Real Dictators - Idi Amin Part 1: The Butcher of Uganda

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

From 1971 to 1979, President Idi Amin Dada devastated Uganda. The military dictator sank the economy and deported an entire ethnic class. He slaughtered up to half a million of his fellow citizens. All with the persona of 'Big Daddy', the playful joker. His image as a buffoon, however, belied his extraordinary charisma and his mastery of communication. In a continent ravaged by empire, his bloody tale is part of a much larger story. Let's explore the life of Africa's most infamous son. A Noiser production, written by Jeff Dawson. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's a November night in 1956, in the British protectorate of Uganda, in the heart of East Africa. On the northern shore of Lake Victoria sits the city of Kampala. Tucked away in its back streets is a gymnasium. In the tropical air, two boxers slug it out. They smack worn leather gloves into each other, harder and harder, over and over, staying just within the parameters of the Queensbury rules. Amid the smell of sweat beneath the pall of cigarette smoke, the spectators yell themselves hoarse.

The two men trying to beat the living daylights out of each other are heavyweights, powerful punchers, both trying out for the Uganda Amateur Boxing Association Championships. The first, Les Peach, is a white colonial police officer. The other man, a few years younger, is an army sergeant, African, black. Over from the barracks in Ginger. There have been a number of police contestants. Peach is well known. His opponent, however, is an enigma. Though one thing marks him out, even by the standards of the weight division, he's huge.

An absolute man-mountain. 6'4", maybe 6'6", in height, weighing in at near 300 pounds, as wide as a door frame, with a thick, muscular neck, triable scars, and fists the size of shovels. What's more, shuffling around in black trunks and casually half-laced boots. He carries himself with an extraordinary confidence, has an aura about him, a raw magnetism, something almost supernatural. Stories of his unit's patrols in the bush

come with descriptions of the young man's utter ruthlessness towards the rebels they've been hunting down. But it's not the young man's night. He's forced to the ropes and pummels. He topples back onto the canvas. To a roar and a shower of beer, Peach is proclaimed victor. But his opponent's time will come. The vanquished boxer will ultimately become Ugandan heavyweight champion. By his own estimation, he will hold the title unbroken for a full nine years. Ordinarily, this would rank as a crowning achievement.

But here, it will be but a footnote to an extraordinary life. For this young sergeant, this young heavyweight, will one day become not just the army's field marshal, but his country's leader, president of Uganda. At the peak of his powers, he will be viewed by many as the most famous, most infamous person ever to have come out of the African continent. His name is Sergeant Idi, Idi Amin. His name is Sergeant Idi. Idi Amin. My name is Paul McGann. This is part one of the Idi Amin story.

And this is Real Dictators. Charismatic, strong, but always with an air of dangerous unpredictability about him. President Idi Amin of Uganda will cultivate a legion of fans. Some Ugandans to this day, many born long after his rule, still hail him as a hero, their nation's godfather. But there's an inconvenient truth, their nation's godfather. But there's an inconvenient truth that Amin is responsible for a scale of brutality to rank with any despot in history.

The butcher of Uganda, the butcher of Africa, the killer of Kampala, the black Hitler. You can take your pick from the many monikers bestowed upon him. The greatest brute an African mother has ever brought to life, as his long-time political rival Milton Obote put it. For eight years, from 1971 to 1979, Idi Amin will devastate Uganda's economy, deporting

an entire ethnic class in the process. All this while slaughtering, by some estimates, up to half a million of his fellow citizens. He is a man accused, quite literally, of acquiring a taste for the blood of his enemies. If there's a constant, going back to that boxing ring and way before that. It is that Idi Amin will forever be a man of strength, of machismo, of violence. And it's not just in the boxing ring where he excels. He's a superb swimmer. At rugby he earns a reputation as a fearsome second row forward, the powerhouse of the scrum. Later in life he'll claim to have run the hundred yards in under nine

seconds. This will raise a few eyebrows, it would make him the world record holder, and then some. But such is the way in the court, the circus, that surrounds Idi Amin. Even in, say, the account of the boxing match at the outset of this story, collision of fact and fantasy is an everyday hazard. Self-awarder of the Victoria Cross, self-proclaimed conqueror of the British Empire, the self-anointed king of Scotland. A huge pinch of salt will be needed

