Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 395 - The Kagera War: Part 1

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Idi Amin comes to power in Uganda, a military strongman, he lets his military run wild across the nation in a nearly decade long reign of terror. Amin, however, is a drunken, paranoid, monster. He purges his military, worried that someone would depose him. He imagines invasions of the British, Americans, Tanzanians, and the Israelis massing on his border. Finally, he invades Tanzania, sparking the Kagera War. This is the story of the fall of Idi Amin. Part 1/4 SOURCES: Tony Avrigan, Martha Honey. War in Uganda: The Legacy of Idi Amin. Ogenga Otunnu. Crisis of Legitimacy and Political Violence in Uganda, 1890-1979. Ogenga Otunnu. Politics and the Military in Uganda, 1890-1985. Yehudit Ronen. Libya's Intervention in Amin's Uganda: A Broken Spearhead. Tom Cooper. War and Insurgencies of Uganda. 1971-1994 George Roberts. The Uganda-Tanzania War, The Fall of Idi Amin, and the Failure of African Diplomacy. Alicia Decker. In Idi Amin's Shadow: Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda Mark Leopold. Idi Amin: The Story of Africa's Icon of Evil

Hey everyone, it's Joe. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog, as well as every regular episode, one full week early. Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well. Gets you e-books, audio books, first dibs on live show tickets and merchandise when they're available, and also gets you access to our Discord, which has turned into a lovely little community. So go to patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys

and join the Legion of the Old Crow today. Hello and welcome to the Lines Ed by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe. My country, the People's Democratic Republic of Donkia, has issues. Thanks to our colonial history with world superpower, South Clownium, our newly independent nation has little in the way of resources, infrastructure or professional development. Things are not made better by the fact that the few of us that rose to the surface to take control have begun to steal funds from the few experts we still have, namely disposable vapour, and white monster. When the people begin to protest against us, saying we're causing all of these issues, I see the refusal to acknowledge that I have set boundaries quite triggering. After being

gaslit by the serial narcissist, I asked my fellow commanders, Nate and Tom, if they have the mental bandwidth to hold space for me so I could trauma dump a bit. They agree that these protests are being incredibly toxic. We decide, as a form of self-care, we could not allow this to continue. It's very hard for us to watch the secret police disappear dissidents. I don't think people realize this. It has only reinforced our leadership through trauma bonding. Bellas, how are you doing?

I hate it when my subjects love bombed me, but then they decide to ghost me when I start killing them with the secret police. This is based on a very stupid idea that I came up with during our bonus episode last month on the Battle of Checkpoint Pasta of the

tender dictator. Woke Ediamine. I mean, if it couldn't be any dumber than me and Tom have been going back and forth, making a neutral milk hotel lyrics about Lord Byron. So, like, this show contains multitudes. No, I'm not going to sing any on here. They're for us only. But the concept is funny.

Don't need $100 a month to the Patreon. Do you get access to our group chat? Don't need $100 a month to the Patreon. I don't have an acoustic guitar, but I have an electric guitar that I can just strum without amplification. And I will play Jeff Mangum's A plus B equals C, in simple-ass compositions and sing and that I cannot hit those notes. My lyrics about Lord Byron.

I'll do it. But it has to be a monthly subscription. It can't be a one-off. All right. My dignity is worth more than that. Is it to sing the whole thing in Mickey Mouse voice? When you were young, you were the king of carrot flowers.

Could work. You know, we just had Nate Timber. Now we're getting January. Because we're doing a four-part series on the Kigaro war. Uh, that's right. I took time off to write a month long series. Are you guys familiar at all with the Cagero war? Uh, much more kind of familiar with like all the stuff that precipitates it between like Milton Abote and, uh, Idi Amin having the most petty falling out ever over, uh, lots of gold, but, uh, oh yeah, we'll get there. That's for sure.

this whole thing is is a war based on petty grievances and not entirely just petty grievances but people involved I think personally hate one another more than a lot of the wars that we talked about before but I'm hitting the big old African military history button because I love talking about it so much because if there's one thing we love more on the show than an absolute psychopath get a control of an ox court of a nation than running it into the ground, is that same psychopath pissing off someone more powerful than they are and having everything taken away from them by force? Yeah, to the context of like, I suppose as much as I know about this war, it involves two of my favorite groups of people that I won't name

because it will spoil what's eventually coming. Yes. So a small note here on the name that I chose for the series, the Kigara War, um, that's the generally accepted name for the most part. I know some countries have different names for the war than the one that I've chosen. I'm going with this one. My bad. Another small note, though, this is not an exhaustive history of Edie Amin or is eight years in power. We're going to be covering a lot of that history because it's kind of impossible to understand the context of the war and the state of the Ugandan military and as a state without understanding him. But we cannot hope to cover Amin, Ugandan colonial and then independent a politics, nearly 10 years of crimes against humanity, and then a war in a concise series that

won't last the better part of several months. So if there's some particularly horrible thing that Ediamine did that we do not go over, we did not miss it or ignore it, but it doesn't fit in the context of this series that is about the Kigera War, not Ediamine. Or anything that comes immediately afterwards. Yeah, we have to talk a little bit about that. Anyway and Yarrima 70 and things like that, but like context is important. I cannot cover everything in regards to the nation state of Uganda as it's ever existed

if this is going to be a consumable podcast series. But before we get into how an alliance of Omar Gaddafi, Ediamin, and the PLO of all people all got their teeth kicked in for a very, very stupid reason, we first have to go over my personal favorite invasion, the invasion of context. So, Ediamin Dada, he has several names. This is the one he's most commonly known as, was born on May 30th, 1928 in Kampala, we think. Off to a good start. Also, I should say the context war is just another name for trying to have a conversation with myself or nays.

Paperwork for Ugandans, especially that of a small Kakwa tribe member like Ediamid was. It was virtually non-existent. At the time, records of birds were generally passed down through oral tradition. This is made all more complicated by the fact that Idiot Meen lied about pretty much every facet of his life. And, you know, once he becomes head of state, he begins to change the official personal record of himself multiple times. For example, despite saying for years, I am this many years old, he says in another interview that he wasn't entirely sure how old he was. the man cannot be trusted altering the official records

to say that I'm 6'3 and have a massive hog that's one thing he didn't have to lie about the dude was huge I don't know about the size of his hog that cannot be confirmed nor denied but he was a large lad to the point it caused

medical conditions I'm not going to do the most risky on-air Google search turn safe search off he was the third child in his family to a father who'd been conscripted as a child soldier for the British during World War I during the Tanganyika campaign, which we have talked about. There's some reports putting him as young as six years old at the time when he was conscripted.

I mean, knowing how big Ediamine is, I have a feeling this is a rather large six year old, but I don't think he's that big. Yeah, he's solidly in the large nephew contingent. Yeah, it's a very special contingent of the. British conscription force. After this, his father joined the protectorate police force, which was the colonial cops of British Uganda. And young Edie was born on the floor of his police barracks building, which might be

the most, like, the way that anybody can tell you're going to be evil, is that you're born on the floor of a police building by a cop. I feel like sort of like being born under a bad sign. I feel like if you're going to have cop in your blood, even if you're, you're, you're not related to a cop if you're born on the floor of a police station. That's going to follow you forever. The die's been cast. You have cop brain. Exactly. There's no turning back. It's the only way to make cop your actual sign. Exactly. Actually, we don't realize is you can't convert to being a cop. It's an inherited trait like a, you know, a kind of like religious community.

