This is perhaps a bit apropos, but when I was a kid, when I visited beautiful Anishinaabewaki in the summers, there was a game arcade my cousins and I would often visit. This arcade had the 1991 cabinet Road Riot 4WD, and I remember there was a character in that game called “Idi A Mean Dada” who was basically just a grotesque generic caricature of a stereotypical “African dictator”. Naturally this “Idi A Mean Dada” character was the host of the track “Timbuktu, Africa” – which looked nothing like Timbuktu – despite Timbuktu being some 6,500 km away from Kampala.
I said to my cousin, “This is… pretty racist…” and my cousin concurred. I believe my mom was, what, impressed that I could recognize and point out that it was racist? And I was just thinking, “Well, yeah, obviously.” – but I guess that just speaks to how normalized that kind of junk was back then.
I don’t really know much about the real Idi Amin, but yeah, he sure had A Place in popular culture didn’t he.
This is perhaps a bit apropos, but when I was a kid, when I visited beautiful Anishinaabewaki in the summers, there was a game arcade my cousins and I would often visit. This arcade had the 1991 cabinet Road Riot 4WD, and I remember there was a character in that game called “Idi A Mean Dada” who was basically just a grotesque generic caricature of a stereotypical “African dictator”. Naturally this “Idi A Mean Dada” character was the host of the track “Timbuktu, Africa” – which looked nothing like Timbuktu – despite Timbuktu being some 6,500 km away from Kampala.
I said to my cousin, “This is… pretty racist…” and my cousin concurred. I believe my mom was, what, impressed that I could recognize and point out that it was racist? And I was just thinking, “Well, yeah, obviously.” – but I guess that just speaks to how normalized that kind of junk was back then.
I don’t really know much about the real Idi Amin, but yeah, he sure had A Place in popular culture didn’t he.