with practically every public utterance, not to mention those of his perplexed biographers. Daniel Kalinaki is a journalist with Nation Media Group in East Africa. Idi Amin's legacy is a contested one, and I think will be contested for many, many years to come. There is no doubt that his regime was marinated in the blood of many innocents. There isn't a proper examination of his legacy and the separation of the good bits,

however few they were, from the bad bits. So I think it is a contested legacy, will be contested for many, many years to come. And the importance of programs like this is it probably gets younger people to begin thinking about it. Now, regardless of whatever conclusion they reach, it should be one that examines the facts rather than the propaganda around the man and the myth

around the things that he did or didn't do. So who is Idi Amin? And how did we get here? Unpicking the life of Amin is an almost impossible task. Very little is known about his early days. He had no compulsion to write journals, pen and autobiography, or even record thoughts. Such things were of little concern to a man whose formal education did not proceed beyond the elementary. His decisions were made on instinct, if not impulse.

He was often depicted in the West as a buffoon. But this characterisation ignored his mastery of political manipulation. This was a man who could speak twelve languages. He was no idiot. The lack of a recorded history only enhances Amin's mystique as a leader. He reveled in the folklore, the uncertainty, the superstition that was spun around him. It was all part of his power. Stories abound of severed heads in the fridge, of opponents being fed to crocodiles, of cannibalism.

of opponents being fed to crocodiles, of cannibalism. The image has been compounded in books, by documentaries, an Oscar-winning film, the only consistency being their inconsistency when it comes to details. Mark Leopold, Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, is author of Idi Amin, the story of Africa's icon of evil. Well, partly it's difficult to know the truth about Idi Amin because there are practical problems in terms of getting hold of the information, especially for the early years, but also because he very quickly, after taking power, became very well known in the West, in Britain particularly,

as an extreme comic, frightening, threatening, monstrous, funny, a much larger-than-life character. And in that process, stories got told and retold. Amin's political enemies when he was in power were very keen to spread stories of how dreadful he was and of atrocities he was supposed to have committed. But this was tangled up with these sort of very mythical aspects of him, which amounted to fundamentally a racist stereotype. One thing is clear. To begin to understand Amin and the mythology around him,

you have to know something of the country he calls home. Where and what is Uganda? he calls home. Where and what is Uganda? And how did the history of this land shape the life of its most notorious son? Let's go back, all the way to the Middle Ages. Just off the coast of East Africa lies the small island of Zanzibar. Since as far back as the 1st century AD, traders from Arabia have been sailing down from the north and settling here. From Zanzibar they ply their wares

on the African mainland, up and down what is known as the Swahili coast, a thousand-mile stretch of seaboard ranging from the Horn of Africa all the way to Mozambique. The very word Swahili, derived from Arabic, means just that, coast. But what lies beyond Africa's coastline? The merchants and traders are becoming increasingly curious.

From Zanzibar, caravans are dispatched to penetrate deep into the mainland interior. Making contact with the inland tribes, the Arabs trade Indian silk for ivory and gold. The commerce makes Zanzibar fabulously wealthy, a byword for opulence. The island becomes known for its exotic homegrown produce – cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg. And there is another prized commodity they peddle in Zanzibar – human beings. From the medieval period onwards, hundreds of thousands of slaves are transported from East Africa via Zanzibar. Over time the slave traders push further and further inland Often exploiting tribal conflicts to seize their quarry

Slaves are shipped on to the Arabian Peninsula Persia, India and Madagascar Forced to till the soil, work the fields Their treatment is brutal By the 19th century Zanzibar, under the rule of a sultan, is at its peak as a rich offshore trading station, a gateway to the African continent. As late as 1897, long after slavery has been abolished in large parts of the world, the market squares within Zanzibar's old walled city still teem with forlorn,

chained Africans. But it's not just Arab traders plundering East Africa. By the Victorian era, Western eyes have also been drawn to this corner of the continent. At first, it's Christian missionaries who make headway. Men like the celebrated Dr. Livingstone want to highlight and end the practice of human bondage. But another motive soon emerges for entering this last uncharted patch of the so-called Dark Continent. The Europeans are searching for a holy grail of sorts, the source of the River Nile.