So you have to be born in a police station. Everyone else they're faking, but the true orthodoxy knows that cops are born, not made. That's right. Being an ethnic cop is a matrilineal trait. Yeah, it's called being a Irish person from Massachusetts. I was going to say, yeah, it's an Irish American. If they take DNA tests on fucking 23 and me before it went bankrupt, the cop would just show up instead of anything else. Others have argued that Amin was actually bored in what today would be Sudan due to the fact that his tribe, the Kakwa people, generally lived in the northwest of Uganda on the border. And the border back then was so blurry at the time. People often just moved back and forth freely, but I should point out the other historians argue this, that this is a

form of revisionism on the behalf of modern-day Ugandan politicians attempting to find a way to say that their nation's greatest criminal was actually a foreigner. Either way, we actually have no idea. Amin's mother, Aisha Ate, was from the Lugbara tribe, and a member, some put her as a priestess of what was called the Allah Water Movement. The Alla Water Movement was a cult-like movement of the Lugbara people that rejected modern medicine and instead thought they cure for virtually everything lay in drinking tea

made up of a local flower that made you trip absolute balls. Hell yeah. I mean, I respect it. Yeah, there's worse things you can be doing in the world. I mean, if you're tripping a ton of balls, you're not having a lot of worries in your life other than maybe the ants under your skin

or whatever. Smoking on that E.D. Pac. Through tripping said balls, drinkers were believed to gain supernatural powers, and of course, be able to fuck for hours. Modern historians show that not only was this a kind of faith healing, melt your brain with tea group, but they also were kind of a politically anti-colonial movement, wanting Ugandans and its people, as they understood them, to be free of British rule. It's also one of the main reasons why the British ended up outlawing their practices.

Owing to a local rumor, Amin's father believed that he was not very much. the true father of his son, he thought he could have been the result of what of these drinking teas and fucking for hours type situations? And his father demanded a paternity test, which you're probably wondering what did a paternity test look like back

then? Well, something kind of sort of a horror film. It meant leaving the newborn in the forest for four days. And if the baby survived, well, then you are the father. Oh my God. I mean, I guess

This is sort of like, there's plenty of antecedents to this in many cultures around the world, but still it's just horrifying. Yeah, it's what if, you know, the Mori Povich show was hosted by the Kakawa tribe of Uganda? After this, the family moved together into the police barracks, separating when Amin was four years old. At which point, Amin went to live with his mother. Amin soon became a student of his kind of sort of priestess mother, drinking the drug tea, but also learning how to mix it and prepare it for others. So, yeah, he becomes a philosophical street pharmacist. At this time towards, I suppose, the end of the colonial age, especially for the British Empire, a lot of these kind of shamanic practices came back into vogue in a lot of indigenous cultures in the country.

So this is not surprising at all. No, not at all. And it's not the only one going on. It's just the only one that edamine happens to be born into as a kind of acid nobility. Idiot means mixing up that walkie sludge. He's going to do a forward exchange program. Go to the South. Learn how to mix the perfect cup of lean.

That's where Gucci Main learned it off. Idiomene how to mix that perfect cup. I'm sorry. There's a part of me that's just laughing because it's like, all right, look, Idi Amin, obviously we don't want to downplay any of the dup shit that he did. No, that just hasn't happened yet. No.

Yeah, exactly. But it's just one of those things where. At the same time, the idea that, like, there is to some extent a cultural lineage of gripping and sipping that extends all the way over to, you know, sub-Saharan Africa. It's like, well, you know what? I'm learning something new. I'm learning something new. Eventually, Young-Tog would say 500 horses inside my machine. Idi Amin.

I think Edie Mean would have been a lot happier if instead of, you know, learning how to mix hallucinogenic tea and then becoming a, a military strong man through a process we will talk about. He just discovered real big fish. I mean, literally anything, you know? If he was the last king of Scotland, you didn't have to be the last king of Scotland. You could be one of the underground kings. All right? I think it would have been better for all of us.

Here's where we get to pause and talk about some good old-fashioned British racism. Because it means people, the Kakwa, as well as other northern tribes of Uganda, were considered by the British as brutish, violent, and backward, owing mostly to how the British found their traditional religious practices, which sometimes included animal sacrifice and blood rituals, some going as so far as if you follow those long enough back, they did those same rituals with humans. The British found those strange and disgusting.

Some of this is heavily disputed, for example, what these blood rituals looked like, if they engaged in cannibalism, like the British claim they did, that they never witnessed it, things like that. The Kakwa tribe also did not create a society as far as one that the British

could recognize as one, unlike their southern Ugandan neighbors. So they looked at them like, these people are cave people. They don't make things that we recognize the society or religion. So they fell into the martial class system, the martial races system.

So the British, filled their colonial military ranks with recruits from the north from tribes like the Kakwa in order to repress their more quote unquote enlightened and civilized southerners. The Brits saw the Northerners as one of their martial people. We've talked about this on the show before, like how they saw Sikhs and Gurkhas and things like that. This is the idea that some ethnicities in the British Empire were just inherently warlike and made better soldiers. The British saw Marshall people they desired as being more willing to follow orders and commit horrible violence at the drop of a hat.

They saw these people as like more willing to follow orders, therefore less likely to be educated to get ideas about like independence and sovereignty and shit like that. Of course, this was all reinforced with how the British treated these people. They thought a certain group of people were marshal. So shit, I guess you don't need us to build schools and stuff because you're not so good at book learning. This means there's little in the way for people given this title to grow up and out of this situation at all. They're now desperately poor and they're very, very rural, away from any of the civilization in the form of schools, hospitals, anything like that that the British are building in their colonies. So this creates a captive population for young men knowing enlisting was pretty much the only way to care for their families.

So the British created military caste system reinforced it and then called it race science, bringing things back the little Amin, who is not so little anymore. Like I've joked about already, but wasn't much of a joke. Edie Amin has always been gigantic. It's often noted that he was the largest child in his village by far. There are conflicting accounts on whether he used his size to be a brutal and violent bully. This is a story that's often told, but he probably wasn't. This is owing to the fact that, yeah, his mom was considered a quote unquote priestess of this religion.

And that kind of makes it sound like they were better off than other people. But they absolutely were not. The family was desperately poor. And he dropped out of school pretty much immediately. He had very little schooling at all at this point. He was illiterate. And he spent all of his time doing odd jobs, like tending to animals, doing manual, labor fixing things around

the village to earn any bit of money he could to help out his mom. As is the birthright of the largest son of the community, you are the oxen. Yeah, that was me. So it bears to think about if he was a brutal, violent asshole

of a kid, why would people keep hiring him and keep him around? You know, if you're the dickhead of the village, people probably aren't giving you jobs all the time. I think it's easy to see him and what he becomes and assume he's always been a brutal tyrant using violence to get his way when that just does not seem like that was the case. It's kind of like I find a lot of the

time with like, you know, truly evil people like, you know, idiomene or Hitler, for example, there's like, there's this really big attempt to try and pathologize their evil and like the bad things they've done like that documentary about like, oh, Hitler had a micro penis. I'm like, yeah, he also like slaughtered millions of. people. It's like, does it really matter? There's a lot of other things that these people go through that is much easier to explain how they become dull to violence and figure it out as a problem solving tool. Obviously, Hitler is a veteran of World War I. And Ediamine is about to join the military.

