Contemporary African History- Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni: Uganda’s Two Tyrants
S. E. Anderson
Uganda’s Two Tyrants
Reviewed:
A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda
Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State
In the mid-1990s I worked as a biochemist in Uganda. Nearly all I knew about the country when I got there was that it had once been ruled by Idi Amin, whose forces had killed thousands of people.
He was notorious for expelling Uganda’s Asian population, welcoming the hijackers of an Air France jet, lecturing Richard Nixon about civil rights, and trying to improve public morals by banning miniskirts and wigs. Amin had been overthrown in 1979, but his regime left behind plenty of artifacts: a spray of bullet holes on a building façade, an enormous crane hanging over a vanity construction project abruptly abandoned when he was ousted, a photograph of the exhumed shards of a friend’s father’s skull.
What must it have been like to live under such a regime? And how do societies in general behave under such pressure? Derek Peterson’s A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda explores these questions, much discussed during the cold war and unfortunately still relevant today.
Uganda was once part of the British Empire, from which its people inherited a penchant for paperwork. Peterson, an expert archivist, has created, from heaps of file folders, magnetic tapes, and other materials recovered from abandoned storage rooms around the country, what is probably the largest organized repository of government documents anywhere in Africa. It includes the speeches and correspondence of Uganda’s various rulers, court and police records, national radio and television station recordings, letters to Amin from ordinary Ugandans, and the carefully preserved memoranda of a mountain rebel movement that tried to declare independence.
This was heroic work. Crucial documents were buried under layers of old bicycles, junked photocopiers, and ancient dot matrix printouts. An intern found an unexploded bomb amid files stored at a police station, and valuable court records in another storeroom were being used as toilet paper by prisoners awaiting trial. In one memorable passage, Peterson describes removing wasps’ nests from stacks of files in the attic of a defunct upcountry government office:
I found myself standing back-to-back with a valiant records officer, cans of insecticide in both hands, spraying waves of angry bugs as they surged toward us. We went through five cans of “Doom,” two cans of “Kill” and one can of “Bop.”
Eventually Peterson and his colleagues were able to assemble sufficient material to construct a portrait of how Amin’s regime, and the society over which it presided, saw themselves—officially at least. The details of what they found, and especially what they didn’t find, are fascinating.
Amin’s birth year on government records is 1925, but his children maintain that he was actually born three years later, began serving in the British colonial forces at age twelve as a kitchen assistant, and then fought during World War II. Whether or not he had been a child soldier, Amin certainly seems to have had an appetite for cruelty. Though he didn’t, as rumored, eat his victims, he committed numerous atrocities, both under British command and as an officer after Uganda’s independence in 1962. In 1966 a British policeman reported watching him club an old man in Kampala. As president of Uganda, he treated fellow heads of state at an Organization of African Unity meeting to a demonstration of how to strangle someone with a handkerchief. When a group of Karamojong tribesmen, who equate nakedness with masculine honor, refused to wear clothes, he had them executed by firing squad. According to one account, he himself killed Uganda’s Anglican archbishop Janani Luwum and presided over the mutilation of the dead body of Chief Justice Benedicto Kiwanuka.
Amin seized power in 1971 with the support of Israel, which under its periphery doctrine sought alliances with non-Arab states on the edges of the Arab world. Uganda bordered Sudan (now South Sudan), which borders Egypt, and Israeli leaders saw him as a more compliant partner than his leftist predecessor, Milton Obote. But when Israeli prime minister Golda Meir and British prime minister Edward Heath refused to sell him advanced fighter jets to attack Tanzania, whose president, Julius Nyerere, was harboring pro-Obote rebels, Amin turned for help to Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi.
Throughout his eight-year reign, Amin deluded himself about Uganda’s international importance, carrying on “a one-way correspondence with American presidents,” writes Peterson, proposing that UN headquarters be moved to Kampala, and nominating himself to replace Queen Elizabeth as head of the British Commonwealth. But Uganda was crumbling beneath his feet. Since colonial times Indian immigrants, known as Bayindi in Uganda, had dominated commercial life. In 1972 Amin expelled them all from the country. The economic consequences were dire, but the expulsion had not been entirely unexpected. The Bayindi had long occupied a precarious position in independent East Africa. Bayindi businessmen ran the cotton gins, traded coffee, and owned most of the shops, pitting them against Black Ugandan farmers and consumers.
As a result, many Black Ugandans hated the Bayindi, and many Bayindi returned the favor. Shortly before independence, a group of Ugandan activists organized a boycott of Bayindi businesses. Children refused to buy peanuts from Bayindi kiosks, and enforcers stood outside Bayindi shops staring down anyone who dared go in. In a famous song that reflected the feeling, if not the reality, of Black–Bayindi relations at the time, the Ugandan musician Christopher Ssebadduka thanks Amin for kicking the Bayindi out. They were living in prime city residences, sings Ssebadduka, forcing the natives to remain confined to villages. They refused to give lifts to Blacks in their cars and broke utensils if they thought a Black person had used them. They tilted the scales to cheat Black traders, were rude to Black customers, and charged astronomical prices so that Black parents couldn’t afford to send their children to school. They hired Blacks to clean their latrines but forbade them to use them. “Do our friends shit pearls or powder?” the song concludes.
With the departure of the Bayindi, Uganda’s banks ran out of money. The OPEC oil embargo of 1973–1974 and global stagflation in the years that followed made things worse. There were shortages of gasoline, gunnysacks for grain traders, stationery for government offices, pipes for culverts, and cement for construction projects. Well into the 1970s, Uganda’s police still communicated by Morse code. Amin imposed price controls on essential commodities, which led to an enormous black market and rampant smuggling. This in turn “fueled a short-lived belle époque” in Kampala, writes Peterson. For a while the main shopping avenue boomed with exorbitantly priced goods, including toilet paper at two dollars a roll—more than it goes for at my local grocery store half a century later.
For Amin, every problem called for a security crackdown, and the economic crisis was no exception. His 1975 Economic Crimes Decree made hoarding, smuggling, and profiteering punishable by death. The rich and powerful got away with it; only small traders were punished. Peterson’s book contains photographs of some of those who were caught, a look of quiet dignity in their eyes as they contemplate the prospect of the firing squad.
Amin and his officials issued rambling directives about the running of businesses, the planting of trees, the construction of latrines, the proper attire for teachers, and even the requisite length of their fingernails. Ugandans in turn reported to various government agencies, truthfully or not, about increases in crop production and school enrollments, as well as the wonderful music on Radio Uganda. In 1976 a correspondent named Tito Bisereko submitted a long report with suggestions about how to address smuggling, gonorrhea, and traffic jams caused by wandering cattle, which “trouble drivers and walkers on the road.”
The 1950s saw the creation of numerous Ugandan political parties, all banned soon after independence. But cultural activities were encouraged, and much of the nation’s energy went into music, drama, dance, and storytelling performances and exhibitions of traditional arts and crafts. This seems to have been more than a safe diversion from politics: it was also genuinely patriotic. The British had built monuments commemorating only their own conquerors and explorers, as if Ugandans had no history of their own. Among the heroes of this period is the great scholar of African religion John Mbiti. Growing up in his native Kenya, he’d been taught that his ancestors’ beliefs were barbaric, but as a young professor at Uganda’s Makerere University, he proposed that the spiritual nature of African traditional life had much in common with Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam in their ideal forms. The missionaries “didn’t bring God to our continent,” Mbiti wrote. “God brought them.”