Control of this waterway, Africa's mightiest river, grail of sorts, the source of the River Nile. Control of this waterway, Africa's mightiest river, will gift a massive strategic advantage in the colonial scramble for Africa. And if it can curtail the Arab-Swahili slave trade in the process, more the better. In 1858, a Briton, an explorer called John Hanning Speak, is the first recorded European to set foot in what we now call Uganda. He is the first to spy the fabled body of water from which outflows the Nile. Without stopping to consult the locals, Speak names it Lake Victoria, after his queen.

This is the very last part of Africa to be discovered. Discovered that is by Europeans, not of course by the people who already live there. But sure enough, where explorers and missionaries lead, entrepreneurs follow. They rush to exploit the area's natural resources. There are rich pickings to be had, the soil is incredibly fertile, and there are minerals, copper, gold. And the slave trade? Don't worry, they'll sort that out later. Tom Lowman is a teaching fellow in African history at the University of Warwick. East Africa itself, particularly in the Great Lakes region, enjoys excellent rainfall,

and that enables enormous cash crop production. And this is something that colonial territories become increasingly interested in. It's the abundance in the very lush green terrain first draws people's attention, but then it's the recognition that you can grow large amounts of coffee, other kinds of crops as well. And obviously coffee becomes an enormous export. It doesn't have mineral wealth on the same scale as somewhere like Nigeria or somewhere like South Africa where diamond and gold or oil is discovered. Its wealth in many ways is both in its manpower and also in its potential as a grower of abundant crops as well.

The Imperial British East Africa Company moves in. crops as well. The Imperial British East Africa Company moves in. In 1888, the East Africa Protectorate is established, known later as the Colony of Kenya, pronounced in those days as Kenya. Beyond Kenya, the company begins consolidating treaties with local tribes. The idea is to establish a smaller sister colony, a Kenya II. This second parcel of land is about the size of the state of Oregon, similar square mileage to the UK. It will be fused around an ancient kingdom, Buganda, with a B, home of the Ganda, or Bagandan people.

with a B, home of the Gander or Bagandan people. Buganda for over half a millennium has acted as the conduit to the lands beyond. It dominates the trade on Lake Victoria. It's a perfect jumping-off point for a new imperial venture. What's more, its king, the Kabaka, is a man quite happy to don a Western-style suit. He's been wooed by the tales of Britain's economic ambitions. When the British make their way into the interior and discover the Baganda are one of the first social groups they discover, and they are very taken with them, and I think the reasons they're very taken with them aren't that hard to deduce.

It's a stratified kingdom that take their king very seriously. And so for the British, they're seeing a little bit of themselves, I think, in the reflection of what they find. When advanced kingdoms are found in Africa, Westerners and outsiders get very excited. Advanced in their lingo means looks most like us and behaves most like us. So that's what happens with the Ugandan kingdoms in the south. A deal is struck. In 1894, heel is struck. In 1894, Buganda becomes the keystone of the British Protectorate of Uganda. The new name is as clumsy as it is insulting. The Swahili-speaking traders, who brought the ancient kingdom to British attention, do not pronounce the B at the start of a word. The imperial authorities never bother to check. Uganda, in name at least, is a colony by mistake. Trade is the primary form the British Empire takes here.

Trade backed up by arms, if need be. Derek Peterson is Ali Mazrui Collegiate Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Particularly in the south and west of Uganda, colonial government was experienced not really as an exercise in violence, but rather as an exercise in cooperation. Colonial government involved a kind of cooperative relationship between a ruling aristocracy on the one hand, the aristocracy of the Kingdom of Uganda, the aristocracies of other of Uganda's kingdoms, Ankole, Toro, Busoga, and British administrators on the other. The exception to that was Bunyoro, which the British conquered by force of arms in the late 19th century and brought about a

demographic catastrophe in which tens of thousands of people were killed. Nonetheless, a kind of demographic catastrophe in which tens of thousands of people were killed. Nonetheless, for Buganda in particular, British colonialism was really quite a good deal. It didn't involve the overt use of military violence. To the contrary, the ruling aristocracy enjoyed great power and privileges. Staggeringly, with the acquisition of Uganda, a full quarter of the entire globe is now under British rule. With this final piece of the jigsaw, British possessions in Africa extend in one uninterrupted sweep from Cairo to the Cape. Unlike many places situated on the equator, Uganda rests on a high plateau. It is on average