Also, I would just throw this in there too, is that I think that people like to pathologize stuff and it kind of create this semantic link, kind of an unconscious idea that it's because of some sort of failing or insecurity about a thing. But in my experience, people who are true sociopaths, like, they tend to be pretty good at knowing what they can and can't get away with within the context of where they are. And then as soon as they can get in a position where they know they can get away with stuff, they just do whatever they want to do. And it's like, that doesn't mean that, you know, this person was a sociopath and just like a violent, you know, aggressor and bully and generally hostile person from, from earliest

age. But, like, it's probably likely that something that he's about to experience and what Joe's about to talk about, gave him the understanding, like, you can, in fact, use violence to get what you want. And in certain contexts, you are granted free reign to do that. And that will change people. That's exactly what happens. Yeah, that's exactly what happens with the Edian in my opinion. Because Amin joins the King's African Rifles Fourth Battalion, like many others from its region. The fourth was the main employer for men, not only of the Kakwa tribe, but of the Newby and Acholi tribes as well. When exactly he enlisted his unknown, some people say he joined at some point around 1943, while others say he joined in 1945.

The British Foreign Office says he joined in 1946. And again, this is not helped by the fact that, I mean, routinely changes his story regarding his military service under the British Crown. The interesting part is all of this could be true, kind of. While he almost certainly officially enlisted in 1946, there's a good chance that he had been informally inducted into the rifles when he was 12 as a kitchen helper aboard a Royal Navy ship, the Yoma. This is a very common practice at the time, and it tracks with the original story of Amin himself,

who said he was originally a cook in the military. Though Amin's stories from here are entirely untrustworthy, he said he was aboard the Yoma when it was sunk by a U-boat, but his telling of the story differs from not only the official one, but from literally any other survivor, and no other survivor puts Amin on that ship. He also said he fought as a soldier during the Burma campaign of World War II, which he absolutely did not. There's zero evidence he'd ever been to Burma as a whole in his entire life. And he didn't officially enlist in the rifles until after World War II was over. By all accounts, the British officers wanted him to enlist, owing to the fact that he was fucking huge. He was six foot four and

jacked. But most importantly to white officers of the colonial military, they thought Amin was dumb. Edie Amin was not a dumb man. He was just, he did not have the kind of intelligence they could recognize, mostly because he was giant and illiterate, but he was clever as the British will eventually find out. If I remember correctly, Idi Amin would do stuff to kind of play up this idea of like dumbass, gentle giant, but like, you know, to impress his superiors like jumping into a pool in his uniform and stuff like that and like doing feats of strength. And it was always assumed like, oh, he's just like a big kid and he's dumb. And it's like, I think he was playing that up so that you guys would not scrutinize him in the same way.

You know what I mean? Somewhat, especially when he was a lower-ranking soldier, because he takes the military life incredibly well. He shines his boots, he irons his uniform, and this is where he learns that violence is a decent problem-solving technique, mostly because the British colonial military is a rigid one, even compared to how any militaries of the same era were run. white superiors had normally local auxiliaries under their command that they used dispense out horrible violence against their fellow soldiers to keep them in line.

And Amin quickly becomes their favorite tool to keep soldiers in line. He is beating the ever unholy dog shit out of his fellow soldiers at the slightest violation of rules and regulations to the point that his own officers complain about it. And then when they're like, why are you beating them so badly? He would just laugh. I feel as though this is a thing that's interesting to point out is that in some instances, later on in British colonial things, you actually have situations where junior enlisted and non-commissioned officers are different races to include some of the people in the country like where the colonial enterprise is taking place.

But in stuff at this era in Central Africa, it would absolutely be what Joe's just describing where it's white officers and black NCOs and black soldiers, and thus the white officers aren't, you know, soiling their consciences by being the one doing this. Yeah. They wouldn't do it either. It would have been the white NCOs doing it to white soldiers in Britain. But in this case, like, it's like a magnification of the same system.

And it's far more brutal. And they are far less bothered by it when they've got somebody like Ediamine or other large NCOs to basically, yeah, like you just described, brutalize and torment and kind of like enforce an absurd level. of military discipline, which is toxic to the human brain. You and I both know this. And we didn't experience, I mean, we did experience hazing, but not like this. And it wasn't as like openly systematized in the same way. No, I didn't have the large boy in charge of beating me. At the time in the King's rifles, white men were officers, black men could not be officers, the highest rank

that they could achieve as warrant officer, which meant something different back then. Yeah, and the British Army warrant officers, either above Sergeant Major or below Sergeant Major, but like you'll, I've encountered enlisted warrant officers before because they're senior NCOs basically. Yeah, that was pretty much all it was. He was also really good at boxing. He became so good at boxing. He became the Ugandan national champion and went undefeated for nine goddamn years. So he also could have been agreeing to gold NCO's officer in the American army. Yes. Which was the thing they were obsessed with back then too. It's like, hey, this cool ass sport. It proves our NCOs are tough. And every now again, it blinds one of our soldiers. But hey, who cares? Yep. He was also one of the best black rugby

players in Uganda, though he dropped that sport because as a black man, he can only play at such a high level. And anything else was shot off to him due to his race. It's really shocking to me that they segregated rugby, but it doesn't surprise me. I'm just like, man, you guys are such, we have a lot of American listeners, but I'm sufficiently lived in Britain to be, like, you guys are such cons. In the British sense, in the British sense, understand that it's, it's not a gendered slur in the British sense. What is, it's gendered towards men. Man, guys are such cons. I can't believe it. That's just weird to that. That detail being shocking is weird, but like, It is. They segregated rugby.

He could be good at boxing, but he could only be so good at rugby. He was promoted into the NCO ranks, where he again impressed his white superiors for vicious brutality against the soldiers under him. Like I said, that he would joke about beating the shit out of his soldiers. And his white superiors, despite having complaints, never stopped him. And he only got promoted from it. So again, he's learning that viciousness is the key to success. and it's only reinforced.

He and his unit were eventually deployed to Kenya to support British forces and putting down the Mao Rebellion. Ooh. Yeah. And without going into the entire history here, because that is a different series in the future, the British methods were, in short, horrific.

And Amin's personal conduct during the rebellion was called, quote, manifest sadism by his own officers. Now, I need to point out here, that does not mean he was punished. nor stopped from doing these things. They were only supported. And Amin, unsurprisingly, excelled at committing terrible violence

and was recognized for this by his promotion to sergeant. A rank he was only able to obtain due to cheating, not only from him, but also his commanding officer, because Amin had a horrible knowledge of the English language at the time. And order to go from corporal to sergeant, he had to speak English. So his commanding officer just helped him cheat on the exam because they liked him so much because of the manifest sadism.

That's really telling because it's like if you thought this guy was going to be a liability, then you absolutely had an out in the sense of limiting his advancement. And instead, they're like, no, we like him being our kind of pet torture so much that we're going to find a way to bend the rules and get him further and further along. Yep. That's telling. That's right. Edie Amin would spend the rest of his life being kind of self-conscious about his level of

English, despite the fact he spoke it mostly fluently by the end of his life. Look, John Wayne Gacy is really good at putting on makeup. The other stuff doesn't matter. I think he can advance in clown school. You know, like, we need to kind of make an exception here. That's unfair. I think Edie Amin killed significantly more people with his own bare hands. Oh, I'm sure.

I'm sure he did. I'm sure he did, yeah. Unfortunately, Seth Putnam died before he could write a song called, Idi Amin was a sensitive man. We said the word cunt once, so now we can start talk about anal cunt. We've broken the ice. We can talk about Hitler was a sensitive man.

We could talk about the picnic of love. We can talk about if Hitler was alive, he would listen to the cure of the Smiths in Depeche mode. God, what a freak, man. I'm sorry. This guy was actually funny, but there is something. If you were a teenager in the 90s.

Like, sometimes it's like the Maryland Manson Onion articles, like Marilyn Manson's just going door to door trying to shock people. people. Just fucking give it up. Well, the picnic of love was actually funny because Seth Putton and Moran out of things that he could be offensive about. So he flipped it on people and did an album with songs

called, like, I respect you both as a woman and a person and stuff like that. It's just like, what's going to be the most shocking thing to my fans? Like, me being nice. That is actually funny. Just about the only thing that slowed down ED means military career temporarily was when he got syphilis. This maybe would not have ended his career, but it would have ended his climb up the promotion letter at the time, but not for Edie Amin, because his superiors liked him so much. He was eventually promoted to warrant officer in 1959, which at the time was the highest rank of black soldier could get within his unit. But by 1960, it was becoming clear that the British were going to leave many parts of their overseas empire, you know,

Prime Minister Harold McMillan's famous Wins of Change speech and all of that. But little had been done to prepare a lot of these places for independence, but specifically for our series, Uganda. Uganda as it existed and would exist had never existed as a historical entity, not as a state. This led to a lot of tension between the northerners and the southerners, anti-colonial bodies, and the British, all just kind of shrugging and saying, well, you'll figure it out. And as for the King's African Rifles, things get even weirder. Because as a body, it was not an independent military whatsoever. They were entirely commanded by white men.

And as the rifles were broken down into different units to be given over to the newly independent nations that these units would have been stationed, they just get called, hey, you're the army now. But the British made no attempt to do what's called generally Africanization prior to this. And by that, I mean training, promoting, and empowering African military officers to take command of the military when all the white people left. be able to do logistics, fly planes, be general officers, be staff officers, do all of the things you expect the military to do. Because this takes years and generations of professional education

and experience to be able to do. The British simply did not do this. Instead, they began that process in 1961 in what could be considered a crash course. That included promoting the first two Ugandans to be commissioned officers in the new Ugandan military. Those two men would be Shaban Apollot and Ediamine. Yeah. I'm really taking aback by this because obviously it repeats itself and in some cases it was even more extreme in terms

of cutting out the entirety of the local population, even the sympathetic and elite local population from any actual echelons of development. And I guess with the Brits, it's just like, I don't know, Tom knows a lot more about this than I do from personal experience, but they

love to wax so nostalgic about how like generous and munificent they were towards their colonial possessions. And it's like, man, shut the fuck. Of course they were very, uh, uh, you know, nice to Uganda. They promoted Idi Amin. Exactly. No one can argue that the British suffered from the same issue as Americans. There was no institutional bigotry. They were willing to approach it from a meritocratic angle. And when they saw excellence, even amongst native populations, they promoted it. For example, a big guy who hits people a lot. They're like, make this man the fucking chief of staff of the army immediately.

There is no army. There is no chief of staff. There is no military academy. Make one for him. I'm sure it'll work out great. They didn't even make a military academy. They had no additional training during Amin's first assignment as a lieutenant, one of two, while still being a member of the British-led newly renamed Ugandan rifles. He helped commit a mass slaughter of civilians and what was known as the Turkana incident. Seven months after this, Uganda's independent. And Milton Abote becomes prime minister. Now, Amin and Apollot's promotions were considered something of a stopgap,

while a group of Ugandans attended Sandhurst Military Academy for a more traditional military education. This is a process that takes a very long time. Though, in the meantime, the Ugandan military was largely still commanded by white British dudes who just stayed on during the transition. This caused a lot of problems with the newly independent country, as black soldiers were still criminally underpaid and treated, well, like they always had been. This led Abote and others to think of a very fast but short-term solution, an even harder crash course in Africanization. And I should be clear here, I'm not saying that leaving a bunch of white dudes in place is the right choice either.

Uganda didn't have any good choices available to them at the time. It was a matter of picking what they saw as the least bad of a series of bad. So they expanded the military. But the British really didn't want to help them do this. So they reached out to who else, but Israel. Yep. Who quickly began training the first pilots of the new Ugandan Air Force and an entire new battalion of soldiers for the army.

This is seen more as an attempt of a boatie trying to play the Israelis and British off one another to compete for influence in the newly independent country. Who could give me more stuff? And it's a good game to play if you're a newly independent, largely poor, weak nation. I mean, the Israelis also kind of did this between the US and the Soviet Union, quite frankly. Yes, they did. Yeah. At the same time, Amin was pro to major.

In case you're wondering, oh, did he go to Sandhurst or something? No, he did not. He still had not gone to any professional military education as an officer. Yeah. It's interesting at this point, like post-independence, because you have essentially the two strains of, of a newly independent former colonial country having two of the most mental cons at the helm in the form of Milton Abote and Ediamine.

Ediamine's working his way up, but he's about to come to the part that really brings him into national power in a way. And that is they're growing discontent within the Ugandan military. Abote attempted to calm soldiers with a promise of a pay raise, but he didn't have any money.

So he could never really tell anybody when they were actually going to get this raise. And then this was followed by a mutiny of soldiers stationed at the Jinja Barracks in 1964. This is not the first time that Ugandan soldiers had mutinyed, but it was the most serious since independence. The muting soldiers demanded not only a pay raise, but better food and the dismissal of all British men from the army. A government minister, Felix Onama, traveled to the barracks to try to calm them all down,

but like, boys, everything's going to be fine. You're going to get your pay raise. You know, smooth things over. over, but instead he's kidnapped by soldiers and force fed the soldier's shitty diet of rotten cornmeal until he vomits. Yeah, I suppose the point I was going to make earlier is that like, as in a lot of post-colonial countries like early on, you will have the two wings, you will have like the military kind of functionaries who are a holdover of the colonial power and then you will have people like

a boat who are like much more kind of like politicians and maneuvers and kind of a little bit like hooksters who will be like, okay, they're just solving problems as they crop up rather than having an overarching plan. And like the mutiny at Jujah is a perfect example of Abote being one of those. Yeah, Abote is no idea what he's supposed to do about this mutiny. But then Major Ediamine reappears because his job in the Uganda military was recruitment. And he was doing what he had always done and what the British had always done before him. And that was going to the north and recruiting his fellow tribesmen

because Amin also believes that they're the best soldiers in Uganda because well shit that's where I'm from and Amin has a deep deep love affair with the British military I mean it's easy to think of him most accurately as a bit of a teaboo this is what being a teaboo gets you

yeah he comes back down from the north during the mutiny he goes to the prime minister as something of an advocate for the soldiers but most importantly not a guy that's actively taking part in the mutiny. He asks for their demands to be met because he points out like things are going to get a lot worse if we don't do that. And Abote agrees. And in turn, he sees a mean as a loyalist to him. He did not take part in the mutiny and said he came and talked to me as a boy. So he's rewarded. And he's also seen as a guy that obviously soldiers will respect

because he became an advocate for them when they had nobody else. So mean gets appointed the commander of the ginger barracks. So as a result of the neither Abote, Apollat, or Amin, follow any recommendations given to them by a guy named Colonel John Tillett. He's the British guy that was technically second in command of the Ugandan Armed Forces. And Tillet is like, okay, well, you guys don't have a lot of money. You know, you're not part of the crown anymore, so we're not giving you a ton of money. Obviously, expanding the military is kind of a bad idea because you can't pay everybody. So maybe you should downsize it.

Then you don't have to worry about mutinies anymore, right? Right? They ignore him until it resigns as second in command, and he leaves the country before a successor could even be chosen. However, this was paired with the head of the Commonwealth office at the time. They're named Duncan Sandys going to, Duncan Sandys sounds like a kind of flavored coffee or a donut of some kind. That's some shit they do in Boston. Fucking Donkey Sandy's. He goes to Kampala to warn the Ugandan army that they're not going to be playing this shit anymore, this two-timing us with Israel. He insisted that a British commander

remain in place or all British assistants would be polled. And you can't be going to the Israelis for anything anymore. Command passes to a man named Colonel Groom. And the Ugandan army was essentially to remain a proxy of the British forces

a full two years after being independence from the crown. The British then turned on Minister Onama. This is because Onama favored Apollot over a mean for promotion, namely because Amin's reputation for brutality, mostly thanks to the Turkana incident, and because Amin was unfailingly pro-British. Amin was the opposite of a Ugandan nationalist.

He did not want Uganda to be independent at this point. So obviously the British wanted him to be the guy that gets promoted over Apalot, who is as much of a nationalist as Abote is. He wants Uganda to be independent. He wants Uganda to do anything it needs to do. get on its feet. Meanwhile, it means like, I don't know why we would work against the Brits. Why would we do that? This would change, of course. But for now. But Onama had already promoted Apollat to brigadier, meaning he outranked the Britsman, groom. And Apollot fired him with the

approval of Abote, which, look, everybody involved in this sucks. But there is a great chef's kiss moment when the former colonial guy gets to fire the British officer who's still kicking around? Perfect. Then Obote dismisses all British people from Ugandan service. Obote called this Ugandanization, which is slightly different than before, because it's going to be even faster and harder now. On paper, this is a great idea, and it did lead to a mass uplifting of Ugandan men within the military service. Within a few short years, Uganda went from having two men who were commissioned officers to having 55, though individual British soldiers remained on their job to do things that Uganda just did not know how to do yet.

You know, like operating radios, logistic systems, working on jets, things like that. It kind of goes without saying, though, that this mass, very rapid uplifting of newly promoted men means that they were wildly unqualified for the jobs that they had. This is, in my opinion, not their fault. They didn't have time or a chance to build a professional military or give them a professional military education yet. The Ugandan government simply did not have the means to do so, but Amin himself has promoted to colonel and then in 1964, deputy commander of the army, specifically still in charge of recruitment and training. This will not go badly at all. For anybody,

one of the first things he did was go back and rehire hundreds of soldiers that had been fired during previous mutinies. Amin publicly and privately within the government said that there was no mutiny. They were simply on strike. So you shouldn't be able to fire them. So this is, you know, the classic moving men's loyalty away from the state to you personally situation. I mean, again, made sure to stick to the recruitment standards that the British had taught him, only recruiting men from the north like himself. So not only is he earning the personal loyalty of the military. They're all from his backyard. And they all see people from the south of Uganda called Bugondans as outsiders, enemies, you know, whatever.

Abote and Onama continue to getting closer and closer with the Israelis, both in training and equipment, including pulling Ugandan officers out of training with the British and instead sending them to Israel instead, which not only pissed off the British, but it actually is a form of shooting themselves in the foot because they set them back years of professional development as the men were almost done at Sandhurst

and now had to start over in Israel. I heard they got this great ice cream flavor called WhatsApp, I need to try it. The Brits said fine, but also pulled the rest of their soldiers out of Uganda, including the ones that the Ugandans were still relying on for technical expertise. Now, in neighboring Congo, there was a rebellion against a Western-back anti-communist leader Bozy Shambay, whose Air Force began bombing Ugandan villages on the border, accusing Uganda of harboring rebels, which is because they were. Obote supported the rebels, but not openly. Instead, he tasked Amin with handling that. And this drove a wedge between Amin and Apollat, as Apollat was technically Amin superior,

and Abotei went around him to put Amin in charge of the effort. A good reason for this is Amin already had a pretty extensive track record for being willing to do horrendous shit if asked to. There's also this small fact that the Ugandan army was the most powerful part of Ugandan society, political, economic, or otherwise. and Amin had their loyalty. This was supported by Abate, who was quickly becoming one hell of an authoritarian

and was a northerner himself from the Langi tribe. So, saddling in with Amin and effectively the entire military was a good way for Abate to remain in power. There's another interesting wrinkle here, though. Uganda and Tanzania were together in their support for the Congolese rebels. Abote and Tanzanian president Julius Nayire

were good friends, and they both saw Shambe, is a little more than a Western puppet, which to be fair, he kind of was. So together with the mean, they began smuggling weapons to the Congolese rebels in exchange for resources like ivory and gold. Though since Uganda is pretty poor, they required resources up front, which they would then have to sell, get cash, and then trade them for with weapons, mostly with China. The weapons would then be brought into Uganda, stash into the back of a truck, and transported overland through Kenya, who was not in on the plan at all.

and then finally into Tanzania, and then finally over the Congolese border. Kenya stumbled upon this planet got really fucking pissed off, but a Bote and Amin's support for the rebels only got stronger. Rebels were training in Uganda, chilling at the Antabia airport, and some of them were even crashing on Amin's couch. Quite literally, they were hot couching through Amin's personal palace. The hot couch army.

It's worth pointing out as well as like the situation in the Congo at this time was like Patrice Lumumba was assassinated four years earlier and like cause general kind of uproar in Congo. Yeah, it was essentially a Western puppet state after that. But, you know, watch a soundtrack to a coup d'etat. You want to learn more about Patrice Lumumba. Yeah, I'm planning uncovering something to do with what's known as the Congo crisis at some point in the future. So look forward to that. They continued trading weapons for golden ivory, which the rebels were then bringing over the border by the literal truck. And remember, Amin is in charge of all this and has no idea how to run anything logistically.

He just simply kept all that shit literally lying around his house in the open until he could load it on to a plane, give it to a British guy as a go-between, and then fly off and make deals. He had piles of Congolese gold and ivory just sitting in his backyard and shit. Just a throne made out of gold and ivory. This is all pretty much out in the open and Ugandan opposition to Abate and Amin, mostly made up of Southerners and becoming more and more powerful

within the government, attempted to use it as a way to get them out of power. A motion was entered into parliament demanding a suspension of Amid pending an investigation into, you know, all of the illegal stuff. Abote and Onama were also both named in this parliamentary motion,

meaning the opposition was really going for it. Parliament itself overwhelmingly voted in favor of the motion. So Abote set up a commission, investigating a mean suspiciously large personal bank account with the rebels just hanging out at his house play in Xbox and the truck's full of gold and found all of these claims are without merit. Amazing how that happens.

We investigated ourselves and found out we've done no wrongdoing. They learned from the best, aka the Israelis. Then in February of 1966, Abote called a cabinet meeting and began arresting anyone he thought was disloyal to him. He arrested Apollot, he suspended the Constitution, and began ruling through Dictat. He ran into virtually no opposition to this, physically, at least thanks to Amin, who not only commanded the army, but the personal loyalty of the soldiers themselves, and any opposition to Abote would have to go through them first.

And since doing all this torpedoed virtually any remaining civilian political support, Amin became the only thing keeping Abate in power. Abote and Amin then moved forward to crush their most hated opposition figure, the traditional Bugandan king of the south. There's a system of traditional kings and kingdoms in Uganda. His name was Edward Moutisa of Buganda. He commanded a lot of the personal loyalty of the Southerners. A lot of Southerners wanted some kind of constitutional monarchy with him in charge.

And King Moutiza had a palace in Kampala. So, I mean, bombed the shit out of it, and he was driven into exile. A year later, he took a third wife. This was from the Langi tribe as like a political show of loyalty to Obote. Side note here, Amin would eventually go on to have six wives, but an unknowable amount of girlfriends that could be best understood as a Ugandan harem anime. I don't really want to go into Amin's love life here, but a certain point I kind of had to point out because it's kind of ridiculous.

and he loved his giant cousin. I just really want to tell the story of the gigantic cousin wife. Idiot in Robert Crone, the world's most cursed handshake. Eventually, a new constitution is written by Abate and lawmakers are forced to vote on it. While Amin soldiers literally watched over them gun in hand, making sure it would pass. He also attempted to force all kinds of economic reforms through, but this is where Abote and other dictators like him tend to run into prize. I don't want to call them successful dictators necessarily, but let's say dictators that actually

manage to move stuff along, get stuff done, build a state underneath them full of kind of sort semi-competent yes men to put in place to do whatever the dick head up top says, and then that actually gets done for the most part. Abote was not one of those men. He was so wildly unpopular, even amongst his own party, the Ugandan People's Congress or UPC, that it hardly even functioned at this point other than as a means for him to be in charge of something. State capacity, institutions, everything withered and died on the vine because he strangled the life out of the new country. Of course, Uganda was left as a mostly subsistence farming society by the British with the professional class and administration of the country when it was a colony

mostly made up of South Asian people that they brought in, starting in the 1800s, to act as what amounted to be middle management of the colony, they were a buffer between the Europeans and the African population. This created a massive wealth and economic disparity between South Asian and Black Ugandans. By the time independence rolled around, South Asian Ugandans, despite making up maybe 1% of the population, fully controlled a quarter of all economic activity. For black Ugandans, there is pretty much nothing outside of subsistence farming. The British favored the South Asians for education and promotion, even within Uganda, and they never really attempted, the British never really attempted to industrialize Uganda.

So, Abate attempted to, quote unquote, fix all of this with a state-controlled economy and controlled industrialization that could be best understood as confused dictator attempts to understand socialism, but only really skimmed something someone gave him once. He wrote a pamphlet underlying his ideology, what was called the common man's charter. But it was really nothing, because Abote was never really a socialist. And at the time, there wasn't really an empowered socialist movement within the country at all. And the few socialists that were there fucking hated Abote. They wanted nothing to do with him. And a lot of them had been put in jail by Abote. He just wrote a pamphlet that was as meaningful as any zine any of us has ever read.

It kind of goes without saying that a dictator who has stolen every bit of political power with no interest of ever giving it up cannot, in fact, start creating equality. This only created more political weakness for the unpopular abate, while Amin openly boasted that dude was only in power because he let him be. The two men had been growing to fucking hate one another, pretty much as soon as they were done blowing up the old king's palace. Amin, always close with the British, kept up his personal contacts despite the fact that Abate hated them. And the British were pretty convinced it was only a matter of time before one of them killed the other, but they weren't sure who was going to do it.

Abote is about to experience the, I hate when my dogs turn into snakes. The British even thought that Amin was seeking their approval for a future coup. And this is while Amin was just doing whatever he wanted within the army, like cutting deals with China to send train. and equipment, something the British only picked up on when the high commissioner was kind of sort of kidnapped into Amin's home for drinks at night and saw that over Amin's fireplace, there was suddenly a large picture of Mao Zedong on the wall. A side note here, because this is very funny. Amin thought that the Chinese were sending military trainers, but instead, the Chinese officers

that they sent were just sitting down Ugandan soldiers and telling them all about Maoism. Yes. Yes. All of this was happening as Amin became close personal friends with Colonel Baruch-Lev of the Israeli Defense Force and head of the Israeli mission in Uganda. Bar-Lev was giving Amin virtually everything he wanted from weapons to jets to training in exchange for Uganda voting in favor of Israel at the UN, as well as a few other things. As an extra handshake agreement, Amin would be allowed to freely travel to Israel for medical treatment

due to a horrible case of gout he was suffering thanks to his uncontrolled alcoholism. Amin was constantly sauced up. Even Barlev, Amin's closest friend, thought that Amin was hamstringing all of the training efforts. Amin was sending men for officers training to Israel, but he sent people he personally liked, recruited through the same process that he had been recruited from. He favored rural men from the north, mostly from the tribes he was related to, many of whom still had little to no education whatsoever.

So Bar-Lev was confused when he started getting illiterate truck drivers sent him for a three-month crash course in professional military education. You could see how this would be a problem for like an infantry officer candidate. You can kind of sort of work around this for some things, but you could see how it would be a much bigger problem if said illiterate dude was selected to be a pilot, which happened quite often. If I mean liked a guy and he only liked a guy if he was unquestionably following orders, they would find themselves being rapidly promoted over much more qualified people,

creating a very top-heavy military of the unqualified. Middle and junior-grade officers arguably became the only capable men within the ranks, but had all of their power and commandability taken away from them and siphoned upwards due to the simple fact that Amin was not their friend. By 1969, Uganda's political situation was pure unrelenting chaos. The country was largely torn between Abote and Amin, with Abate absolutely certain that Amin was plotting to kill him, which may or may not have been true. At a party meeting that same year, someone took a shot at Abate, with pretty much everyone

assuming that the guy worked for Amin, but we still actually don't really know. Aboate was only kind of winged by the bullet, and a quick and very bad investigation of course put the blame on a southerner, not connected to Amin, mostly because Amin was never going to be found connected to anything by the Ugandan police or military. In turn, the army and police began setting up checkpoints and brutalizing Southerners under the guise of looking for the gunmen. A general from the army at a meeting publicly accused the mean of being bad at his job in response to the assassination, which was the first time this has ever happened to Amin. So within days, that general and his wife were killed in a drive-by shooting.

I was about to say, I think this is only going to go one way. Yeah, you probably shouldn't be the first man to criticize Amin in public. It's not going to end well for you. Yeah. Yeah. In turn, Abote began to attempt to break Amin's control over the army. He knew that on a long enough timeline, Amin was going to win this battle because Amin control the security services.

So he created and then enlarge the general services unit or the GSU. This is a kind of paramilitary slash intelligence. unit that answered only to the office of the prime minister, rather than Amin, with the explicit and public goal of countering threats from within the army and police. Abote made sure to staff this unit with men from his own tribe and made sure it was commanded by people that would be loyal to him, like his cousin. No word if his cousin was equally the same size as him or not. He has so many cousins in the back pocket, each of them larger than the other. This also kind of implies the possibility of pansexual idiomian in so long as you're his cousin.

It's a Ugandan nesting doll with it, but with increasingly larger cousins. Reverse nesting. Sorry, it's weird. Soon the best weapons being purchased by the state were being funneled into the GSU rather than the army. But Amin was also purchasing weapons, mostly illegally and funneling them towards the army, with his money that he had stolen from the government and also Congolese. these rebels. This is where things get kind of messy. With what is known as the Anyanya affair, Amin, independent from Abotei, was still working with Israel, as Israel got heavily involved in Sudan's civil war, supporting the southern Sudanese against the north, hoping to create

another outposts in their larger geopolitical, anti-Arab, anti-Islamic policies. Israel wanted to use Uganda as a go-between to refuel their planes which were shipping weapons with Abote at first as head of state refused and sought to sever ties with Israel altogether. Meanwhile, Amin simply ignored Obote and secretly continued working with them. This involved like Israeli planes were just landing in and Tebe, completely unknown from the actual government, the Ugandan military is fully supporting them. And this went on until August of 1970 when a German mercenary named Ralph Steiner was

caught on the Ugandan Sudanese border by the GSU. Now this normally wouldn't be such a big problem. It's just another mercenary. It's Africa in the 1970s. There's a lot of these guys floating around there, especially with the Civil War happening in Sudan. But Steiner

happened to be carrying a detailed diary of all of his meetings with the mean and the Israelis in it. Steiner might be bad at his job. Is when you take mindfulness journaling too far and you end up fucking up the spot, you know? This is quite literally the Stringer Bell moment of like, are you taking

notes in the middle of a criminal fucking conspiracy? It's amazing how often people seem to be doing this. Like, this is the first time we've invoked the reference to Stringer Bell in the in the meeting. Like, people are just constantly like, I love writing down all this incriminating information and carrying it on my person at all times. Yeah, people, you know, they're talking

shit about Steiner, but maybe he was neurodivergent. Maybe he had the ADHD and he had to try and create some sort of like mindfulness practice to remember all the points that Idi Amin had made. So he's just journaling. He really loved gossip. This is why... Messy bitch who loved drama.

This is why the tender dictator would employ him. Yeah, you don't have to compromise me. I'll compromise me, bitch. In September, Abote sent Amin to Egypt as the Ugandan representative at Gamal Abdel Nassar's funeral. And while Amin was gone, Abate attempted to take over the army. He promoted everyone just one rank automatically.

and rapidly began appointing his own loyalists within key positions of this new version of the military. And now the Ugandan chief of staff would only answer to Abote rather than Amin, who, he did not fire from being the overall commander of the army. Abote loyalists were dismissed from the army entirely or sent far away from Kampala to far-flung duty station so they couldn't be used for any possible coup. When Amin returned, he quickly began moving behind the scenes, joining politically with Abote's main opposition. The Ugandan Muslim community, which is not just a broad term. It's the name of a political party, the UMC, made up of the same Southerners that Amin had just crushed a few years before. And this is also the first time that you see Amin really grasping at his Islamic faith as a mean of political power, because he is a Muslim. He has been his entire life.

not a very well practicing one he only really tries that to get Omar Gaddafi to like him but he knows the community and everything but this is the first time he's really grasping onto it as a means for power he's not just a sensitive dictator he's a performative Muslim as well

bro is not praying five times a day he is not on his dean I mean he's also like again a crippling alcoholic who has gout from all of the drinking during this period and for a lot of period afterwards which we'll talk about in the next three episodes. There's secret flights of, like, the Ugandan Air Force flying into airports in London and

Scotland and picking up whole pallets full of alcohol to bring back to Amin as like a gift from the British. So the Brits were basically keeping him sauced up? Yeah. Yeah, they were. It was away from like Curry favor. They knew at this point Amin was still absolutely a Tiyibu. He's working with the Israelis shore, but he sees that as more of like Amiens to an end.

He still loves the UK. He fucking loves them. RIP, Edie, I mean, you would have loved taking a selfie outside Big Ben with Chinese tourists. He would have done it. But we'll get to his visit to the UK in a later episode. RIPI, Idi, I mean, I would have loved to know what you thought of Bridgerton. As Abatei remained in power, he became politically opposed to the Brits and the Israelis, especially in regards to African nationalism and apartheid era South Africa and Rhodesia.

Obviously, the Brits opposed African nationalism, and both the Brits and the Israelis were supporters of the racist regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia. Side note, it's Zimbabwe now. Then Abote, thinking he was fully in command of the state security forces, went for the killing blow against the mean. Rather than just shooting him, which is normally how these things end, he began to investigate him for the murder of that general and his wife, who died in the drive-by shooting. He also accused him of embezzling tens of millions of dollars for the Ministry of Defense. Now this is an easy slam dunk for a boat day

because he had been helping him do that. He's like, I know you did it. I kept the receipts. Here's a photo of the two of us with all this gold. I'm not actually stealing it. I'm just there to like help you steal it. Here's a photo of you and your military uniform made out of only

ivory tusks. It was clear to Amin that he was pretty fucked and even complained about it to Bar-Lev over drinks, saying his loyalists were sent away and now Abate's man outnumbered his own in the capital. So Bar-Lev gave him some free advice. He advised him to bring in a core of loyalists, a couple hundred, and equipped them with heavy weapons, not rifles and pistols, but tanks and artillery. Bar-Lev then gave him a detailed rundown of the GSU and units loyal to Abate, which he had, because he had helped set them up, saying,

Yeah, there's thousands of them, but they're lightly armed, and you can take them out with heavier formations. So, Amin launched his coup on January 25th, 1971. It goes very quickly. His soldiers quickly arrest many of the Abote loyalists within the ranks. Sometimes this coup is framed as happening with the explicit help of the British. This is contrary to any evidence that we actually have. They seemed as surprised about the coup as Abote was. According to Cable sent from Kampala, from the High Commissioner's office to London, the first person to inform any British authority of what was happening was Colonel Barlev.

