-minded. Idi Amin’s failure was to overdo what Mobutu, Abacha, and Mugabe all did in less extreme fashion. These men all took the colonial project and, as black men trained by white men, destroyed their nations in the name of saving them. African dictators evoke traditional kingship, which is why some of them are welcomed at the beginning. But what they go on to do is travesty kingship because, at the heart of most African royal systems, the king is not the ultimate arbiter. Tradition is. By granting themselves absolute power, by combining the modern force of arms with a fondness for palatial excess, they parody the thousands of years of stability in African kingdoms. This sleep of reason is only just ending. Some of the monsters are still running loose. Mugabe, for example, is still on his throne. But they are only a part of the story. Something that stays with me from the film is the last act of agency we see in it. It's done by an African, it's ethical, and it's costly.

Midnight. The air is warm. The sun burns even at night. At the subway station, out-of-towners wait for the train. A girl of thirteen sits on the bench next to me. Her ten year-old brother comes to join her. They are out of earshot of their parents. Hey, she says, wassup. She flashes signs with her fingers and, with her brother, starts laughing. Their parents are yards away, in conversation. The little boy wears a toy Chinese peasant’s hat. Are you a gangster? Are you a gangster? They both flash gang signs, or their idea of gang signs. I look at them mutely. One part of me too tired to respond, another is simply unable to believe what’s happening in front of me. It’s midnight, and I don’t feel like giving public lectures. He’s black, says the girl, but he’s not dressed like a gangster. I bet he’s a gangster. He's a gangster. Hey mister, are you a gangster? They continue flashing their fingers for another four minutes, until the uptown train arrives and I walk down the platform and enter a distant car.

Koranteng's Toli - https://koranteng.blogspot.com/