Behind the Bastards - The British Super-Soldier Who Killed A Nation

Episode Date: July 17, 2018

He was a highly skilled soldier who murdered an estimated 300,000 or more of his own people. In Episode 12, Robert is joined by comedian Brodie Reed and they discuss Idi Amin's rise to power and rule in Uganda.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Now the amazing Misty Copeland is facing a new challenge, being a mom. It's just been a whole new world entering into motherhood, and you know, it's a first for me. So this is a little nerve-wracking, and it's been one of the most rewarding things that I've ever experienced. I'm Carol Sutton-Lewis, host of the Ground Control Parenting Podcast.

Tune in starting February 15th to hear my conversation with the incredible Misty Copeland. You can listen to Ground Control Parenting on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, friends, and welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I'm Robert Evans, and this is the show that tells you everything you don't know about the very worst people

in all of history. Today, my guest, who I will be, who's coming in cold with this tale and who I'll be reading a story to, is Brody Reed, comedian. Hello. Hey. Esteemed guest, I think. Esteemed guest, yes, yes.

Esquire, Brody Reed Esquire. I think means you're the editor for Esquire Magazine. Right, I'm a lawyer, and I'm also the editor of Esquire Magazine. Those are my credits, and I won't change them. That's what that means. Now, we're doing a little bit different today. Normally, we're pretty upfront about who

the subject of the podcast is, but there's a lot of background to get to before we can really properly introduce this guy. So I'm kind of curious as to when you figure out who we're talking about, and I also kind of want it to be a little bit of a surprise for the audience. So if you're good, I'm just going to get into it.

OK, I mean, I'm kind of like an amateur private investigator, so I might get it real off the bat, and I don't want to ruin your flow or anything, but let's try. All right, all right. Let's see how this goes. Time on a clock. Maybe this will be my great disaster, but.

I think it'll be fun. Yeah. All right, so today, right now, 2018, Britain is a tiny, adorable nation filled with wizards and a conspicuously broad definition of the word pudding. It's easy. OK, I'm going to guess Voldemort. No, no, no, I'm just getting it that it's easy for us

to forget today, considering how docile the British people are, that for a while, they ruled the entire world. The British Empire was the largest empire in human history. The Mongol Empire at its height held about 24 million kilometers in area, 16% of the world's population. The British Empire was over 35 million kilometers in area and ruled nearly a quarter of the planet's population. Trust me, I did not forget that they colonized everything.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think what's most shocking to me when I read about this is that they controlled that huge chunk of the planet with probably the smallest army than any empire has ever had. You know, the Roman Empire at its height was about 750,000 regular soldiers. The British Empire at its height before the World War

started was about 120,000 British soldiers. They never spent more than about 2.5% of their GDP on defense. Wow. And those are regular soldiers or like super Syrian, like, Captain America soldiers? So you have predicted a little bit where this is going. Now, these soldiers are regular soldiers. They're volunteers, which is different from most.

Most militaries in this period are not volunteer permanent standing militaries. The British are a little bit different there. But they're just normal soldiers. They have machine guns, which certainly helps with the whole colonizing thing. Or they have machine guns for a chunk of this. But it does beg the question, when you've only got 120,000 guys

and from most of the British Empire, they don't have machine guns. How do you hold a quarter of the planet in bondage for 200 years with a whole army that's a little larger than the modern Coast Guard in the United States? Nukes. Is that not the correct answer?

No, no. I mean, you get the locals to oppress themselves. Oh, God. That was my second guess. Yeah. So Michael Codner, who is the head of military science for the Royal United Services Institute, described the British Empire's military as essentially,

quote, the Royal Navy and a system of indigenous constabularies overseen by a small but professional British army. Now, I found that quote in a BBC article from back in 2011. The article also quoted a military historian named Dr. Hugh Davies, who noted that all of British NBA was controlled by just 30,000 British troops, supervising hundreds of thousands of local Indian soldiers

or sepoys. He was quoted as saying, the empire had to pay for itself, and it had to be profitable. And if you put too much into building up the army, the empire is no longer a profitable enterprise. He sounds like a rat mogul. So that sentence sounds like, the empire has to build itself. In his defense, I don't think he's justifying imperialism.

I think he's just explaining this was the attitude that the imperialists had, is we can't spend too much money on the army, otherwise. Yeah, everything is for profit, I understand. And British India was conquered in the first place by a for-profit corporation, the East India Trading Company. The East India Company had a private army of over a quarter of a million men.

Most of those were indigenous soldiers, so local Indians, people from Burma, whatever. That's great, local jobs. Yeah, no, yeah, exactly. By local, very, very ethical with our modern. He's a job creator, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So the East India Company started taking over India

in the 1600s, and by 1803, they controlled most of what's now India, Pakistan, and Burma. In 1814, this giant multinational corporation declared war on Nepal, which was at that point known as the Kingdom of Gorka. They fought for two brutal years before the kingdom ceded a third of its territory to the company in exchange for peace.

The British won, but the Gorkas had put up a really vicious fight, and the East India Company was impressed by their warriors. So they started recruiting these men into their army. At first, these Gorkas were used to keep the peace in ever rebellious India, but the Gorkas quickly proved themselves to be very capable warriors. In 1858, when the Queen formally took control of India

away from the company, Gorkas were integrated into the greater British army. They served as elite shock troops in World War I and II. The British army today still fields battalions of Gorkas, recruited basically as mercenaries from Nepal and paid far less than their British citizen counterparts. This sounds like Game of Thrones. This sounds like some unsullied.

What? It's a little bit like that. Now, the British liked the Gorkas because they were loyal and just incredibly deadly. They carry these big knives called kukris in there. There's a lot of, if you go online, you can find threads today where British veterans talk about the stories their NCOs told about Gorkas,

and there's a common one where you have to tie your shoes a certain way, because the Gorkas- They'll cut your foot off. Well, no, when they're doing espionage missions in the night, they'll tell who they wanna kill by feeling their bootlaces. They could tell, like in World War II, they knew what German bootlaces felt like.

And so if an allied soldier took boots off of a dead German, he might get cut by a Gorka. It's a possibly apocryphal story, but the variants of it are still told today. So they'll kill you if you tied your shoes wrong, essentially. If you tied your shoes like the enemy. Yeah, I heard that.

Yeah, so the Gorkas were like super soldiers of the British Empire. Little bit of what you were getting at. Yeah, they sound like sword guys to me. Yeah, the knives are equally dangerous. Yeah, they're scary. And they weren't the only super soldiers in the British Empire.

Over their period of time, conquering huge chunks of the world, the British encountered a number of warrior peoples. Some of these peoples, like the Gorkas, had their own well-developed warrior culture already when the British arrived and the British just exploited it. But in other parts of the world, the process occurred less naturally.

Take the tribes of the West Nile region of Africa. Their first contact with more technologically advanced peoples came in the early 1800s when successive groups of Arab slavers started preying on them. Certain tribes who were the best fighters were enslaved by these Arab slavers and used to soldiers to capture other Africans who were then sent off to markets

in North Africa and the Middle East. It's sad. Yeah, yeah, it's a bummer. This whole story is gonna be kind of a bummer. Oh, great. When you're talking colonialism, it's never not a heartbreak. I mean, when aren't you talking colonialism

if we wanna get real? Well, I mean, and that's one of the point, like when you start talking about dictators, especially from the 70s, 80s, 90s, you can trace nearly all of them back to colonialism. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's more or less this story. So, by the 1870s, the British had become abolitionists

in a big way, perhaps because they felt kind of bad about the whole Atlantic slave trade thing, but mostly because it was a way to justify conquering colonies in Africa, saying we're going to stop the Arab slave traders, but we have to conquer this whole chunk of Africa in order to stop the slave trade, there's no way to do it. They're a good guy with a gun.

With a lot of the guns. With a lot of baskets, yeah. So, the British took over a huge chunk of North Africa, including the Sudan, and with public pressure behind them, they sent armies down to stop the slave traders. These armies, like all British armies, were made mostly of locals. Many of those locals were recently freed slave soldiers

that the British were happy to induct into their army, so they would free these slave soldiers from the Arab slave traders, and then they would induct them into a colonial military and use them to fight slave traders. Yeah, sounds like college, sounds like the job market. I thought you were going to compare this to like college football.