Barlev informed them that Amin struck Abate because Abate was about to arrest Amin, which was technically probably correct. So it's more accurate to suggest that Israel helped Edia mean Plana's coup, but even then it really just seems to be the passion project of this one guy. By 4 p.m. that day, it was announced over radio that Abote was gone and Amin was now in charge, behind what he called the 18 points, which was pretty much just a list of general grievances as to why Abate was a bad leader. And again, to be fair, the points made are valid, like arbitrary detention, a horrible economy, widespread corruption. And of course, Amid left out the

fact that he was a pretty big reason that all of these were a problem in the first place. Amin framed all this as him reluctantly taking power because you don't understand, I simply had no choice. And in some tellings of this, Amin actually says, the soldiers launched the coup and then forced him to take command at gunpoint against his will. This is obviously untrue.

But several different ways he tells the story. The coup was at first welcomed by the army, the southerners, the northerners, and virtually everybody other than the Langi and Acholi tribes. Though to be clear for virtually everyone, this was a universal fuck-de-that-guy moment. Outside of the loyalists within the army,

nobody liked Amin. And soon those people began to hear small arms fire as Amin loyalists disarmed and murdered Abote loyalists all throughout Kampala. This slaughter eventually went from Kampala to villages, hunting soldiers, cops, and leaders

from the Langi and Acholi tribes. The hit list was extensive, and between the two tribes, they made up about a third of the Ugandan security forces after Abote did his shock reforms when Amin was away. Southerners previously oppressed by the Abote government quickly joined in with the security forces, massacring civilians in an orgy of violence that would become commonplace during Edie Amin's reign. For the Langi and Acholi soldiers within the military, their fate was very clear, fight and die, or run over the the border to join Nabote in exile and plot their next steps in either Kenya or Tanzania.

Amin then announced the birth of the Second Republic of Uganda and released a ton of political prisoners to win people over. This included a lot of people he had put in prison, including Apollot, his former rival. In these early stages of Amin's rule, and I mean early stages, he brought in people from across Uganda for his new administration. Southerners, Northerners, South Asians, all while being supported by the UK, US, and Israel. The African leaders in Kenya, Tanzania, and Sudan, his immediate neighbors, fucking hated him for obvious reasons and rejected his coup attempt. And virtually none of this was made better by the fact that as soon as Amin took over,

Ugandan and Tanzanian soldiers began shooting at one another over the border. This had to do with a piece of land that will become very, very important to our story in just a little bit. called the Kigara salient. This is a piece of land that Amin and other Ugandans believed belonged to Uganda and had been given to Tanzania by the British during the whole border drawing process of independence. Ugandaans generally believe that the real border of the two countries was the Kigara River. And Tanzania and the British had simply stolen nearly 2,000 square miles of what was rightfully theirs. That's their argument. There's a lot of historical back and forth on that one. But as the borders fell, there was a bit of a salient north of the

Kigera River, 2,000 square miles, where they end up drawing the Ugandan border, Ediamine and Abote to a lesser extent. And Abote is eventually going to drop all of that in the future for reasons we'll go into. To have said, their border, it's simply much easier to make it the river. No reasons why making it simple and easy also benefits Uganda. In comparison to his African neighbors, Amin was treated as an honored head of state by Israel and the UK. In the UK, he hung out with the queen, he flew on her personal plane, he met the prime minister, he got to hang out in Sandhurst and play military officer, and of course, famously, Scotland,

all while the press wrote glowingly about how he rightfully kicked out of Bote. The British press at this point loved Ediaveen. Yeah, I think this is something that we're going to get into in subsequent episodes of like, Idi Amin's figure on the international stage was interesting and allowed him to get away with a lot of stuff. It bounces back and forth wildly as time goes on. Another thing he did while in the UK was meet with the Ministry of Defense in MI6. The reason for this was Amin was paranoid about a possible invasion from Tanzania.

The country's leader, Nairi, hated Amin and was a close ally of Abate, and not only an ally, like a friend, and Tanzania's military was currently undergoing its own reform training and armament program in a very practical way we'll talk about in a couple episodes. Amin demanded to know when this invasion was coming, to which the Brits were very, very confused. There was no invasion coming. Tanzania had no military capability to launch an invasion of Uganda to speak of, and all of this was pure paranoid fantasy. Amin did not believe them, and now began blaming the British for helping Tanzania. The other meetings didn't go any better. With Amin telling the UK, he was going to move forward with one policy he's arguably best known for today, expelling Uganda's South Asia

population, calling them simply UK passport holders, which some, but not all, were. Now, it didn't matter if they had a UK passport or not at the end of the day, because Amin began seeing them all every South Asian in Uganda as British and not Ugandan. The UK kind of assume this is coming anyway because Abote actually originally came up with this plan. It had been a couple years before then and he never really pulled it off. So Amin may have actually done it, but Milton Abote is actually one that came up with the program.

And they're not even the only population that these two men would expel from Uganda. Now, the Brits tried to talk him out of it and failed. And Amin didn't really bring this up as Amin. of discussion or like negotiations, his mind was already made up and he quickly pivoted from like this conversation about expelling tens of thousands of people

into I want hairier jump jets like at the drop of a hat. This is a pretty big problem for the Brits because Uganda's economy has been run into the ground. The UK had already given them a ton of weapons on loan and they never paid them off.

The debt was just racking up and up and up and up. And while Ediamine is sitting there trying to get Harrier Jump Jets a wild-the-expensive highly technical weapons platform that Uganda just did not have the ability to pay for years or maintain. While he's sitting there doing that, it's found out that, like,

Amin's counterpart, his Minister of Defense, is in France trying to get a different highly technical jet from France. So like that pissed off both France and the UK who give them nothing. So then he turns to Israel who pretty much does the same thing

because they've been giving them this shit on debt, and he's not servicing it at all. He's not paying back any loans to anybody. So, Amin returns to Uganda, empty-handed, pissed off, and pretty goddamn sure there's a Tanzanian invasion coming any moment now. And that is where we'll pick up next time on part two. You know, I know a little bit about this part of the story because my good friend and friend of the show, Hussein Kisvani, his family were Ugandan Asians who were expelled in the 70s. and his parents were teenagers at the time. And yeah, like, most of these people did not have British passports.

They were British subjects because that's how the Commonwealth worked. And they also, when they got to the United Kingdom, their experience was quite poor in terms of how they were received. And so this is a thing you hear in other post-colonial countries as well. But in this specific case, it feels like it was just, if I remember correctly, Idi Amin was like, it came to me in a dream that I have to purify Uganda. Well, it was originally Milton Obote's idea when Milton Obote was head of state and he just never did it.

I mean, got right in there and got to work, unfortunately. And for Americans, actually, recently had to learn that there were, in fact, South Asians from Uganda because that's where Zoran Mamdani's family's from. And his father plays a part in this story. We will get to him on part four. But fellas, that is the Kigera War.

part one. We got a whole lot more to go. But until then, you host other podcasts. Plug those other podcasts. Trash Future. What a hell way to dad. Kill James Bond or no gods, no mayors. All shows I'm involved with some extent. Please check them out. Beneath the skin and blood work. And you can follow me on Instagram at Scam Golden G-O-L-D-I-N. I feel like the Michael Jordan Flew game right now. So I'm going to stop talking. This is still the only show that I host. Thanks for listening to it. Consider supporting us on Patreon. Five bucks a month gets you absolutely everything from every episode early to our entire backlog of nearly eight years of bonus content, side series, discord access, side series like

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