General Idi Amin of Uganda has laid bare a treacherous weakness of Black Africa that its defenders have either ignored or covered for some time. It is easy to flick aside the fragile political institutions left behind by the colonial powers; the parliaments, the parties, the constitutions, the rules of foreign law have not taken root. The masses are unschooled, timid and ignorant of their rights and potential for power. They are riven by tribal strife. Instead of loyalty to their country, they feel hatred for one another. The quality of statesmanship is low. Leaders are possessed by greed and megalomania. Their promises of the good life have, with few exceptions, collapsed. Most economies are faltering. Life may be getting better for the common man, but not much better. The countries are small; the towns that count are few. A leader only needs a few thousand guns to rule for his lifetime. Thus, the conditions that favor tyranny are many; the checks are few.

General Amin’s callous expulsion of the Asians has brought worldwide (though not much African) condemnation upon himself and crippled all those, both black and white, who have spent years trying to focus the attention of outsiders on the injustices of white Southern Africa. But his treatment of the Asians is only the most dramatic of the wrongs inside Uganda. Ugandans have treated one another far worse than they have treated Asians. Uganda has become a land ruled by undisciplined and poorly trained solders, robbing, raping and killing as they please, with little disapproval and no punishment from above. It is another bloody and depressing chapter in recent African history.

Of course, the 47-year-old Amin is not a typical leader of Africa. Poorly educated, he has a penchant for buffoonery and takes delight in outrageous pronouncements. He cannot understand why governments are upset by his recent cable to the United Nations expressing approval of Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. It is obvious that the intricacies of finance and state do not interest him. In a brilliant analysis, Nigerian journalist Peter Enahoro recently described him as “the kind of man who approaches a thorny problem with an empty mind. It is when he begins to address an audience that solutions suddenly fill his head.” Diplomats and newsmen in East Africa spend a good deal of time arguing whether he is utterly stupid, a man of shrewd peasant cunning, or mad.

Yet it is too simple to dismiss the troubles of Uganda as an aberration, the way a decade ago defenders of Africa dismissed the chaos in the Congo as an aberration. The Congo was a product of unenlightened, and brutal Belgian colonialism, but Uganda has no such excuse. For the British, Uganda was a model of the best that could be accomplished under their colonial system. At independence a decade ago it was a relatively educated, stable and rich African country.

There is historical irony now in reading what the young Winston Churchill wrote in 1908 after a visit there. “There is no region,” he wrote, “which offers prospects to compare in hopefulness with those of the Protectorate of Uganda. . . . Nowhere else in Africa will a little money go so far. Nowhere else will the results be more brilliant, more substantial or more rapidly realized.”

Uganda has fallen far. But it is not all because of the historical accident of Idi Amin. An analyst needs to explore the conditions, duplicated elsewhere in Black Africa, that led from Churchill’s dreams to Amin’s brutality.

Churchill and many other British had been excited by one section of Uganda, the Kingdom of Buganda by the shores of Lake Victoria. It was a rare example of an organized and complex tribe led in a feudal way by a king called the Kabaka. The Baganda (as the people of Buganda are called) accepted the Christian missionaries who headed there soon after stories of the land were spread by Stanley and other explorers. With Christianity came schools and Western attitudes. By the time of Ugandan independence in 1962, Buganda was one of the most modem and productive areas in Africa. If Uganda were comprised of Buganda alone, Churchill’s prophecy might have been realized.

But in the 19th century, imperialists drew colonial boundaries without worrying about the people who lived within the ruled lines, and Uganda was drawn to include far more territory than Buganda. As a result, the Baganda found themselves at independence in a country where other peoples - less modern and less educated - outnumbered them by more than five to one.

The man who ruled Uganda for most of its early years, first as Prime Minister and then as President, was A. Milton Obote, a northerner from the Lango tribe. Like most African leaders, he was obsessed by two ambitions - to keep himself in office and to unite the hostile tribes of his territory into some kind of nation. Obote saw the Baganda as a threat to both obsessions and decided to destroy their power.

