An American Family in Amin’s Uganda

When Bert and Diane Adams moved to Uganda in 1970 they had no idea that a few months later General Idi Amin would overthrow the government in a coup and rule Uganda with great force in the coming years. In this book, Bert Adams, a sociology professor from the United States, tells his family’s story of their time in Uganda at the beginning of the Amin era. Bert’s assignment was to teach sociology at the prestigious Makerere University. With a down-to earth writing style and a keen eye for observation, Bert has captured Uganda as it was in the early 1970s as his family met and fell in love with the Ugandan people and then traveled around the country in their old Volkswagen bus. An American Family in Amin’s Uganda gives an inside view of one family’s attempt to live a normal life – teaching, singing, making friends, putting on dramatic productions, sight-seeing – in a country that was beginning to unravel under Amin’s increasingly erratic and brutal rule of terror.