Well, yeah, that too, absolutely. So, one such army of former slaves was headed by a German doctor and a Muslim convert named Emin Pasha. In the 1880s, Emin Pasha and his army were besieged by an Islamic army during the modest insurrection. They were eventually freed by a guy named Henry Morton Stanley, who, regular listeners of the podcast, will recognize as the guy

who mapped the Congo for King Leopold of Belgium. Stanley took Pasha with him when he left, and Pasha's men stayed behind in the West Nile region on garrison duty for a few years, until they were picked up by agents for the Imperial British East Africa Company. Now, the company representatives were always alert for new warrior people to enlist,

and they considered these men to be, quote, the best material for soldiery in Africa. These tribes came to be called Nubians, and became the British Empire's shock troopers in Africa. The East Africa Company used their Nubians to carve an empire out of the continent's heart. They named their new colony, Uganda. As the British Empire grew, the Nubians were inducted

into the regular British army, and became the elite fourth battalion of the king's African rifles. They were Muslims, which differentiated them from most of the peoples they were sent to suppress in Central and West Africa. The British basically turned the Nubian people into a living, breathing factory for the production

of the deadliest colonial soldiers in Africa, and yes, being bred for war had a negative impact on the Nubians themselves. Here's what one former commanding officer of the king's African rifles wrote about them. Quote, the Nubians became the most feared and influential ethnic group in Uganda, mercilessly suppressing uprisings and tribal supprutes

at the behest of their British masters. It was the success of these early operations that gave them contempt for all pagan and Christian tribes in the country. In 1974, a journalist named David Martin echoed this sentiment, quote, among their fellow countrymen, they enjoyed an unenviable reputation

of having one of the world's highest homicide rates. The Nubians were renowned for their statistic brutality, lack of formal education, for poisoning enemies, and for the refusal to integrate, even in the urban centers. Martin was in Uganda to write about one Nubian in particular, one of the deadliest warriors to ever serve in the king's African rifles, a man named Idi Amin.

Okay, wow. Okay, so that's... This guy sound like black Republicans to me. You guys are on the wrong team. I mean, did they ever have a choice? No. Yeah, exactly. You're right. If you recruit a people as soldiers for 100 years

and don't really give them any other options for anything to do, it's not gonna be pretty. Yeah, I hear that. I mean, I grew up in a bad neighborhood also, but I didn't become a tough warrior. I just became a comedian with a smart mouth. I'm sure there were a few Nubian comedians, and that part of the difficulty here

is all these stories about how brutal they are are coming from British and American white guys. Yeah, totally. They were probably just pretty cool. They were probably just, I don't know, trying to invent whatever sports game that they had. I'm trying to play some football, and they were like, well, these guys are brutal.

They're kicking our ass. Well, I mean, it's like British football, so how brutal can it be? I mean, I feel like if colonizers came over to Africa and then the Africans just like dunked a basketball, they'd be like, wow, these brutal power. It's a shame that basketball did take it over there first. No, I know.

So Idi Amin was born sometime between 1925 and 1928. We don't really know for sure. He was probably born in the village of Kiboko in Northwest Uganda. He was for sure a kakwa, which were one of the Nubian tribes that British considered to be a warrior people. Now, Idi's father served with the British Army

in the king's African rifles and was generally out of the picture. His mother is usually described as a witch or a self-proclaimed sorceress. I watched a documentary when I was sort of prepping for this thing that was called Amin, The Rise and Fall, and it was a terrible documentary. It's one of those like 90s made-for-TV movies

where all the acting's bad and it's very sensational. It leans into this. Super biased. Super biased. And it leans into this stuff that I think most people have heard about Idi Amin, which was like witchcraft, cannibalism, that sort of thing, which we'll be talking about a little bit later, but is... I mean, that just sounds like Los Angeles culture.

Witchcraft and cannibalism? Yeah, astrology and veganism. Not so much cannibalism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say veganism's, yeah, a better isn't than cannibalism. Yeah, I would say. But we're gonna get into sort of how a lot of these facts are unreliable about Idi.

But the way that this terrible documentary summed up Idi's childhood, I found humorous, which is the child grew up by the river learning the ways of manhood and the spells of witchcraft, which that sort of sums up, I think, the general common popular perception of who this guy was, right? Yeah, it sounds like he fished a lot.

Boy, yeah, there's always... There's gonna be a lot of dark stories about rivers whenever you read about the... It's the same... They're scary. Yeah. How did the ocean get to the land that way? Yeah, it's one of those, like, anytime you read about a place that's famous for its rivers

and they have some sort of horrible butchery happen, there's just always tons of stories about kids finding heads in the rivers. We were just in the Cambodia one, it was the same thing, just like... I mean, you find all kinds of weird stuff in there. Yeah. TBH.

So yeah, the witchcraft stuff is almost certainly racist bullshit. What witchcraft was and is still common in parts of Uganda, I mean, was it practicing Muslim? Ugandan Muslims had their own kind of witchcraft-y tradition where people would use the Quran to foretell the future and he certainly used that, but he wasn't doing like pagan blood magic

or anything like that. Yeah, all of this sounds like astrology so far. What was the sign, does it say? Well, it was like the Islamic version of astrology. Oh, okay. But, I don't know, probably Aquarius. Yeah. Witchcraft was less of a factor in his regime

than the traditions and rituals of his beloved British army. So it was eventually abandoned by his father and by some accounts, his mother too. It's kind of hard to tell what happened there. He got as far as the fourth grade before he dropped out of school. When he was at most 17, a British colonial army officer noted his tremendous size

and recruited him into the king's African rifles. He started his service as a cook's assistant, literally peeling potatoes, which is like the stereotypical bottom-of-the-rung army job. But he didn't- It kind of seems like if you're big, that you shouldn't be a rifleman. We're gonna make you target.

Yeah. Well, go ahead. You're a pragmatic man. I mean, I would only recruit the little guys. Most feared army ever. He didn't stay at the bottom long. Itty was gigantic. He was like six foot four, well over 200 pounds.

And he was in his younger days. He gets kind of heavier as an older guy, but if you could get a picture of him when he's young, he is solid muscle. He is just a mountain of a man. Yeah, me too. He's got about three inches on me. And that's about it.

So he was a perfect candidate to become a heavyweight boxer, which is exactly what happened. According to Robert Keely, deputy chief of the US mission in Kampala, quote, his advancements came essentially through boxing. He was very tall with tremendous reach and big hands. He was big and strong and tough in general. You could picture him in any culture

as a heavyweight champion, and that's what he was. The Ugandans are very fine boxers. They still prove it to this day in the Olympics. They have a strong boxing tradition, which the British encouraged. The main avenue for advancement in the army was boxing. So Amin eventually became the heavyweight champion of the army, and in 1951 to 1952,

the heavyweight champion of all Uganda. His ability to punch people proved useful in maintaining discipline of among other soldiers in his unit. Here's another quote from Keely. Idia Amin became prominent as the link between the two. The officers sitting around sipping their tea or their brandy or their port.

Upon hearing some noises and disruptions outside, would call in Sergeant Amin and tell him to take care of the problem. Amin goes out, there are some shouts and screams as he knocks him heads together and kicks him butt, and then silence. The officers resume their sipping in a very appreciative of Idia's performance.

Jesus. They eventually made him the top sergeant. Wow. Okay. Because of course, Sergeant was as high as an actual African could raise in the king's African rifles. We're not allowed to have any Africans be officers in any of the British colonial armies

in the world, or I think in India for that matter. Which is, if you're a racist colonial power, you don't want anybody in your army. You can't have, you gotta recruit soldiers from the locals, but you don't want them learning about supply lines and logistics and stuff. Yeah, good point. Yeah, then they'll know how to, you know,

overthrow the seven guys that you have there. Yeah, that's why I haven't been promoted to any officer ranks. I mean, how's your boxing? I mean, very, very, very bad. But if we're talking about a Wii game, then still very bad. So we need an army where, yeah, where Wii is the product.

I mean, with drones nowadays, that's, Go on. That's the future, I feel like that's the future. The drone boxing, I hear you. So Eddie was the perfect soldier for the British Empire. Everyone who served with him in those days was impressed both by his toughness and by his almost superhuman strength.

His commanding officer, Ian Graham, said that his body was, quote, like that of a Grecian sculpture. During one terrible march, when all of the other men could barely continue, quote, one man was an example and an inspiration to us all. As we finally passed the finishing post, Idi Amin was marching beside me at the head of the column,

head held high and still singing for all he was worth. Across one's shoulder were two Brinn guns, and a Brinn is like a machine gun. It's like a 22 pound machine gun that you put on a tripod on the ground. So you have two of those in one hand, and over the other was a crippled Ascari, and the Ascari was a British word for a local soldier.

So he had one of his wounded comrades on one arm and two machine guns on the other. That's like the kind of soldier he made. He was just, he was like, he was a super soldier. Man, he invented CrossFit apparently. This guy's some Joe Rogan, Alphabreen kind of guy. Now Ian Graham said that seeing this reminded him of a translation of another

of a King's African Rifles marching song. I'm about to read you the song, which is, explains sort of how the British viewed men. No, sing it. Oh boy, that's, I think I can do a good British accent here, but I don't know that I can sing a good British accent. I mean, does it even rhyme? I don't think they, okay.

It does, I'm impressed. It definitely rhymes and it's a bit racist. Oh, okay, great. Now for this, you need to understand the word, Suity is another word for Nubian. Like it's like a local term for like people who are from his group of Ugandans. So here's the British fighting song

that this guy thought of when he saw Idi Amin marching. It's the Suity, my boy. It's the Suity with his grim set ugly face, but he looks like a man and he fights like a man for he comes of a fighting race, which that's exactly what these people were to the British. The whole song?