a mile above sea level. This gives it a pleasant climate, one agreeable to Europeans. And its soil is conducive to another valuable cash crop, cotton. In 1902, the British Cotton Growing Association moves in. In London, the popular magazine Punch disagrees with the glossy prospectus. It suggests that in Uganda, Britain has been sold something rather useless, a white elephant. But a young journalist-cum-politician called Winston Churchill gives the new protectorate his seal of approval. In his best-selling travelogue, My African Journey, he declares Uganda to be the pearl of Africa.

Governing Uganda will be done according to a standard procedure. The kingdom of Buganda may be on side, but out in the sticks there are ancient tribal rivalries to manipulate. It's the same old ploy. The white settlers, meanwhile, as in Kenya, grab the best land for themselves. Mariam Mufti is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Now, famously, the British are known for divide and rule strategies in order to consolidate their colonies. Now, in Uganda, these divisions are fostered, but they're not created by the British.

I think the British take advantage of pre-existing divisions. And those pre-existing divisions were on the north-south divide in Uganda. The north is poor, it's relatively backward, it's uneducated. It is also a land which is not being used agriculturally, so it's infertile land. Whereas the south is more familiar with sophisticated political systems, with kingdoms, the largest kingdom of which is Buganda. This is where the British choose to settle, in the south. Now, when the British arrive in the southern part of Uganda, well, they end up contributing more to its advancement. They bring with them education, the missionaries bring with them money to invest in Uganda. The British end up using the Bugandan people as agents of imperialism.

So they encourage the Bugandans to start invading other kingdoms, fighting with other kingdoms, and trying to acquire land, surrounding land in the southern part of Uganda. And the way they're rewarded is by giving them land. These Bugandan people started earning cash from these British colonizers. The Bugandans, they are now becoming more and more powerful in Uganda. The British, they are managing to consolidate their control over

Uganda as a colony. It's not just the British who are flocking to the new colony. 32,000 workers of Indian origin, largely from the Punjab, are shipped in to help construct the Uganda Railway. It will link the protectorate to the coast at Mombasa. Such is the Indian prominence that up until 1920 the rupee is used as East Africa's official currency.

It is said that the railway will help put an end to the accursed slave trade, but it will also provide a means to export, to exploit Uganda's riches. And so the new British Protectorate of Uganda is consolidated. In 1902, to police these East African possessions, an army regiment is established. It's called the King's African Rifles. Its 4th Battalion, known simply as 4KAR, is designated to protect Uganda. It's run along typically colonial lines. Native troops, known as the Askari, serve under white officers.

The regiment will serve with distinction through both world wars, against the Germans in East Africa in World War I, and later against the Italians in Ethiopia and the Vichy French in Madagascar in World War II. To young East African men, men who want to make something of themselves, to advance beyond the lot of the village or the plantation. Joining the rifles presents a way out. This is especially the case for those from Uganda's impoverished north. The people who lived in the south

had high opportunities to go to school in the early days, get sucked into the colonial civil service, while those from the north then tended to be taken in as men in the end. The construct was such that it was inevitable that the army that emerged had a lot more men and then officers who were coming from the northern parts of the country. In the coming decades, one such northerner will take the king's African rifles, the whole Ugandan army in fact, by storm. But all in good time.

Right now, in the early 1920s, Idi Amin is only just arriving in this world. Tucked away in the northwest of Uganda, at its furthest extremity, lies a region known as the West Nile. This area is bounded by the banks of Africa's greatest river. The mighty waterway serves as a division. It separates this territory from the rest of the country. It is in the West Nile region, near the sleepy town of Koboko, that Idi Amin grows up. This is one of the few facts about him that is undisputed. Whether he was born in the West Nile is open to question, as is the matter of when.