On paper and in theory, Obote may have seemed right. The Baganda were proud, arrogant, separatist, almost autonomous and had their own king. Uganda could never become a nation until at least some of the separatist feeling of the Baganda was quieted. But the practical result of Obote’s policy of putting down the Baganda was to create a Uganda in which the least modern peoples were in charge of developing it into a modern state.

With his anti-Baganda policy, Obote also created a solid bloc of bitter opposition to himself right in the capital of Kampala and the surrounding area, for this was the heartland of Buganda. If trouble arose, no one would take to the streets of Kampala to defend him.

Obote used the Ugandan army to suppress the Baganda, and that turned out to be his greatest error. The soldiers, led by General, then Colonel Amin, stormed the palace of the Kabaka of Buganda in 1966 and sent him into exile in London, where he died a few years later. Amin’s troops, almost all northerners, then virtually occupied Buganda in the name of Obote for four years.

But Obote had fashioned a dangerous instrument. During his regime, the army increased from 1,000 men to 7,500; it was the fastest growing African army outside Nigeria. An unpopular man who needed the army’s support, Obote gave in to all its whims. When the soldiers mutinied against heir British officers in 1964, Obote dismissed the Englishmen and replaced them with sergeants swiftly promoted. Whenever the soldiers demanded an increase in pay, he gave it; the Ugandan army soon became one of the worst trained and best paid armies in Africa.

In January 1971, this army overthrew Obote while the President was at a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ conference in Singapore, and General Amin became President Amin. In a few months, it became clear that stability was not to be the hallmark of the military government. For one thing, the soldiers began killing one another. Though northern, the army was not united by anything beyond its contempt for the Baganda. As happens often in Africa, there was tribalism within tribalism. The army came mainly from three northern tribal groups - the West Nilesmen of President Amin, the Lango of former President Obote, and, the best trained of the lot, the Acholi. The West Nilesmen considered both the Lango and Acholi supporters of Obote and a purge began, which President Amin either could not or would not stop. At least 1,000 were killed.

Since by then perhaps 1,500 Lango and Acholi had rushed across the border to take refuge with Obote in Tanzania, the purge crippled the army. But Amin simply recruited almost three times as many as had left or been killed until the army swelled to 12,500. It was now even more poorly trained and undisciplined than before. To make matters worse, Amin promoted a few sergeants to colonel as a reward for standing by him in the coup.

Without paying any heed to his budget, Amin began squandering his country’s funds on the military. By the end of the last fiscal year, Uganda had spent a third of its budget on defense, more than twice as much as was originally provided. Three-quarters of the capital budget - the money set aside for school buildings, roads and similar projects - was spent on arms and other military goods. This heavy military spending almost depleted the treasury and left Uganda with little foreign exchange for imports.

Without discipline or training but well armed, the soldiers began to rule the life of Uganda as only arrogant, ignorant men can. For more than a year, the country has undergone a kind of reign of terror, with men of all races, including Americans, killed and high government officials disappearing. Some of the murders and detentions have been coldly calculated, like the slaughter last year of the American journalist, Nicholas Stroh, when he investigated reports of an army massacre in the barracks at Mbarara. Others have died at the hands of drunken soldiers on a spree. In none of the cases have the soldiers been disciplined. With the acquiescence of their former general, Amin’s soldiers have become their own law.

Faced with a desperate financial situation, Amin did not suddenly decide to change character and attempt to deal with it rationally. Instead, he has assumed the pose of a mad magician, pulling outrageous surprises out of his sleeve. The first came last April when he turned on one of his early benefactors, the Israeli Government, and threw out all Israeli technicians and businessmen. This was a swift way to cancel all debts to IsraeI and to insure some financial and military support from the incredibly rich and militantly anti-Zionist Libya.

