Amin, Idi

Amin, Idi c. 1925-2003

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Idi Amin became the president of Uganda in January 1971 after a military coup removed the elected leader, Milton Obote, and he fled into exile to Saudi Arabia on April 11, 1979 after a war with Tanzania. In the intervening eight years his name became synonymous with mass murder, destruction, militarism, and the worst features of political misrule in Africa.

Idi Amin was born in northwest Uganda in 1925 or 1926; that his birthdate is imprecise illustrates the marginalization and isolation of the peoples of that part of Uganda under British colonial rule. Britain had claimed Uganda as a protectorate at the end of the nineteenth century, and Uganda was integrated into the East African Command of the King’s African Rifles (KAR). Later the events of Amin’s life became more precise—the records show that he was recruited into the KAR in 1946, one year after the end of World War II. Amin was deployed by the British to participate in the counterinsurgency war against the freedom fighters in Kenya, and there he engaged in brutality and wanton murder against Africans. Based in the Muranga region of Kenya between 1953 and 1956, Amin learned all of the techniques of low-intensity warfare when the British incarcerated more than 1.5 million Kenyans and hanged thousands.

Idi Amin was both a pugilist and militarist; from 1951 to 1960 he was the light heavyweight boxing champion of Uganda. He also rose through the colonial army, eventually attaining the rank of effendi (warrant officer), the highest rank that a black African could attain in the KAR at that time. The Uganda that became independent in 1962 was plagued with deep divisions based on regional, religious, and ethnic alliances. Because of uneven colonial penetration, the areas in the south of the country—including the precolonial kingdoms of Ankole, Buganda, Bunyoro, Toro, and Busoga—were more involved with colonial cash crops, and hence in these regions there was a higher proportion of Africans educated by the missionary schools. These regional differences were interpreted in ethnic terms, so much of the writings on Uganda portrayed Idi Amin as coming from the tribally backward north. This social reality was compounded by the fact that there were close to 100,000 Asians who dominated the interstices of the colonial economy and owned sugar and tea plantations. At the time of independence in 1962 there was not a single black African wholesaler on the main business street in Kampala, the capital.

Amin was promoted rapidly in the Ugandan army, becoming general and commander in 1966. By 1969 the social divisions in Uganda had deepened to the point where Obote’s government increasingly depended on the military to maintain its power. The military was mobilized against trade unions, against village cooperatives, against cattle rustlers, against political opponents, and against students.

The military coup of January 25, 1971, took place while the prime minister, Milton Obote, was attending a Commonwealth summit meeting in Singapore. The military takeover immediately plunged the society into a bloodbath. The coup could not have been consolidated without the support of imperial security networks, especially those of Britain and Israel, and later, records showed that the governments of Israel and Britain were indeed involved in planning, executing, and defending the military coup in January 1971.

The relations between Britain and Uganda changed one year later, however, when Amin declared an economic war, which involved the expulsion of more than 80,000 Asian citizens who held British passports. Many Asians (primarily of Indian origin) owned businesses in Uganda, and by deporting them Amin gained domestic political support amid increased repression in the society. But their expulsion placed Amin on a collision course with the West, and brought the conditions of the people of Uganda to the attention of the international media.

At the height of the cold war, Amin became the chairperson of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The selection of Amin was possible, in large part, because of the divisions unleashed by the cold war in Africa. The Soviet Union supported leaders who declared themselves to be anti-imperialist. When Amin had seized power in the 1971 military coup, Uganda was diplomatically allied to the United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom. After the expulsion of the Asians in 1972, Uganda became a close ally of Libya, Saudi Arabia, and the Soviet Union. Inside Africa, Amin formed a close alliance with known butchers and militarists such as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Michel Micombero of Burundi. In the same year Amin expelled the Asians, Micombrero carried out genocide in his own country, killing more than 300,000 citizens. The selection of Amin to be the chairperson of the OAU brought disgrace to the organization insofar as Amin used the clause of noninterference in the internal affairs of states to prevent pan-African intervention to stop the killings.

The killings and wanton destruction of lives in Uganda intensified between 1972 and 1978, and it has been estimated that by the end of his regime Amin had killed more than 300,000 Africans (another estimate puts the number as high as 500,000). In addition, there were more than one million Ugandans living in exile in neighboring countries.

The Ugandan army invaded Tanzania and occupied the Kagera province in October 1978, precipitating the war between Uganda and Tanzania. The Tanzanian army counterattacked and supported Ugandan exiles in launching their own counteroffensive (as the Uganda National Liberation Army, or UNLA) against the Amin regime. At the end of this war, in April 1979, when the combined forces of the Tanzanian army and the UNLA took Kampala, Amin fled the city to exile, first in Libya, then in Saudi Arabia, where he lived until his death in August 2003.

When Amin came to power in 1971 he had been hailed as an archetypal common man, and Western social scientists had declared that Uganda’s military government could serve as a model for modernization in Africa; Makerere University in Kampala was a veritable laboratory for the ideas of modernization and nation-building. But Amin’s regime left a tradition of destruction, low respect for human life, and cross-border warfare that is still plaguing the regions of eastern and central Africa. The continuing war between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel paramilitary group in northern Uganda, remains one of the outstanding legacies of this period of militarism, masculinity, and warfare.

SEE ALSO African Studies; Colonialism; Dictatorship; Genocide; Militarism; Military Regimes; Obote, Milton

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, David. 2005. Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. New York: W. W. Norton.

Avirgan, Tony, and Martha Honey. 1982. War in Uganda: The Legacy of Idi Amin. Westport, CT: L. Hill.

Campbell, Horace. 1975. Four Essays on Neo-Colonialism in Uganda. Toronto: Afro Carib Publications.

Elkins, Carole. 2005. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. New York: Henry Holt.

Kyemba, Henry. 1977. A State of Blood: The Inside Story of Idi Amin. New York: Ace Books.

Mamdani, Mahmood. 1984. Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Horace G. Campbell