Peterson takes Mbiti to task for failing to refer anywhere in his writings to Amin’s assaults on Pentecostals and other evangelical groups. He also suggests that the work of John Tumusiime, a regional cultural officer who built a provincial museum and a monument to Uganda’s World War I sacrifices, might even be “malignant” because it was part of Amin’s cultural revival movement. I’d personally give Mbiti and Tumusiime a break, as I do Peterson, who in his own book doesn’t mention the torture chambers, probable targeted killings, and wars of aggression of Uganda’s current leader, Yoweri Museveni, whose crimes make Idi Amin look pretty good in comparison.
Amin’s 1978 invasion of neighboring Tanzania set his overthrow in motion. Ugandan forces captured a small piece of territory, but Tanzanian forces pushed them out a few months later. With British backing, they then crossed the border and easily routed Amin’s soldiers, many of whom were reportedly awash in alcohol and busy entertaining prostitutes in their tanks. Amin fled to Libya and then Saudi Arabia, where he died in 2003.
There is no accurate count of Amin’s victims, but he was not genocidal, writes Peterson, nor were Ugandans “willing executioners” who approved of his methods. They were captives of a system of violence that “arose out of the militarization of otherwise technical questions of government.” Because Amin seemed to have had no idea how to run a country any other way, “the army came to be the essential framework for administration.”
Even more interesting than what Peterson found in the archives is what he didn’t find there. In response to criticism, Amin, in an unusual gesture of transparency, established a Commission of Inquiry into the Disappearances of People in Uganda, which detailed 221 cases, for most of which his own security forces were responsible. But the primary material record contains virtually no evidence of bloodshed. After Chief Justice Kiwanuka was dragged out of his chambers and murdered in 1972, the remaining justices declined to pursue cases involving abuses by the security forces. Files were opened and records were made, but there were no hearings, and no evidence was presented in court. In the archives of a provincial government building, Peterson came upon a sheaf of notes about a prison warden’s affair with a female prisoner. On the back of one of the pages was a drawing of a makeshift torture rack, presumably torn from an interrogation manual that no longer exists.
In 2015 a huge trove of photographic negatives taken during Amin’s rule was discovered in the archives of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation. It had originally been collected by the Ministry of Information and included no images of dead bodies, executions, or even Amin in an “uncomplimentary light—sneezing, chewing with his mouth open, picking his nose.” Peterson suspects that such photos were destroyed as soon as they came out of the chemical bath. The entire archive of Amin’s State Research Bureau, whose agents—typically dressed in tight bell-bottoms and shades—grabbed people out of their homes or on the street and beat them, sometimes to death, appears to have vanished. The screams of people being tortured in the State Research Bureau’s headquarters could be heard in the French ambassador’s residence next door, and after Amin’s fall reporters who entered the building described seeing bodies everywhere, bloody footprints on the floor, thousands of ID cards of the executed, and files detailing who was loyal to Amin and who was not. None of this evidence can be found today.
These missing records must have been carefully removed, not by Amin or his brutal henchmen but by ordinary people employed by the regime as photographers, report writers, and clerks. Together they cleansed the official record, leaving historians with only the written accounts of witnesses and reporters and the fading memories of survivors. This tells us something about historiography and how some archives, like some people, repress, consciously or not, the most painful events of the past.
When I first arrived in Uganda in 1993, it was ruled by Yoweri Museveni, who seized power in 1986 and retains it to this day. Unlike Amin, he knows how to handle mzungus—the Ugandan term for whites and a synecdoche for the neocolonial powers that still exert control over many African nations through financial aid and military ties. The Pentagon, impressed with Museveni’s military acumen, offered him lucrative partnership opportunities in the global war on terror. His forces have since been deployed, with Washington’s support, in many countries in the region and served as security guards in Iraq, eventually taking over many jobs from US forces as the latter withdrew. Museveni is also the quintessential World Bank darling, enjoying lavish donor aid and a reputation for being a prudent modernizer.
