Archives of Idi Amin Edgar C. Taylor 1 * , Nelson A. Abiti 2 , Derek R. Peterson 3 , Richard Vokes 4 1 Department of History, Archaeology and Heritage Studes, Makerere University, Uganda 2 University of Western Cape, Curator, Uganda National Museum, Uganda 3 Department of History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA 48109 4 Department of Anthropology and Development, University of Western Australia, Australia *Corresponding Author: edgar.taylor@mak.ac.ug Abstract: This report describes the official photographic archives of Idi Amin’s government held by the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC). During his reign from 1971 to 1979, Idi Amin embraced visual media as a tool for archiving the achievements of populist military rule as his government sought to reorient Ugan- dans’ relationship with the state. Only a handful of the resulting images were ever printed or seen, reflecting the regime’s archival impulse undergirded by paranoia of unauthorized ways of seeing. The UBC’s newly opened collection of over 60,000 negatives from Amin’s photographers, alongside files at the Uganda National Archives, offers the first comprehensive opportunity to study the Ugandan state under Amin’s dictatorship through the lens of its own documentarians. Résumé : Ce rapport décrit les archives photographiques officielles du gouvernement d’Idi Amin détenu par l’Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC). Pendant son règne de 1971 à 1979, Idi Amin a adopté les médias visuels comme outil d’archivage des réalisations de son régime militaire populiste alors que son gouvernement cherchait à réorienter la relation des Ougandais avec l’Etat. Seule une petite partie History in Africa, Volume 48 (2021), pp. 413–427 Edgar C. Taylor is Lecturer in the Department of History, Archaeology, and Heritage Studies at Makerere University. Nelson A. Abiti is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Western Cape and Curator of the Uganda National Museum. Derek R. Peterson is the Ali Mazrui Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Richard Vokes is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Development at the University of Western Australia. E-mail: richard.vokes@uwa.edu.au © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the African Studies Association. doi:10.1017/hia.2021.8 413 of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2021.8 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 197.239.40.123, on 11 Feb 2022 at 20:57:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms