Snakepit, Moses Isegawa

It tells the story of a Cambridge graduate who goes back to his country -- Uganda -- just as Idi Amin takes over. It describes life in Amin's Uganda and is rather macabre: a woman who is coerced into becoming a government agent by a General to whom she inadvertently betrays her family, a bureaucrat who comes home to find his wife's head cut off, a man forced to collect wood for his wife's funeral pyre which he is then thrown on to, the list goes on and it's all 'business as usual' as far as the government is concerned.

The novel begins with the graduate, Bat Katanga, slightly improbably landing an amazing job immediately after his return from Cambridge but it then goes on to become more probable. Bat isn't portrayed as being infallible or as being particularly good. The sketch the author draws of him is of a man who inadvertently walks into a world of corruption, who tries to do what's right (or at least what he thinks is right) and who loses his idealism.

I have no idea if this is what life was really like under Idi Amin's regime but I wouldn't be surprised if it was. The book isn't pleasant reading by any stretch of the imagination but it is a book worth reading despite the fact that it seems to be a bit stylistically messy at times.