Huh? I assume there was more, but this was the line that this guy recalled, which is like, it shows you exactly what the British thought of these guys, is that they are soldiers. That's why, and that's what they were bred for and encouraged for,

and they didn't have to do people of like the Kaukwa tribe, didn't have to do anything other than send their sons to fight for the British army, and the British would take care of them. And then they respond with their own diss track? Or, I don't know how these beats go. I don't think they saw this as a diss track at that point. That's too bad.

Yeah, it is. And it gets, yeah, it gets better. So Young Amin was sent to war several times on behalf of the British Empire. In 1949, he went to Somalia to suppress the shift to rebellion. In 1952, he went sent to Kenya to suppress the Mao Mao uprising.

We don't talk about the Mao Mao uprising a lot these days, but it basically started as a bunch of Kenyan rebels who were angry because the British were whipping people half to death, which is that's how British kept discipline in all their African colonies, was just horrific amounts of whipping. So these guys rose up

and they killed some British people and the British sent an army in and brutally suppressed it. They put more than one and a half million Kenyans in concentration camps. They hanged thousands of them. E.D. probably would have been doing a good amount of the hanging. And he also killed a number of warriors

in vicious battles in places like Kenyoma and Kangeema. So he's been raised just as a soldier and now he's been brutalized, suppressing multiple colonial wars very violently. Man, successful black man, and then he just turned around and betrays his culture, classic story. I mean, he kind of starts with the betrayal, right? Yeah. Many.

Later, well, we'll get to later, right now, actually. Oh man, there's more, okay, great. There's a lot. So by the late 1950s, itty had risen as high as an African could in the King's African rifles, which is Sergeant the British, yeah, as I said, didn't let their locals

be officers in their armies. This policy came back to bite them in the ass in the late 50s, because by that point, it had become clear that colonialism was on its way out. The British were preparing to release Uganda as an independent nation. Unfortunately, the British hadn't governed any of their colonies as countries.

They basically just treated them as money-making enterprises, corporations essentially, with all the business of statecraft kept out of the hands of the locals. The British were required by the international community to leave Uganda with an army so it could defend itself, but they hadn't trained any sort of officer corps into Uganda, which is an important thing to have,

which is why every military in the world has an officer corps, you know? You train people to do certain jobs, but the Ugandans just didn't have that. And rather than spend more money and time to build an officer corps for their soon-to-be country, the British just randomly promoted the sergeants they liked best.

One of those sergeants was a boxer with a fourth grade education named Idi Amin. This isn't, okay, cool. Yeah. He was commissioned in 1962, right before Ugandan independence. He found himself in charge of a platoon in northwest Kenya, captured a bunch of prisoners,

and ordered them to be executed. The British governor of Uganda, Sir Walter Coates, vetoed the possibility of Idi being charged for this war crime. Amin was one of the few African soldiers and the entire officers in the entire army, and prosecuting him right before independence was deemed politically undesirable.

No one stopped to consider whether or not it might be bad for Uganda if one of their high-ranking military leaders was a war criminal. Okay. So, when we get back, we're going to get into how Idi Amin rose to power and to be the president of Uganda and what happened next, which is going to be a dark story.

But we have some ads first off. Okay, great. And before we get into some ads, I've been talking a lot about the Doritos people. We're trying to get Doritos to sponsor the podcast. Oh, I hear you. I love that crunchy crunch of the Doritos chip. Nothing washes the horrible taste of colonialism

out of your mouth. Like a cool ranch powder. I was going to say nacho cheese, but that's what's great about Doritos is freedom. The freedom to cleanse your palate with whatever exciting flavor combination you want. How are they not a sponsor yet? I, well, maybe they will be after this video.

Jesus. Let's hear from some other sponsors. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock.

And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments

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But who was this woman really? Listen to deep cover on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You must be the civilian mercenaries, Ether and Sirius. I'm Ether and big guy is Sirius. I'm Logo. I'm here to seek your services for a mission.

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Wind's approaching Gale Force speed. Sandstorm imminent. The storm coming. We have to keep going. It's the only way. Call me to the Inter. Listen to IntraQuest on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we're back. And we're back. Sorry, what's up? So, yeah, I did want to get into, before we dig into the rest of the story, what you recall about Idi Amin, before we get into his career. Not much.

I have heard the name before. I've heard that he was a president. If you got into, he was a bad guy. I don't know the details. I mean, already I've learned way more than I thought. Yeah, before, you know, it was even, it even became an independent nation. I didn't realize that, you know,

they killed so many people. Yeah. Well, it was one of those things I had vaguely heard. Yeah, he was president of Uganda. There were these rumors of witchcraft and cannibalism. I hadn't known any of this stuff about sort of how the British military worked at the time and the fact that he was basically bred

to suppress insurgencies. Like that's what the British used his people for, was controlling populations through brutality, which I think is an important thing to get into here, because otherwise it's just a story of like this dictator, but he didn't rise up out of anything. He was like, and I think- He went up to the system, he paid his dues.

And he was also trained, like you're going, when we get into the things he did in Uganda that were brutal, they're all echoes of things he was doing for the British. Like they, like it's not just a story of like some horrible dictator rose up and did terrible things. It's the British trained this guy to do terrible things on their behalf

and then abandoned the country of Uganda to him. Yeah, this is basically, this guy is completely might, meets right. And that's dangerous. It's dangerous for you. And it's dangerous if you don't, like people like that exist in every culture. We've got more than our fair share of them

in the United States. We have structures built up to like make sure that those people don't wind up in charge of the military or whatever. Like- Yeah. At least not to the extent where it's like, there's a reason we've never had the army seize power. Like it's in our country.

Yeah. Definitely. Well, it's because we give them so much money. Okay, so not just cool, cool ranch. Let's get back to Idi Amin. All right. But seriously Doritos people, send us a, drop us home. We're at Bastard's Pod on Twitter. Yeah, Idi Amin has just committed a war crime

right before Ugandan independence and the British governor of Uganda has sort of hushed up the whole thing because he's one of the only officers and they didn't want to, you know, they just didn't want any complications. They said it would be politically undesirable if this came up right before independence.

So Idi Amin, now an officer rises again rapidly through the ranks, according to Robert Keely. He advanced by eliminating his rivals in one fashion or another, either physically or by discrediting them or by scaring them or some way or another. His promotions came frequently. So he's good at working the system.

He understands how the British military works and he's- Respect the hustle. Yeah. And if there's one man who knows how to hustle, it's Idi Amin. Now on October 9th, 1962, Uganda gains its independence from Great Britain. Uganda's first prime minister was a guy named Milton Abote

and the president was a guy named Edward Mutesa. Mutesa was also the king of the Baganda who were a southern tribe in Uganda. He was better known as King Freddy. For a little while, Mutesa and Abote coexisted and things were all right in Uganda. Milton Abote, like Idi Amin, came from northern Uganda. He advocated for a great African awakening.

He was a socialist, although not a very dogmatic one. The West generally disliked him, but he was also super corrupt, which is gonna be a theme in this story. So by 1964, Idi Amin had been named deputy army commander under a dude with the really cool name, Shaban Apalot, which is one of my favorite names that I've encountered in this podcast research.

He saw action again fighting alongside Katanga rebels who were battling the government of Zaire. And he took gold and diamonds from the rebels and gave them guns from the Ugandan army in exchange. He then sold the loot for cash. Abote, the president, got it on the racket. There was a brief parliamentary inquiry, but Abote had all the other people in the scheme arrested,

and so he and Idi were fine. Now in 1966, Abote got tired of sharing power and suspended the constitution. He sent Colonel Idi Amin to attack the palace and bring the king back dead or alive. The king managed to flee the country, but the coup succeeded, and Abote was left as the sole power in Uganda. Now, this did not make the British happy.

The Boganda were their favorite tribe in Uganda, Winston Churchill under secretary of state for the colonies from 1905 to 1908. Great guy. Yeah, super good guy, never caused a famine that killed four and a half million people. Yeah, not even, well, once, but let he among us who has not starved four and a half million, yeah.

We all cause a couple of famines, you know. He considered the Boganda to be civilized, which means basically that they'd all converted to Christianity easily. Their territory was just where the British wound up putting the railroad and their administration buildings. So the Bogandans were the people the British had spent the most time with in Uganda.

They considered them civilized because they acted like British people. They're the good ones. Yeah, exactly. Now the Ugandan people, most of whom weren't Bogandans, supported Abote's kicking down the king. They saw him as casting down a British-backed monarch. They saw this as a true break from the past

and chanted a new beginning. It was an exciting time, but the excitement soon faded in the reality of Abote's ridiculous corruption. People protested, of course, and by 1969, the government could only stay in power with the military's backing. Idi had been popular with the British because he was a great soldier

and because he spoke English with just the right accent that made them think he was cute and dumb because they were racist as fuck. But Idi was not dumb. Well, the government had grown more dependent on his military. He started recruiting hundreds of his relatives and fellow Nubians into the army

and putting them in the positions he would want them in when it was time to take power. This was disrupted in 1970 when an assassin tried to kill President Abote and shot him through the mouth. American diplomat, Bovunal, recalled, the army went a muck and for about 12 hours, it was a pretty horrifying situation. Idi appears to have gotten confused

and thought the attempt was a coup against both him and Abote, so he ran. He, quote, jumped out the back window of his house in his pajamas and disappeared, which really mystified us all because they were expecting that this assassination attempt was him seizing power, but it was just somebody else.