A peculiar feature of Idi Amin's life, even in power, is that his age is never mentioned. A peculiar feature of Idi Amin's life, even in power, is that his age is never mentioned. Between 1925 and 1928 is the usual estimate for the year of his birth. Some say as early as 1923. And as for the month, who knows? Koboko is a border town. It sits at a crossroads between Uganda, the Sudan, and the Belgian Congo. The predominant tribe in this area is the Kakwa. It is to this people that Idi Amin belongs.

The Kakwa are spread across all three neighboring countries. They've never been a convenient fit for the imperial cartographers. In the West Nile, random lines on a map mean little to the locals. They are but a curiosity. You'll notice in the writing on Idi Amin when he's in power, there's this quite fraught attempt to pin down where he comes from and how that's shaping things and the role that plays, and it definitely does play a role. West Nile in particular was complicated because it was on two different international borders, the Uganda-Sudan and Uganda-Congo borders. Amin's tribe, the Kakwa

people, spilled over all those boundaries. The Congo-Uganda border was defined in the early colonial period as being the watershed of the Nile and Congo rivers. So it's across the top of a range of hills and on one side the rivers flow down to the River Congo and on the other side the rivers flow down to the River Nile. And on the Nile side that was to be Uganda and on the side, that was to be the Congo. But it was never demarcated. It was never actually shown exactly on the ground where this watershed was. And I interviewed a British colonial officer who said that in the 1950s, in the run up to Congo independence, somebody in London thought that they really ought to demarcate this border. And they sent this junior colonial officer to do that. And he said, well, what do I do?

And they said, well, if the rivers run that way, that's Congo. And if they run that way, that's Uganda. And he said, well, what if there aren't any rivers up there? And they said, well, just piss on the ground and see which way it goes. And that's how Britain created Africa's borders. The West Nile region has been spliced, almost as an afterthought, onto the protectorate. Amin's tribe, the Kakwa, have ended up Ugandan by accident as much as design. It's something that will be held against Amin in later life,

that he was never a true Ugandan to begin with, whatever that actually means. One of Amin's sons, Hussein, will later insist that Idi Amin was not born in the West Nile, even if he did spend much of his childhood there. Rather, Hussein says, his father was born down born in the West Nile, even if he did spend much of his childhood there. Rather, Hussein says, his father was born down south in the capital Kampala, possibly in a police compound, where Amin's own father possibly served as a law officer. The name of Amin's father is Andreas Nayabira Tomoresu. He too is a member of the Kakwa tribe. Amin's mother, Aisha Ate, is from a related West Nile tribe, the Lugbara.

He grew up in a very deprived and obscure corner of Uganda, and it would be very unusual for someone from his kind of background to have had their birth registered with the government or anything like that. But he also encouraged any kind of rumors about his past that might be seen to make him more powerful. Whatever the case, we can say with a degree of confidence that Idi Amin does spend his early years in the West Nile. Life here is hard. There is fishing to be had on the river, but away from it, on the parched scrublands, the only living to be scratched is from raising undernourished cattle. Moving south to find work would not have been unreasonable for Amin's father.

Going south to find work would not have been unreasonable for Amin's father. In the new protectorate, that's where the jobs are, in Kampala, around Lake Victoria, in the plantations, in the factories, on the railway or the docks. The people of the West Nile will always feel different. They're outsiders. They're nestled between the Bantu peoples of Equatorial Africa to the south and the Arabs to the north They are ethnically distinct physically large, darker skinned than the southerners a people apart

They are often referred to as Nilotic, of the Nile They are sometimes described as Nubian That's the name given to the ancient civilization that over the centuries spread down the course of the river from Egypt. In the West Nile, the Arab influence remains strong. The regional lingua franca, Swahili, is tinged with Arab words. Another Arabesque language, Kinubi, is common. And then, there is religion. In the last half century in the south of Uganda,

courtesy of those Victorian missionaries, Christianity has taken root. But in the north, its grip is less sure. In 1910, Amin's father, Andreas, forgoes his Roman Catholicism to convert to Islam, taking the name Amin Dada. Andreas will pass this name on to his firstborn son, calling him in full Idi Amin Dada. The name Idi reportedly comes from the Muslim festival Eid,

which Amin later proclaims as the day of his birth. Muslim festival Eid, which Amin later proclaims as the day of his birth. Intriguingly, while the date of Amin's entry into the world is unknown, he is very specific about his exit. He'll talk about it casually, as if it were no big deal, but he claims to know the exact time and date of his own death. Throughout Idi Amin's childhood, his father will be largely absent. It's his mother, Aisha, who brings him up. Aisha has a special skill. She's a herbalist, part family doctor, part midwife. Rumours swirl that she's even been summoned down south to treat the Bagandan royal family. They've been struggling with infertility issues.

But Aisha, it is said, puts together a bespoke package of medicines. This intervention ultimately helps the royals to conceive a child. Alicia Decker is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender and and Sexuality Studies, African Studies, and History at Pennsylvania State University. His mom was an herbalist who gained a lot of repute as she had more and more success. She traveled around and she partnered with various military men. And so she would hop from a number of barracks around. And so Amin lived with her in these various barracks. And so he was, from a very young age, acculturated into the military

lifestyle. And the men that he looked up to were all soldiers. Later stories will describe Aisha as a witch doctor, someone who can kill with a mere curse. Her son will be more than happy to run with this. At one point, his mom had gotten involved with one particular man in the military, and she was older than him. He was, I think, 10, 15 years younger. And so his colleagues, the boyfriend's colleagues in the military, started to tease him and say, you're messing around with an older woman.

So eventually he decided that it was in his best interest to leave her because he just, he couldn't handle the blows to his masculinity. And so the rumor that has become a social fact is that Amin's mother put some sort of a spell on him and or poisoned him and he died shortly thereafter. So it was, you know, her getting the last word. And so as incidents like this occurred, she gained more and more fame. But Amin, I think, definitely did embrace this idea that he came from a powerful background

and that his mother had these important powers. Being accused of being a witch sounds like a really dreadful thing from our point of view, but it's also an assertion of power, of having access to powerful forces, of being able to hurt or help people as he wanted. To encourage this kind of speculation is something that increased his strength

and the perception of his powers. Aisha is also said to be a purveyor of a West Nile drug, yakan, or lion's water. It's a powerful hallucinogen. Later, Idi Amin will be rumoured to imbibe it before his big speeches. Others will claim she is a prostitute, or at least a loose woman. In fact, when Aisha's son is born, many dispute the identity of his father. She can only prove the paternity of the newborn, they say, if she undergoes an ancient ritual.

She must leave her baby alone on the slopes of Mount Niru for four days and nights, survive, and he is Andreas' legitimate offspring. The infant Idi Amin, so the story goes, endures the ordeal. Not only that, he is saved by Nakan, a mythical seven-headed serpent. Idi Amin will never forget his roots and the mysticism of his people. He will always identify with the Kakwa. He bears their tribal marking, three vertical cuts behind the eyes, the signature 111s.

And he will also identify with his father's religion. According to legend, he will later attend an Islamic school in the nearby city of Barua, possibly around 1941. He will be acclaimed for reciting Quranic verse. It certainly fits a later narrative. Amin enjoyed telling his life story. He told it differently,

depending on who he was talking to. He inflated or compressed parts of it. He spoke Luganda with some considerable facility, which suggests that he did, in fact, spend quite a lot of time around Kampala, even if he wasn't born there. So there's a real value for Amin in telling his story differently depending on who he was talking to and whose loyalty he wished to command in some sense. As a youngster, Amin tends to the family goats.

He digs ditches. Good, honest work. Though he also has a reputation as a fighter, a bit of a bully. Within Uganda, male West Nihilas have a reputation for their stubbornness, their size, a certain macho swagger, their physical strength. The North is extremely violent. These are people who settle scores by violence. These are people who exact revenge. Now, I am not passing judgment on these northern tribes. I'm just saying that was the way of life,

and that was perhaps embedded in their social norms. That's the environment that he grows up in. The men in these parts have had to learn to be tough, to know how to fight. For throughout history, with the Arab slavers lurking, their very survival has depended on it. There is however a way for such men to turn the hardship they have endured to their advantage. With his particular background, Idi Amin is an ideal candidate for the colonial army.