In early August, Amin pulled out his biggest surprise by ordering the expulsion, within ninety days, of most of the 75,000 Asians in Uganda. This may eventually destroy his economy, for the Asians controlled the commerce of Uganda and filled most of the skilled and professional posts. But it also guarantees him great popularity, for the masses of Africans hold a deep hatred for Asians.

The Asians have long been the despised minority of East Africa, like the Jews of old Europe (see Meisler: “Kenya’s Asian Outcasts,” The Nation, September 1, 1969). Hard-working, clannish, sometimes disdainful, the Asians have proved too strong a competition for Africans trying to get their first foothold in a money economy. In addition, the Asians have attracted the enmity that shopkeepers - or, as they are called in East Africa, dukawallahs - experience all over the world.

Under the guise of keeping Africa for the Africans, the East African governments, including Uganda before Amin, have developed various sets of legislation to take shops and jobs from Asians. Citizenship is the excuse. Although either born in East Africa or resident long enough to look on Africa as home, most Asians, under the constitutional rules of the independent black countries, are aliens. Therefore, Africans insist, their laws against Asians are not racial, but only a way of taking the economy out of foreign hands. The policies of Amin, however, make this hard to believe. His tirades against Asians have not distinguished between citizen and noncitizen Asians. In addition, his officials, in a hurried campaign, have on technical grounds torn up the citizenship papers of two-thirds of the Asian citizens. Citizens or not, Asians are not wanted by Africans. All this has made the Asian population a convenient scapegoat in Uganda for a man who desperately needs scapegoats.

The attempt in mid-September by Ugandan exiles, with Tanzanian support, to invade Uganda and overthrow Amin has only made matters worse. The invasion was a Bay of Pigs for President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, who has feuded with Amin ever since the latter came to power. Nyerere evidently believed that the Ugandan army, weakened by tribal conflict, would crumble in face of an invasion. He was mistaken, for anti-Asian hatred had inflated the popularity of Amin. The army held fast.

The victory over the exiles has made the soldiers even more drunk with power. Amin’s battle pronouncements have fired them up against Acholis, Langos, Asians and whites. Diplomatic sources report that since the invasion an average of five Asians a day have been shot to death by soldiers. There are reports as well of soldiers massacring Acholi and Lango villages in the north. And a purge of important Baganda has begun. In the most spectacular incident, soldiers arrived at the High Court one day and removed Chief Justice Benedicto Kiwanuka, a prominent Bagandan leader. Most outsiders believe he was killed a few hours later.

Since the invasion, Amin has behaved as if he could with impunity rail at the rest of the world. He comes up every day with a new accusation of impending invasion by Britain, Tanzania, Zambia or the NATO powers. Most foreign governments have accepted his tirades meekly.

Aside from the Asians, there are more than 5,000 British, almost 1,000 Americans and several hundred other foreigners in Uganda. Most diplomats insist that, if their governments were to offend General Amin, he would fall into a rage and harm these hostages. As a result, while the tyrant blusters, foreign diplomats do little more than wring their hands and make feeble protests.

The United States is the worst offender. Since Amin came to power, his soldiers have mistreated Americans far worse than they had any group of foreigners except Asians with British passports. Three Americans have been killed and one wounded; the wife of an American diplomat was almost raped; eight Americans were detained, and numerous American tourists have been roughed up. Yet, the U.S. Government has done everything it could to avoid antagonizing the President. The Peace Corps, for example, withdrew all its volunteers after one of them had been killed by Ugandan soldiers. But, to appease Amin, the Peace Corps never announced an evacuation. Instead, officials insisted, each volunteer had made a personal and individual decision to leave.

With foreign governments taking that kind of attitude, there is little pressure on Amin to moderate his antics. The President has neither solved his problems nor run out of scapegoats. It is hard for an outsider to see any hope for Uganda now; it is a model African state gone wild. Perhaps Uganda is the exception that proves the rule, but its background and history have too much in common with much of the rest of Black Africa for any friend of Africa to feel smug about it.

Mr. Meisler is Africa correspondent of the Los Angeles Times.