So he was mocked for weeks in the wake of the attack because he ran out in the night in his pajamas and a number of people counted him out as a force in Ugandan politics at this point. But Idi embarked on a redemption tour. Part of that was having a bunch of people clandestinely executed in the night. Part of it was showing up in public

with a bunch of his armed friends and just scaring people. Naul was there for part of that too. He was out at a bar one night and he, quote, you know, he saw, he saw Idi, quote, I walked out of the bar and there was Amin, a huge man, an enormous fellow with his officers and their weapons sitting in the main lounge, sitting at attention,

not talking, just looking around. I thought, Jesus, what's going to happen? They sat there for about half an hour and then Amin said something in one of the local languages and they all got up and walked out of there. What it was, I'm convinced to this day, was a threat on the part of Amin about reestablishing his position.

He knew that he was laughed at because he ran away. This was his reprisal, his counter threat, and it worked, people were scared to death. So they might've been more scared by the fact that Idi had had a number of people killed. Yeah, and the fact that he just sat there for half an hour for his day, that's crazy. Yeah, it was a little bit like,

some guy just sits in the bar staring at you with like his friends and all their guns. You know, that's intimidating. So yeah, in 1971, President Abote went to Singapore for a conference. Before he left, he put out the order that Idi Amin was to be arrested for massive corruption and murder,

which Idi was guilty of, but which Abote was guilty of, too. Before the warrant could be served, Idi Amin launched his coup. The killing started right away, at least 1,000 soldiers from tribes that Idi didn't trust were massacred. The river filled with corpses, which is, you know.

So when you tell the story, like, when I hear stories like this, I'm like, I don't even know where all these people, how many people are they gonna kill before they just completely run out of people, you know? It's like, geez Louise. Yeah, they really go pretty far. And by the time this is all over,

Idi will have killed, something like one in 57 of the people in Uganda. And he's not the worst of them, which we'll get to as well. Oh my gosh. He's just the one that everyone focuses on because there's rumors that he ate people. Wow.

So Nal was the American Diplomatic Officer in Uganda. So he had responsibility for all of the 800-ish American citizens in country. He told those people to hold fast and chill at home, and that went fine. But there was also a tourist group in town who were furious that this coup got in the way of their vacation.

So I wanna read this story just because it's a little elevity. It's just Americans. A Yelp review in here. It's rich Americans acting like rich Americans in the middle of a coup that's life and death for the people in Uganda. We just wanted to go on a nice vacation,

hunt some endangered animals. I said to them, look, the airport is closed. And later the tour leader turned to me and said, well, Mr. Nal, these are important people. They haven't got time to wait around. They're going to miss their connections in Nairobi. I said, you're damn right, they're going to miss their connections in Nairobi.

And they're going to get hungry. They're going to get tired. They're going to get dirty and they're going to want to get their laundry done. And it's not going to be done because I don't see any chance of these folks leaving for four or five days. And that was just the case.

They were furious. One guy, the president of this big liquor-distributing company in Hartford, Connecticut, High Blooder Hue Mind or something, he beat me about that on the head and shoulders. He said he had to get back to sign a contract. I said, you can't do it. There are soldiers at the airport who will kill you.

Which, yeah, I just love. Like there's people getting murdered in the street and you're like, I've got a contract to get back to. Yeah, that sounds like every screenplay where a businessman is in there. His inconvenience. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's like that.

Yeah, there's a terrorist hijacking the airplane and he's like, I'm going to miss the account. I got to get home for Christmas. So, okay, that was a nice little interlude. So in short order, Idi Amin is the new president of Uganda. That's a position he would hold for more than eight years. The Western powers, mainly the British and the Americans,

were helpful at first. They hated Abote because he was a socialist and because he was even more corrupt than they were prepared to forgive. Idi Amin had a good reputation among the British. He trained as a paratrooper in Israel, so Israel really liked the guy too. So yeah, at first it seems like this new dictator

is going to be great for white people, you know. Lady Listowell, who is a Hungarian noble woman and a journalist who became Idi's first biographer, met him around this time and here's how she described meeting him for the first time to give you an idea of how this guy comes across. Quote, I looked into the smiling face

of a tall muscular officer with shrewd eyes who invited me to a cup of coffee. He was a hoaking figure of a man and I was fascinated by his hands. Beautiful, slim hands with long, tapering fingers. We get it, you're horny. We get it. We did a podcast on King Leopold of Belgium,

the guy who massacred 15 million people in the Congo and in his biography, there's like a whole paragraph talking about how beautiful his hands were. So that's apparently, if I can find one more, that's officially a trip. How blood-stained his hands were. Beautiful hands. I'm just always shocked that apparently

some people are really staring at hands a lot. Yeah, I know and you never hear about like, you know, his cuticles weren't not well manicured. His fingernails were a little long. Just really, yeah, yeah. There were actually reasons that a reasonable person who wasn't, you know, purely looking at this from like the British point of view,

might have thought Idi Amin had a shot at being a good president. For one thing, he was a fun guy. Everybody who met him really spoke highly of him. Like even people who later were like, oh yeah, he definitely committed atrocities. He was charming. He was a fun guy to be around.

Yeah, I met him and I was so scared. I was like, this guy is gonna kill me. So I was like, ha, ha, ha. Nice guy, great guy. He was obsessed with Scotland, which is one of the other famous things about Idi Amin. Yeah, all of the officers in the Kings African rifles. Yeah, and he had, he loved people playing bagpipes.

Bagpipes, weird. Yeah, all of the officers in the Kings African rifles had been Scottish and so Idi just really loved Scottish culture. He had a whole plane. I do remember seeing him in like clothing and he's wearing like plaid and stuff. And there's a movie about him that's not super accurate,

but it's called The Last King of Scotland. Right, okay, yeah. Yeah, and he had a whole plane dedicated just bringing Scottish whiskey into Uganda. Like there was like a presidential plane that's just the whiskey express. Which is a cool thing to dedicate a plane to. It's a color plane?

Yeah, no, that's legitimately fine. Hey, are you cool at flying? Yeah, I'm fine. Shut up. No, we have a vodka guy fly the whiskey express. He's fine until he gets home. Idi adopted a number of British military traditions for his own military.

He sent a musician to Scotland for a year to learn the bagpipes. He also established a state military jazz band with perhaps the best name for a band I've ever heard. The Revolutionary Suicide Jazz Band. Also known as the Revolutionary Suicide Mechanized Regiment Band, or the Suicide Mechanized Jazz Band. And here's their...

Are they like a punk band? No, they were just a jazz band. They should have been a punk band. That's a fucking... Why did they call themselves Suicide? This is a good picture. This is a really great picture. They were the regimental band.

They were a military band. And the band they were a unit for was one of the elite mechanized regiments in the Ugandan army that was the Suicide Mechanized Regiment. So it was like to try to make them sound scary. These guys don't care if they die. They're the Suicide Regiment, for sure. And this amazing picture with several others

will be up on our website, behindthebastards.com. You owe it to yourself to check it out. Yeah, so it also seems, I should note, that from reports at the time, most of the musicians in the Suicide Revolutionary Jazz Band were sort of press ganged and forced to play. Yeah, they don't look exactly happy. They don't look jazzed.

Wow. So, Itty's Reign was brutal by all measures and got increasingly brutal as time went on. There are a number of theories as to why Robert Keely thinks he was just promoted out of his depth, like Michael Scott. Basically, he was a fine sergeant, but he never should have been an officer,

let alone running the nation. Which is one way or another probably fair. Keely says, quote, he had learned to use his fists and translated that into how you hold your position, how you protect yourself. He applied all of the brutal boxing lessons he had learned against his rivals. Lady Listowell also thought that this poor guy

had just been forced to jump into a position too complex for his mind. Quote, the kakwa have a great respect for personalities, but not for rank or position. They never had chiefs or recognized clan leaders. Amin was brought up to believe that all kakwa tribesmen are equal. Some of his recent measures illustrate all too well

that he had to leap from a peasant background into the complicated politics of the modern world without any intermediate feudal preparation. I think this attitude that Itty was just a guy that who got promoted beyond his talents is inaccurate and based pretty heavily in racism. It shifts the blame over to Uganda for letting such a man rise that high.

And I think the real blame lies with the British. Again, there's guys like Itty in every country of island authoritarians who seek to impose their will on others, establish nations, build antibodies up, checks and balances and legal systems, and establish bureaucracies to stop men with fourth grade educations and histories

of head injuries from heading the army. Boy, that sounds nice right about now. Well, clearly ours aren't perfect. So, but Uganda didn't have any of that. The British didn't put any of that in place before they just abandoned them. It's one of those things where if you look at what was set up when Uganda was freed,

I don't see someone like Itty was bound to at least try to take control. Yeah, it sounds like they set up the country like a reality show. Yeah, yeah, it is almost like that. Yeah, they were like, here you guys go, here's some sticks, survive. And they didn't consider any of the ways

it could go badly. And they didn't, they know, like the British have never had a military coup. And they have an officer cadre for a reason. They know how you set up a military so it doesn't destroy the country. And they didn't do any of that in Uganda because they were lazy and they didn't care.