When he joins up, Amin will be putting his life on a very different track, one that will lead, ultimately, to unfettered power. Who knows where Idi Amin would have ended up had he never joined the Ugandan military. But after a chance encounter in Kampala, that's just the course that history will take. It's the late 1930s. By this time, it seems Idi Amin has followed his mother south, to the ancient kingdom of Buganda. Here, as young as possibly twelve, Amin becomes an indentured labourer on an Asian-owned sugar plantation. The indignity of the work, and the ethnicity of the owners, will sow a long-held grievance.

How long he works on the plantation we do not know. First reports of Idi Amin as a bona fide young man aged around eighteen to twenty find him in more rarefied surroundings, as a coat-check attendant at Kampala's Imperial Hotel. In 1946, while going about his business there, it is said Amin comes to the attention of a passing British army officer. This officer can't help but be drawn to the young man's sense of discipline and his sheer physical presence. Amin might barely speak a word of English, but he declares on the spot that he'd like to join the King's African Rifles. The officer mulls it over. Why not? He's just the sort of chap the regiment is looking for, especially if he doesn't mind getting his hands dirty.

I think recruitment was very, very informal. It wasn't a question of filling in forms and passing an entrance exam. You had to be tall and muscular, and Amin was above all else tall and muscular. Throughout the colonial era, there was these martial myths that persons from the north of the country were taller, beefier, brawnier, fiercer, and so therefore they would make better soldiers. And so there was a deliberate recruitment strategy

going way back to the beginning of the King's African Rifles that tried to recruit men into the army who would be natural warriors. There were a lot of stereotypical practices that were put into place to encourage men from the north to be even more manly if that's possible. So lots of sporting events and very violent, brutal types of competitions to try and cultivate this kind of violent masculinity that would then feed into the kind of military exploits that the colonial government needed them to engage in. Idi Amin has worked his ticket.

He's told to hop on board the truck. And so begins Amin's life in the army. It's not an illustrious start. Amin begins at the Mbarara barracks as a laundry worker, then a cook. I don't think he was even trying to prove himself. He just comes from a very, very poor background. And I think his poverty becomes almost an incentive to try and climb up the ranks, social ranks. And somehow he manages to prove himself to his superiors in the British Army

and climb up the ranks slowly and steadily, at which point I think ambition takes over. And once that ambition takes over, there's no turning back. After a year of spud-bashing, Amin advances to his unit proper, the 21st King's African Rifles Infantry Brigade. He arrives in Gilgil, Kenya, to be licked into shape. Amin will later claim he was press-ganged into service in the World War II Burma campaign. This seems unlikely, although there is a suggestion claim he was press-ganged into service in the World War II Burma campaign.

This seems unlikely, although there is a suggestion that he may have sailed to the Far East, prior to joining the army, as a boy crewman on a merchant ship. His ship was torpedoes, he says. They were rescued by the Americans, or was it the Australians? With Amin, the maybes and the possibles are never far away. Despite a facade of colonial order, East Africa is a turbulent place. In Uganda, British rule is less direct than in Kenya. Here, it is subcontracted through existing local political structures.

Beneath the imperial lid, however, there is still a simmering pot of ethnic tension. Kingdoms and tribes across the land resent the dominance of the internal kingdom of Buganda. To illustrate these complexities, Uganda radio broadcasts in 24 languages. Mastery of these different tongues is crucial in the maintenance of power and control. Amin's own aptitude for communication will serve him well. His army officers, in fact, in the early days were saying his Swahili wasn't very good. In fact, people constantly mocked his languages and his accents, but he spoke at least a dozen languages, probably more.

There are a lot of languages in Uganda. Beyond the Ugandan protectorate, too, there is an endless cycle of border clashes and tribal conflicts. According to some reports, in 1949, Amin, now a corporal, is dispatched to northern Kenya to help fight against Somali rebels. Amin turns out to be popular amongst his comrades. Athletic yes, but also funny. He can open beer bottles with his teeth. To the pleasure of his superiors, the hard as nails Amin proves to be a keen, eager soldier and a good shot. He is a useful man to have around, especially for another conflict that is now brewing. A conflict in which Idi Amin will well and truly earn his stripes.

