Chronicles Idi Amin's rise and fall. Amin's despotic reign of terror is viewed through the eyes of Nicholas Garrigan, a Scottish doctor who arrives in Uganda in the early 1970s to serve as Amin's personal physician. His perspective as an outsider causes him to be initially impressed by Amin's calculated rise to power and he grows increasingly monstrous. A pointed examination of how independent Uganda (a British colony until 1962) became a breeding ground for Amin's genocidal tyranny. Amin is both seductive and horribly destructive. Garrigan grows increasingly prone to exploitation.