So, fuck the British empire. Yeah, fuck them. And Flint, Michigan still doesn't have clean water. Yeah, and fuck us too, for sure, for sure, for sure. This one is, actually, this one's sort of our bad too because we supported the Idi Amin regime for a while, we being the United States. Fuck us.

Fuck everybody. Fuck everybody. Except for Uganda, they didn't deserve any of us. Except for Doritos. Now, Doritos had nothing to do with this. Okay, that's good to know. That's fair. And you could argue that Doritos

has stopped similar monsters from arising in other countries by filling them with nacho goodness. Yeah, that's right, you stop the monster of hunger. As far as we know, Idi Amin never got to experience extreme nacho flavor. And that might be the secret of his madness. Yeah. The only extremism he should have been into

is nacho cheesy crunch. So yeah, when the British first started the Ugandan colony, they had carried out a policy of bringing in South Asians, mostly from India to Uganda to quote, serve as a buffer between Europeans and Africans and the middle rungs of commerce and administration. This had started when the British brought 30,000 Indians

over to build railways in Uganda. These folks had a lot more experience with Western style capitalism than the average Ugandan. And as a result, they saw great success setting up businesses in the new colony. By the early 1970s, Ugandan Asians owned 90% of the country's businesses and contributed 90% of its tax revenue,

despite making up a small minority of the actual population. This has obviously caused a lot of unrest between native ethnic Ugandans and the Ugandan Asians. President de Bote had pursued a policy called Africanization, which attacked Ugandan Asians with laws aimed at reducing their economic dominance. It expanded on that policy and added

in a healthy dollop of straight up racism. He announced that the government would be reviewing the status of Ugandan Asians who'd been given citizenship. So basically they were looking at naturalized Ugandan citizens and finding excuses to take away their citizenship. Yeah, that's what's happening right now. Yes, it's exactly what's happening right now

to naturalized American citizens, which is... Huge bummer. Huge bummer. Weird how these shitty guys have the same playbook in a lot of cases. I mean, also canceled all in progress citizenship applications from Asians. And then in August of 1972,

he gave all Asians and Ugandan 90 days to vacate the country. So we're gonna get into how that policy went and what a clusterfuck ensued afterwards and what happened once the West finally decided that Idi Amin wasn't their man. But first we've got some capitalism to get into. Oh yay.

Okay, capitalism, the thing that has nothing to do with the tens of millions of deaths to colonialism. Not a thing. Not a thing. Here's some ads. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup?

Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century.

We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing.

And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. In the summer of 1999, a young woman in South Carolina disappeared in the middle of the night.

Her name was Brooke Henson. Seven years passed. She was presumed dead. And then a tip came in that would turn the entire investigation on its head. He said, I think I found your girl. She's alive. She's in New York.

And I said, really? According to this tip, Brooke was now a student at Columbia University. But the small town detective on the case in South Carolina, he didn't believe it. So he kept poking around. I said, I'm calling about a girl you might know named Brooke Henson.

And he said, I wondered when you were gonna call. When my son brought her home, I knew she was troubled. The detective ultimately became convinced that she was a master of deception, a spy. But who was this woman really? Listen to deep cover on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You must be the civilian mercenaries, Ether and Sirius.

I'm Ether and big guy is Sirius. I'm logo. I'm here to seek your services for a mission. I Heart Radio presents IntraQuest, an adventure podcast. Run! Hurry up! Dead end! Oh no, we appear to have reached an impasse

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Three adventurers face a dark force on their quest to return home. Wind's approaching Galforge speed. Sandstorm imminent! Storm coming! We have to keep going. It's the only way. Call me to the Intra.

Listen to IntraQuest on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So as the story has come up here, Idi Amin has seized power. He's executed a bunch of people. And he has decided to expel all of the Asians in Uganda. He's given them 90 days to vacate the country.

This policy affected 85,000 people, 23,000 of whom are already citizens of Uganda. I'm going to play a clip of Idi Amin talking to the press to hear how he justified the policy. And I think what's interesting about this is how friendly the foreign press is to him, which sort of gives you an idea of how charming this guy was in person.

So even though he's introduced, he's talking about something pretty awful. Like people are, they just, yeah, I'll play it. Decision for the economy of Uganda. And I must make sure that every Ugandan get a fruit of independence. Since independent, actually Uganda is not yet independent. I will say that even when the British handed over

on the 9th of October, 1962, the Uganda still not yet independent. Uganda will be independent after this. My decision, after, I want to see that the whole Kampala Street is not full of Indians. It must be proper black under administration in those shops is run by the Ugandan. Would you like to get all Asians out, really, sir?

Yes, they must go to their country. Even nationals of Uganda? If they want to go, they are welcome to go. What will happen to these people if they don't go by the time they do? I think they will be sitting like they are sitting on the fire. I will tell you this. You just wait after three months.

What will you do to them? OK, you will see. I think they will not sit comfortably here in Uganda. I will tell you this. I must actually tell you the truth. Have you asked the British to take them away, sir? We didn't know, sir, that you are building friends in Kamp for them if they are not doing.

I am not responsible for building them trans-city Kamp. Have you asked the British to take them away, sir? Yes, it is the British. High Commission is here. He's the responsibility. I have told him. You've said you wanted to teach Britain a lesson, President.

Why is that? And that is now lesson I'm teaching the British. I am teaching now the lesson, because I am correcting them from the mistake they had made. If they had think before earlier that there was an African here who can even work under building the railway with the instruction given to them by the British, this problem will not happen.

Wow, that was like a Monty Python. Yeah. It's remarkable that he's like talking about like 80,000 people, terrible things will happen if they don't leave. And then all of these guys laugh, just because it's Disgusting. It's, yeah, and it's so, I mean, he has a point at the end there when he says it was fucked up

with the British to bring these people into build railroads and not just have us build railroads, because it's our fucking country, which is a fair point. But at this point, these guys are like third generation Ugandans. It's messed up to kick people out of your country and take their businesses. It's just weird to me how friendly the press was to him

still at this point. Well, they were all British guys, and they didn't really give a fuck about brown people either way. They were just there because they had to be. Yeah, and they thought he was fun, and they liked. Yeah, it's, yeah. So, Iddy's main defense of his policy

was that he was trying to give Uganda back to Ugandans. He also said that God had told him in a dream that South Asians were to blame for Uganda's economic woes and corruption. It's probable that this policy had a lot to do with the fact that Great Britain had just refused to sell him guns so he could invade Tanzania. So he was basically just being like, OK, Great Britain,

you have to deal with 80,000 refugees now, because you wouldn't give me the weapons I needed to fang with my neighbor. Iddy was brutal to the Ugandan Asians, but he was equally brutal to ethnic Ugandans. His particular targets were Acholy and Langi tribesmen. In the first few days of his regime, he executed more than 1,000 members of these tribes

in the army. As his reign wore on, the purges spread from the military to the general population. Bullets were in short supply in the country and desperately needed for all the wars Iddy planned to start. So the murder squads he dispatched had to find other ways of doing their work.

Their preferred tools were sledgehammers, crowbars, and sometimes crocodiles. Oh, my god. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you have crocodiles, every problem looks like a crocodile. No one has ever wielded a crocodile that's been a good guy.

It's never a tool of the good guys. No. What about? Yeah. Yeah. So the most feared government agency, sort of the idiomine equivalent of the German SS, was the State Research Bureau, which

is maybe my favorite name for like a secret police organization. It just sounds so like. Yeah, that scares me. Seems like the guys who should be like, oh, yeah, your soil's pH is off. But these are the murder police, as opposed to countries where all of the police are the murder police.

Anyway, Apollo Lewalco survived 196 days in the pink stucco building, where they tortured and executed their captives. He gives us our clearest picture of what life was like for people deemed by idiomine to be enemies of the state. Quote, when the prisoner's name was called out, the guards would go and grab him. We were all in handcuffs already.

We were in handcuffs 24 hours a day. But they would change the position when they called a man, putting them on and back. And then they would place a long rope with a loop around his neck. Then someone would drag him by the rope along the staircase going up to the ground floor. And people would be beating him on all parts of his body.

Then his head would be beaten in. By the time he reached the top of the stairs, he was dead. So Lewalco claims the guards made sure the prisoners saw every execution. That was part of the point. He claims that between 150 and 200 people were executed every night while he was there in 1977. Lewalco believes he saw more than 15,000 Ugandans

clubbed and beaten to death over just five months. At least 250,000 Ugandans perished during idiomine's terror, and the real number may be more like half a million. Roughly one in every 57 were to die over the next eight years. So Iddi himself is said to have participated in a number of these murders. Lewalco claims to remember seeing him beat men to death with sledgehammers while wearing a gas mask.