In 1952, a seismic shock is sent through East Africa. Rebels of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army rise up against British rule. Largely members of the Kikuyu tribe, they are enraged, amongst other things, by the privilege accorded to the white rulers and landed settlers. A state of emergency is declared. The tribal fighters go collectively under the banner the Mau Mau. They are a serious threat to British governance. There is a real risk of contagion. The rebellion must be contained at all costs. The Mau Mau embark on a campaign of terror. The Kikuyu people come with a fearsome reputation. Using guerrilla tactics, they attack British-owned farms and properties.

Hundreds of civilians are brutally killed, hacked to death or burnt alive. There is outrage. The slaughter dominates the headlines on London's Fleet Street. As the British Empire winds down, there have been other insurgencies to deal with. And by now, the British have formulated a comprehensive plan to deal with uppity locals. In response to the Mau Mau Rebellion, this means bringing Britain's full military power to bear. Complete with an aerial bombing campaign, the full works, and of course, plenty of boots on the ground. In spring 1953, Corporal Idi Amin is sent into the bush once more, fighting on the front

line. Dispatched in the first wave, on a night-time patrol, he's involved in vicious hand-to-hand combat. In one skirmish, according to his old commanding officer, Amin is nearly decapitated by a Mau Mau machete. He has a hand in killing several rebels. Amin is promoted again,

this time to sergeant. If the Mau Mau behaves shockingly, slaughtering around 2,000 fellow Kenyans, the British response is overkill. Literally. In our age, it would likely constitute a war crime. Civil liberties are suspended. to war crime. Civil liberties are suspended. Over 150,000 Mau Mau and their sympathizers end up in detention camps, concentration camps. Old tribal enmities spill over into unbridled sadism. Many of the Askari, the East African soldiers, are tribesmen themselves. They have a deep hatred of the Kikuyu. The British officers are more than happy to manipulate this dynamic. Sexual assaults are routine. There are summary killings. Setting people on fire, slicing off ears, castration. These are all methods deployed

in the grisly routine of extracting information, much of it too horrific to describe here. By the time the rebellion is eventually quelled, there are around 20,000 Mau Mau dead, over a thousand executed. Britain will later pay reparations. One of those brutalized is a man named Hussein Onyango Obama. His grandson will go on to become the President of the United States. We do not know of Idi Amin's part in these proceedings. At the very least, he is aware of the coercive nature of the barbarities, schooled in the arts, so to speak. Well, I'm really as interested in the myth

as I am in the reality, insofar as one can distinguish between the two. And certainly the stories of cannibalism and ultra-violence and sexualized violence is absolutely central to the myth of Idi Amin. And it's a myth that he played a part in creating himself. He proves himself to his British army commanders by being excessively violent, by being the black man who can take on the other black men. And they find his so-called shrewdness and his cunning indispensable.

And he proves himself step by step, you know, from one incident to another, that this is someone that they can rely on. Whatever Idi Amin does do, he's commended for it again. He reaches the rank of effendi, equivalent to a warrant officer. He reaches the rank of effendi, equivalent to a warrant officer. You can see in the memoirs of his officers how he was regarded in the army, on the one hand as being a great soldier and on the other hand as being violent, incredibly strong and physically powerful, stupid, hypersexual, and so on and so forth.

It's a kind of parody of masculinity that's put on to black men that Amin totally incarnated in his myth. He used this image, I suspect, to ingratiate himself with the white officers and to frighten and bully his fellow Africans in the ranks. Back from the front, Amin fathers a boy, the first of a multitude of children by six official wives plus assorted mistresses. The number of his offspring is put conservatively at 35 but is possibly as many as 60. His personal and professional lives are going swimmingly. He is, as one of his army sponsors puts it, an incredible person who certainly is not

mad, very shrewd, very cunning and a born leader. It's quite a citation. But in the army, there is a glass ceiling. Idi Amin has maximized his potential. He has risen as far as a black African can get within the colonial military structure. He can now progress no further. It will take a fundamental shift in the status quo to change that reality. Before long, that's exactly what will happen. Before long, in British hands. But soon, it will be taken back by those who call it home.

As the 1960s begin, the curtain will fall on the British Empire in East Africa. In the process, the glass ceiling in the Ugandan army will be shattered. Idi Amin will climb further and further up through the ranks. He'll set his eye on the very top, not just of the military, but of a newly independent nation. That's next time on Real Dictators.