Not quite a chip off the old block

Idi Amin died in 2003 aged 78 in a Saudi hospital, almost a quarter of a century after being ousted from Uganda and forced into exile. The tale of his downfall is an exciting one: he escaped from Kampala in a convoy with around 30 of his family, as an invading army of Tanzanians and Ugandan exiles closed in.

I have often wondered how Amin decided which of his offspring to take. By this stage the dictator, who used to boast of his sexual fecundity, had married six times and had more than 40 children.

In Jinja, a jet waited to take the chosen family members to Libya. After a short stay there as a guest of Muammar Gadafy, they flew to Saudi Arabia where they subsequently lived on a government pension in a villa in Jeddah. Considering the alternatives, it must have seemed like a charmed life. Papa drove a Chevy Caprice and shopped at Safeway. He married again and had more kids.

Eventually several of his wives, together with a good number of his offspring, were ordered to leave. Most of Amin's children now have foreign passports. By 1993, Amin was living with the last nine of his children and a single wife, Mama a Chumaru, the mother of the youngest four. His last known child was a daughter called Iman, born in 1992.

Many of the exiled children live in penurious circumstances - and so to the case of Faisal Wangita. His situation is unexceptionable insofar as it represents the traps into which many young Africans are falling in European urban centres. In this and other respects he is to be distinguished from that of Amin's children who remained in Uganda.

Jaffar Amin, who studied in Britain and now works in Kampala, is closely related to Faisal Wangita: his mother Marguerite, with whom Amin had an informal liaison, was sister of Wangita's mother, Sarah. He has described Amin as "a loving but strict father" (he also remembers being taught how to shoot and strip an AK-47).

But Amin was never much of a father to Faisal Wangita. In falling in with a Somali gang he has found himself among the most ostracised - and violent - of all London's immigrant communities. Far from this being a particular case of the son inheriting the vices of the father, his fate and that of his victim are functions of general patterns of migration and urban poverty.

· Giles Foden is the author of The Last King of Scotland

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaK2bZH9xfJZomK6fX2WBcMHKnKmipZVjtKq4xKydqJyVow%3D%3D