Quote, I mean, was actually participating. He turned to us at one point and told us to relax. The state research bureau men were mostly Nubians, like Iddi, former super soldiers of the British Empire, doing what they'd always done, just for themselves now. And again, this is not savagery that he's executing suddenly now that he's in charge. This is exactly what he was doing on British orders

in Kenya. You know, I'm going to go ahead and guess that when he was president is not the first time he had people killed with sledgehammers. Like, it never ceases to amaze me. Just the capability of brutality of some people. No. And these all, all these deaths, like obviously

these deaths aren't idiomine, but they're also on colonialism, which is. Well, yeah, for sure. I blame everything on colonialism, just so we're straight. And that you can, it's totally fair. It's like being a white kid who is educated in the South. I did not hear very much about colonialism growing up. And so it's once I've started researching a lot of these guys

in the show and learning about King Leopold and the 15 million who died in the Belgian Congo, which is probably the worst single crime of colonialism that I've come across. But like, it's, I think it would probably be fair to say that like, if you add together the Nazis and the Stalinist and Maoist communists and all the people they killed, it doesn't come close

to the deaths to colonialism. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, in a shorter time, you know, the Nazis were great at killing people fast. But there's, we'll never know most of what was done on behalf of the British Empire. Yeah. Anyway.

So while most secret police organizations wore, you know, wear leather trench coats and dress in all black, like, you know, like, you're in central casting, you're trying to, like, cast a secret police, like, they're all in black, they look like the Matrix guys. Yeah, they're wearing turtlenecks. They're wearing wraparounds and glasses.

Not the men of the research bureau. OK. They wore flowered Hawaiian shirts, platform shoes, and sunglasses. Oh, no, they're dressed real cool like me. Oh. I appreciate someone doing it different. If you're going to massacre hundreds of thousands

of people, at least try a new, you know, there's no armbands here. It's style. Dress like pared heads, I guess. Yeah, this is. Wear sandals. If Jimmy Buffett carried out a massacre, it would look like this.

Every time you kill somebody, you get a lay. Yeah. One, you know, they're all drunk with a, they've got a whiskey plane. Yeah, yeah. So the research bureau headquarters was connected to President Amin's home by an underground tunnel, so he could show up

and participate in the executions when he wanted to. Most of the work was headed by a man named Major Faruk Minawa. He was sort of the Leverenty Beria type figure. And Beria was the head of the KGB for a while under Stalin. So he's the kind of guy who could murder his own friends after a night of drinking and hanging out with them. At one point, he had his wife and three daughters executed. Fuck, dude.

Yeah. That guy should have waited till a grant the photo came out. Just to get it out of the system. I think so. He suspected his wife and daughters were helping gun and rebels because they were begandas, which is like the tribe, one of the tribes that he hated. So yeah, it's important to understand

that all the repression apparatus that he created was very decentralized. So most of the deaths during this period were not Idi Amin signing someone's death warrant. It was as a result of the fact that all soldiers and intelligence officers in his country were allowed to arrest or kill any person they considered dangerous to peace and good order.

So Idi gave his men a legal excuse to pursue their personal grudges and steal from people. Well, abolish ice, you guys. Just dropping that in there. No, and that is the official line of the podcast, is abolish ice by Doritos. Abolish ice. I'm drinking all water or lukewarm until ice is abolished.

It is funny that our Gestapo equivalent is ice because if they had known 15 years ago, they probably would have named it something cooler. Ice is, yeah. It's not that cool. It's not that cool. Yeah, Amin gave his men excuses, yeah, to pursue personal grudges and steal from people.

One survivor recalled, quote, everything you have seen in Wild West movies was everyday life here. Someone bumping off the husband and publicly taking the wife or someone bumping you off and openly driving off with your car. So I hope we've presented kind of a picture of how brutal Amin's regime was. Let's dig a little deeper into the man himself.

You can't understand Idi Amin without understanding that he was great at fucking. Great at fucking? Who wrote that? Well, at least he needed everyone to believe that he was great at fucking. So one way or the other, it's important to understand that that was a part of his public image.

That's how you knew his bad ladies. No, and almost all, the only famous person I'm convinced to is ever actually good at fucking. Benjamin Franklin. What? I was going to say Marlon Brando, but OK. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Marlon Brando makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. He was method, so. He was method. Anyway, yeah, so Amin was, it was important to him that there be a public image that he was virile and good at sex. His former minister for health, Henry Kiemba, said this. Besides his five wives, also he had five wives.

That's kind of low, honestly, for what I thought. Yeah, no, he's a conservative fellow. Besides his five wives, Amin has had countless other women, many of whom have borne him children. His sex life is truly extraordinary. He regards the sexual energy as a sign of his power and authority. He never tries to hide his lust.

His eyes lock onto any beautiful woman. His reputation for sexual performance is so startling that women often deliberately make themselves available, and his love affairs have included women of all colors in many nations, from school girls to mature women, from street girls to university lecturers. Which is, who knows how true that is.

Yeah, it sounds like a lot of rape. It definitely, definitely, A-Lock, because there's a ton of stories of him having husbands executed so he could fuck their wives. Oh my gosh. But this is, you know, his former minister of health giving what is, this is what idiom in, wanted people to hear about him, that he's,

because this was important. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I'm great at fighting and I'm great at fucking. Yeah, he sounds like Will Chamberlain. There's just something about authoritarian assholes and needing people to believe they're tough and good at fucking. Mm-hmm.

I want everyone to know, I am bad at sex. Which means, very smart. Ladies, bad at sex. Good sex over there. Yeah, I'm trying to think about which of our presidents were definitely the best, because I hear JFK was terrible. Really?

Yeah, LBJ said JFK was terrible. Well, you can't trust that guy. You can't trust that guy. He was jealous. And he called us dick jumbo, which means he definitely. Well, maybe that's true then. I don't know, Nixon seems pretty bad. Nixon can't have been good, right?

Mm-mm, no way. No. I feel like Teddy Roosevelt. Well, he was in a wheelchair. No, that was FDR. Oh, never mind. Well, he was a big stick guy, right? Yeah, he was the big stick guy.

Yeah, that guy could fuck. That guy could fuck. And I feel like FDR was probably pretty good, but he would have been a hands and oral man. That's my guess for FDR. I think he leaves them satisfied is what I'm saying. I don't think I... I agree.

Yeah, yeah. So, Idi Amin, again, had five wives. His favorite wife was a lady named Sarah. He met her when she was 18 and a go-go dancer for the Revolutionary Suicide Jazz Band. Okay. Story as old as time. Story as old as time.

Idi fell in love, but tragically, Sarah already had a fiancee and she was pregnant, so when she gave birth on Christmas Day, 1974, Idi just told everyone that the kid was his and had the birth announced on state television. Oh, what the fuck? Sarah's fiancee was not happy with this,

but he died in a car crash immediately after this, so it worked out. No suspicion. No. I don't know. Nope, just a random car crash the day that he complains. Poor guy. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I shouldn't have laughed there. I may be getting a little callous with all these stories. I mean, it's hard not to disassociate a little bit. I mean, so far in the last hour, I've learned of many millions of people dying. Yeah, it's horrific. So Idi, I mean, married Sarah in 1975.

It was a small private ceremony, but Idi was concerned that having a small private ceremony might be portrayed or might be seen as excluding the people of Uganda, so he remarried her in a gigantic televised ceremony. Yes, her Arafat was his best man. The banquet cost $2 million. The banquet, not the whole wedding,

just which I would kind of want to check out. I mean, I've seen Super 16, you know, whatever it's called, so. President Amin cut the wedding cake with a sword. Knowing his history, there's no chance he didn't also use that sword to stab people. Obviously, a sword guy is a sword guy. Fucking sword guy.

Sword guys are the problem. That's how you know someone can't be trusted if they're a fucking sword guy. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, machete is a people's weapon, but. While you were learning about colonialism, I was studying a block chain. So Idi had five wives and something like 40 or 50 children. He married his first two wives in the same year, 1966,

when he was 28. One of those marriages went all right and produced several children, but his second wife, Kay, divorced him. Idi murdered the best man and then murdered Kay. Her arms and legs were found in a sack in the trunk of a car, so Idi had her body sewn back together and marched around in front of his children and other wives.

Oh my God. Or he didn't. So this is again, where we get into some controversy, because his kids are still around and talking today and do speeches and like. Oh my God. Several of them have, they don't like necessarily doubt the crimes that were committed in their dad's reign,

but they are all pretty consistent about the fact that no, he was a good dad and very normal around us. So it's possible this story's a lie like the witchcraft stuff. Hard to tell. Because again, his kids even today are all pretty much, he was fun. So he might not have brought it home. I really don't know.

I wasn't there. Yeah, okay. There's, it's one of those things that's impossible to know the truth. There's stories that he was brutal to his kids and fucking had corpses created around them and then his kids say stuff like, here's a quote from his son.

It was fun with my dad all the time, it was fun. His daughter, Maimouna Amin said, he was such a lovely man, so good, so lovely. He never beats any children. When he's at home, he just wanted us all to be on him. He's like a mother, a father, a sister, a brother in one. He loved music and he's always on his accordion singing. Wow, what a revisionist history, this jikas.

I mean, it's also possible that he was a brutal monster everywhere outside of the home and was fine with his kids. Yeah, and they just never heard about the other stuff. No, they heard about it. But again, a lot of them don't deny the brutality of the regime. They're just like, at home, he was a normal guy. That's fucked.

Which, that happens, like you can find plenty of stories about people hanging out with Hitler and being like, he was super nice and he was like my uncle. Yeah, people always say dictators are charismatic and stuff, I mean, even if we, I feel the same thing with celebrities, I don't really know. Yeah, and I can't know.

What we do know, and what we do know for certain is that Idi Amin played the accordion fucking constantly. He was apparently, if you're an accordion guy, he was apparently good at playing the accordion and here's a picture of him doing the weird owl thing. Oh my God. Right? It's weird that dorks are truly the worst people in the world.

It's because, yeah. This guy's in a sword, accordion's backpipes. This guy has bad taste. Everyone with bad taste needs to be called. No, and if he had grown up now, like yeah, he would still play the accordion and have a bunch of swords but he would also be able to talk to you about anime for 16 hours.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'm sorry, anime fans. I mean, anime is pretty cool. Yeah. Sigoi. Some of it. So the stuff Idi Amin is probably most famous for is, again, cannibalism witchcraft in his obsession with Scotland

because that's like the sensational stuff where you can deal with this. So he's for sure eight people. We don't know. Okay. Again, that's one of those, yeah, we're about to get into that. So it's inarguably true that he loved Scotland.

There's a shitload of documented evidence of that. Yeah, maybe he just was eating some haggis and people thought it was like human intestines. Or they just wished it was. Yeah, exactly. Oh, please eat some people. Stop with that shit. It is very much up for debate as to whether or not

he was really into black magic and cannibalism. The rumors that he was into magic and eating people started with the begondons. And the begondons were people from South Uganda and they did not like the people from North Uganda. A lot of these rumors originate from one begondon who served in Idi Amin's cabinet. He wrote in his book,

which was one of the major sources for the last King of Scotland, quote, Amin's bizarre behavior derives partly from his tribal background. Like many other warrior societies, the Kakwa Amin's tribe are known to have practiced blood rituals on slain enemies.

These involve cutting a piece of flesh from the body to subdue the dead man's spirit or tasting the victim's blood to render the spirit harmless. Such rituals still exist among the Kakwa. If they kill a man, it is their practice to insert a knife in the body and touch the bloody blade to their lips.

I have reason to believe that Amin's practices do not stop at tasting blood on several occasions he has boasted to me and others that he has eaten human flesh. He went on to say that eating human flesh is not uncommon in his home area. It's possible that this is true. The British noted that the Kakwa engaged

in quote, sacrifices of humans and animals. But it's also worth noting that most of the claims about cannibalism came from Idi's enemies. A major source for this podcast was an article from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands titled Idi Amin, Icon of Evil. This article notes that the witchcraft

and cannibalism myths may have started as a result of local racism within Uganda, so racism from southern Ugandans towards northern Ugandans. Quote, the southern Ugandans are particularly contemptuous of the southern Sudanese and Nubis, not of other northern tribes as wild and uncivilized.

It is from them that we have reports of Amin and his Nubis tasting the blood of their victims and eating their livers, and the explanation that such a custom is either a Nubi or a Kakwa one. So we don't know, it's possible he licked blood, it's possible he ate flesh, it's also possible that's just racism from people in the south who hated him.

Yeah, I mean, I would argue, you know, you kill thousands of people, that is worse anyway. I mean, I wouldn't be completely surprised if he got into desecrating some bodies at all. It wouldn't be beyond the pale to assume. But it's also, I think this is something that happens

in Western media a lot with these dictators where if you can get, like there's a bunch of stories about the North Korean regime that are bullshit, that have no basis in reality about like, and it's always like the kooky ones about like ridiculous claims that Kim's made and like the stuff that sounds really funny,

like that you can laugh at. And some of those are true because like any authoritarian regime is gonna have some silly stuff around it because it's a silly thing. But a lot of it's just lies. And it's the same thing, it's lies that make it seem like something other

than what it is, which is a brutal dictatorship, as opposed to like, no, it's this crazy cannibal madman who ruled the country. And it's like, well, no, there's nothing really great. He's just a monster, like all of the other monsters. That's less scary to me than just the person who knows exactly what they're doing and does it anyway. That's like if an oil tycoon or something

and then there was a rumor that like, did you hear that he litters? Yeah. He's running the environment. Yeah, and that's kind of why I wanted to dig into these myths about him a lot because that's what most people know about Idi Amin, which I think is less, I think the fact that the idea

that, oh, maybe this guy was a cannibal and a dictator is less interesting than like this guy was trained to be a brutal dictator in the British army who raised him to be a soldier and then abandoned him and his country to whatever was gonna happen next, which I think is a more accurate story. But that one isn't fun for Americans

because it implicates all of Western civilization as opposed to, oh, some cannibal got in charge over there in Africa. Anyway, that's my thinking on the matter. So obviously by this time, and by the middle of his reign, you know, by the middle of his reign, kind of the bloom was off the rose. The British were no longer fans of Idi Amin.

Word of his atrocities had filtered out to the world, Europe turned away, and Idi did what he always did when someone questioned him. He flipped out and attacked. He declared himself conqueror of the British Empire. He had t-shirts printed up with his face on it and conqueror of the British Empire printed beneath, which is a pretty pro move.

He developed a love for having white guys, particularly British guys, bow to him. So there's a bunch of pictures like this of British businessmen like squaring oaths to him. Now, this is the first cool thing that you showed me. Oh, just wait, because it's about to get fucking better. Because at one point he made a bunch of British businessmen carry him around on a sedan chair while a crowd cheered,

which is, that's a solid move. Yeah, I do like that. It's hard not to support that. For sure, he's got a little, he's got, oh, okay, someone's holding an umbrella for him. Yeah, and that's the kind of wackiness that we know went down. And again, he's not all wrong.

Like the whiskey plane was a solid idea. Yeah. Yeah. So Edie desperately wanted to be a major player on the global stage. He wasted no opportunity to wade into any global conflict that he could. When the Watergate scandal broke, he sent a letter to Richard Nixon and gave him advice

on how to handle Watergate. Nice. Quote, when the stability of a nation is in danger, the only solution is, unfortunately, to imprison the leaders of the opposition. Yeah. The longer he was in power, the more unhinged and braggy he became.

President Amin started to inflate the stories of his military service, claiming he'd fought in Burma during World War II. He offered to marry Princess Anne of Great Britain. He also offered to become King of Scotland and lead the Scots to independence from Britain. For the most part, the international response to Eddie Amin was laughter,

the same kind of laughter you'll find today when people talk about ridiculous North Korean propaganda. Alan Coran, a British comedian, had a popular column in Punch Magazine where he'd write out fake Eddie Amin speeches that were very racist. If you've got Spotify, you can find the album that was made based on these columns

with a white guy doing Eddie's voice. When was this? I mean, this was like in the mid-70s. If you look up Eddie Amin on Spotify, you'll find the album and it's infuriating. Because it's just, it's joking about what was in reality a horrific, crime-filled regime, making fun of the fact that Eddie Amin talks funny,

which he doesn't even talk that funny. He speaks better English than I do fucking Uganda. So, yeah, but this is again, that's the international reaction, is they're laughing at this guy, they're making fun of him. He's like, this horror show is playing out in Africa and it's being treated as kind of like a freak show

to the rest of the world. So, yeah, the caricature of Eddie Amin is based a lot in white European racism, but it's also based in some local Ugandan regional racism. So they're north, north of Uganda is basically the social equivalent of the American South. And the well-educated, well-to-do Southern Ugandans considered Eddie Amin to be like a hillbilly.

They thought his accent, when he spoke in Uganda, they thought his accent was painful. So it's basically, he was like to a lot of people in Southern Uganda, he was like, if we had a president who came from the dirty South and talked like he grew up on the bottom of the river. Yeah, President Kid Rock, number 46. Yeah, exactly, that is the attitude

that the Southerners have towards him. In reality, Eddie Amin was a pretty smart guy. He wasn't educated, obviously, but he had a lot of intelligence because you don't carry out a regime like this and keep it going for eight years without that. Most of his actions were pretty logical. Mass murder is a time-honored way to stay in power.

Exiling the Asians tanked Uganda's economy, but it provided Eddie with a host of businesses that he could give away to his supporters in exchange for their loyalty. And for a while, his tactics worked pretty well. But he made more mistakes as time went on. One of those was alienating Israel. He had initially been friendly to the country.

He'd trained there, again, as a paratrooper. But he wound up switching around and backing the Palestinian cause, which is fine, but he also descended into horrific anti-Semitism. In 1972, he told the UN Secretary General that Hitler had been, quote, right to burn six million Jews. And he promised to build a monument to Hitler in Kampala.

He was eventually convinced to cancel this plan because everyone around him was like, that's a fucking bad idea, Eddie, I mean. But he continued pissing off Israel as the years rolled by. On June 27th, 1976, an air France flight with 248 passengers was hijacked by two members of the Popular Front for the liberation of Palestine. Now, this was back in the day when terrorists

playing hijackers didn't kill people as a general rule. They just kind of have the plane flown to an airport and hold everyone hostage until their comrades were released from prison or they got a bunch of money or whatever. This was like a common thing. It was a period of time in the 70s where every week there'd be a new fucking hijacking.

So these particular hijackers, and this plane, most of the passengers, are Israeli. So these particular hijackers landed first in Libya and then at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. President Amin welcomed them enthusiastically. This proved to be a mistake when one week later, Israeli commandos raided the airport, liberated the captives, and destroyed a sizable chunk

of the Ugandan Air Force while it was sitting on the tarmac. Oh, wow. Yeah. There's a movie called Raid on Entebbe about it. It's a very famous, like, commando raid thing. So Eddie flipped out of this. He'd already switched from being pro-Israel to pro-Palestine, of course, but he went over the deep end.

He had a 73-year-old Jewish woman in a Ugandan hospital named Dora Block, pretty brutally murdered. And then he went on kind of a world insult tour. So this is kind of a little bit, and there's growing local resistance to him at this point, too. So he starts to, in the late 70s, go off the rails a bit. He called the president of Tanzania a coward,

an old woman, and a prostitute. He called the president of Zambia an imperialist puppet and bootlicker. He called Henry Kissinger a murderer and a spy, which was pretty fair. He also said that Queen Elizabeth should send him her 25-year-old knickers to celebrate her silver jubilee.

So he was like, the semi-year-old underwear, Queen of England, which is fun. I appreciate a good diss. Yeah, that's solid. He steadily expanded his list of titles over the years. In 1977, he announced that he must now be addressed as, quote, his Excellency Field Marshal Alhaji, Dr. Idi Amin Dada, life president of Uganda,

conqueror of the British Empire, distinguished service order of the military cross, Victoria Cross, and professor of geography. What a good tag at the end. This guy is funny. Yeah, that professor of geography thing is really what sets it off. On October 30th, 1978,

it made the biggest mistake of his dictator career. He invaded Tanzania. This was over a pretty useless piece of land, like there was no good reason to attack the spot that he did. Tanzania counterattacked, and since their military was much more functional than the Ugandan military, the Ugandans were quickly thrown back.

Next Tanzania marched on Uganda, aided by the Ugandan-Ugandan exiles. They moved to unseat Idi from power. For his part, Idi Amin announced that he now loved the Tanzanian president, and, quote, would have married him if he had been a woman. This didn't work, and did not turn back the Tanzanian army. So Idi Amin had to flee from power first to Libya,

and then to Saudi Arabia, where he spent the rest of his life in exile. Somehow not being a warlord anymore seemed to calm him down. He lived a quiet life, regularly visiting Mecca and living with just one wife and several of his children. Boo. Yeah. Yeah, he's one of the ones who got away with it. Idi explained in a rare 1993 interview

that, quote, when I am no longer president, some of them say they don't want me. I accept it frankly. I have had one wife since and have found also to have one wife is better. So Idi Amin lapsed into a coma on July 19th, 2003. He was put on life support at a hospital in Jeddah. His family had begged the new Ugandan government

to let him return home to die. They were told he'd have to stand trial if he returned. So, I mean, he didn't go back. And on August 16th, 2003, Idi Amin died peacefully in a hospital bed in Saudi Arabia. And that's unfortunately not the end of the story or Uganda's problems. Uh-oh.

Because President Abote- He's a ghost. I knew this was gonna happen. President Abote returned after Idi was ousted. Abote was not outwardly ridiculous. He didn't make crazy claims about the Holocaust or randomly insult foreign leaders. He didn't have a wacky title.

What he did do was vastly expand the purges that Idi Amin had begun. While Amin had mostly targeted certain tribe members in the military and government, Abote targeted huge chunks of civilians based on their tribe. He probably killed more people in his second term than died during the entirety of Idi Amin's reign.

Jesus. Abote was eventually overthrown by a general named Basilio Olarro O'Kello, who was violently overthrown by Yawari Musaveni's National Resistance Army in 1986. Musaveni is still the president of Uganda today. He had term limits abolished in 2005 and removed the presidential aid limit in 2017.

Uganda has, to this day, never seen a peaceful transition of power. Wow. So, that's the story. Oh, that's a heartwarming tale. It is, it is. And it's a tale where Idi Amin is the organ through which all of this repression and violence

was executed, but the real bastard of this is the British Empire, in my opinion, at least. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'll trace all the blame back to white people at any time, for sure. But, man, I really just can't imagine living in a country where so much bloodshed is happening constantly all the time, politically.

Yeah, I would move away so fast. Well, and that's, it's one of those things that... How are you gonna, bud? Yeah, how are you gonna? And it's, you get all these people in Europe in the United States now, because most of the people who flee parts of Africa are gonna wind up heading to Europe,

because it's very easier to get there than it is to get to the US. And you get this, like, what is our, we can't take care of all these people. It's like, well, you could steal their shit for 200 years, and then leave them without, because Uganda, at no point in prior history, there were kingdoms and states and whatnot

all over Africa, but there never been a Uganda. All of these groups of people had never been forced together before the British did that. And if you're going to do, you shouldn't do that in the first place, but if you're going to do that, if you're going to force these people into a state,

you owe it to them to, like, create a functional state before you leave, which, yeah. It's fucked up. It's real fucked up. Well, I hope you learned something today. I sure did. I did. I somehow left more grim than I came in. That's the fun of colonialism.

But that's okay. I mean, like, sometimes you gotta know the monstrous capabilities of what, you know, what we can do as human beings to prevent it. Yeah. Geez, I don't know. Yeah, it's hard to take a good lesson out of this other than don't be a colonialist

and don't take a people and train them to be soldiers and nothing else for a century. Yeah. Don't murder. Don't do that. What are some of the things? Don't play backpipes. Don't play the accordion. Well, that's okay.

Let's not attack backpipes. Don't get into swords. Let's not attack backpipes. No, let's attack backpipes. The backpipes aren't the problem here. Yeah, I don't know what else to learn. I'll agree with you about accordions. Yeah, I mean, I haven't watched,

what's it called, Last King of Scotland? Have you watched it? Yeah, I didn't enjoy it very much. Is it sympathetic or? No, it plays into the brutality of it. One thing it does a decent job of is showing you how he might have charmed people early on, but I think it leans more into the sensational side of things.

Okay, but eating people and stuff? And it, yeah, and it doesn't talk at all about a means passed in a meaningful way. And that's why I led this by talking about British military policy in their colonies, because I don't think you can understand a mean without understanding where he and his people came from. Yeah, I mean, that loan is interesting by itself

as a story, I mean, not a fun story, but. It's definitely not a fun story, but it's an important one. And I will say, if you are starting a punk band in the near future, the Suicide Revolutionary Jazz Band, it's a pretty fucking solid name. Yeah, they honestly sound like a ska band. And look like one.

They do look like a ska band, they're all dressed nice, they got their shirts tucked in. Oh man, I could go for some Suicide Revolutionary ska music. Yeah, I think the worst part of that story was that he died peacefully. That is, it's always a bummer when that happens. Cause like we're, I think Gaddafi's gonna be running shortly before this podcast comes out.

And that's a story where the monster gets, like that's what you want to see happen to these guys is they get dragged out into the street and murdered by their own people. The people that they fucked over. Yeah, I can think of a couple of people I'd like to see that happen too. Yeah, yeah, whose names we won't give

because there are laws against that sort of thing. But yeah, it's hard not to want certain people dragged out into the street. And at least like, you know, maybe not even killed just peed on by dozens of people. Well, I guess there's nothing left for us to do, but for me to ask you to plug your plugables. Cool, you could, you know, maybe get some laughs

from looking at some videos. I don't know how to transition this either. I have some videos on my website, BritishRead.com. You can follow me on Twitter at AyoBroBro where I just usually complain about people getting cast in Hollywood and making some jokes. And you can see me perform some jokes all around LA.

And you know, if you have any more questions I will refer you to this guy because I don't know anything. Well, you know, if you like complaining about casting, they did just cast a new Idi Amin movie. Did they? Yes, Scarlett Johansson's gonna play him. Fuck off.

You got me. You got me. I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK, just the two letters there. I got a book on Amazon called A Brief History of Ice. You can find that on Amazon. You can find this podcast at BehindTheBastards.com

where we will have pictures of the incredible suicide Revolutionary Jazz Band and some other pictures from Amin's Reign, as well as links to all the sources for this podcast. I really do recommend reading that University of Groningen article. It's a fascinating analysis of why Idi is seen sort of the way he is today and where he came from.

So you can also find us on Twitter and Instagram, social media, at at Bastards Pod. So look us up, check us out. This has been Behind the Bastards for the week. I've been Robert Evans. Check back in next Tuesday when we will be talking about someone else who is also terrible.

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