But during his four-decade rule, Museveni has diverted billions of dollars in taxpayer and donor funds intended for road construction, health programs, and other projects to a network of spies and torture chambers that silences opposition complaints about corruption, election rigging, and the fact that the country’s modest economic growth benefits a tiny elite while millions languish in poverty and some even starve. Museveni’s army has also inflamed mayhem in Sudan, Rwanda, Congo, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda itself, at the cost of millions of lives. But because of his close partnership with the West, his crimes are far less well known than Amin’s.
Mahmood Mamdani is a distinguished political scientist and the author of numerous highly regarded books on colonialism, war, and the meaning of citizenship. In Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State, he reflects on how these two tyrants confronted, in different ways, the dilemma of governing a postcolonial nation. The British Empire in Africa left behind a collection of tribes. The British were “master classifiers,” Mamdani writes, who sorted human beings into tribes, each with a homeland under a traditional chief, through whom the British ruled indirectly. This worsened ethnic tensions, which persist to this day. Amin, argues Mamdani, tried to build a nation, in part by creating in the Bayindi a common enemy, whereas Museveni took a page out of Britain’s playbook and carved the country into scores of districts, each with its own local government structure, and hundreds of parliamentary constituencies, each dominated by a particular ethnic group.
Mamdani is a Ugandan Muyindi (singular of Bayindi) whose grandparents moved to East Africa around the turn of the twentieth century. His account of his youth and the Bayindi experience of being caught between the British colonials who patronized them and the Ugandan nationalists who despised them is movingly written. However, his analysis of Museveni reads as if he were subject to the same selective memory as Peterson’s archives. It pains me to write this, because I admire Mamdani’s other books, and I also voted enthusiastically for his son, Zohran, in New York City’s mayoral election, but in Slow Poison he avoids discussing Museveni’s most violent assaults on Uganda’s struggling democracy movement with a diplomat’s circumspection.
The son of a cotton ginnery manager in a provincial Ugandan town, Mamdani excelled at school and was awarded a scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh, arriving in the early 1960s. He soon joined the civil rights movement, marching in the South and winding up in an Alabama jail. He returned to Uganda in 1972, just in time for Amin’s Bayindi expulsion order.
At independence, the Bayindi had been invited to apply for Ugandan citizenship, but few of their applications were ever processed. Then regulations were imposed on the economic activity of noncitizens, which mainly affected the Bayindi. By 1972 many were destitute. The expulsion was nonviolent, and Britain, Canada, and other countries took the Bayindi in as refugees, but land, houses, businesses, friendships, and an entire way of life were left behind. Mamdani’s family ended up in Wembley in northwest London. His parents, who eventually returned to Tanzania, were so homesick that they sometimes went to Gatwick Airport just to see if anyone they knew was on the weekly flight from Entebbe.
Years later, some Bayindi actually expressed gratitude to Amin for sending them to countries with reliable plumbing and a social safety net; more than one of Mamdani’s Bayindi friends even placed a picture of Amin on the family shrine beside their Hindu gods. But Mamdani returned to Uganda almost as soon as Amin fell. He taught at Makerere University and became involved in the country’s fraught politics. Milton Obote had won back the presidency in Uganda’s highly flawed 1980 election, and Museveni’s rebel militia was trying to overthrow him. Mamdani ran a pro-Museveni magazine, organized study groups—gatherings of men where much drinking and talking about philosophy and politics went on—and carried out other community activities. At the time, I probably would have supported Museveni, too. He was articulate about Uganda’s need for democracy, and his rebels were considerably more disciplined than the government army. Few could have predicted how monstrous he’d turn out to be.
In order to argue that Museveni relies on British-style divide and rule rather than outright violence to maintain power, Mamdani makes a dubious claim about Uganda’s 1995 constitution:
Citizenship was no longer an individual right as in the previous constitutions of 1962 and 1966. It was now a right of “indigenous tribes.”…[Museveni] wielded it as a device to slice up the country into pieces, each piece a separate district dividing its residents into indigenous and migrants…. Every time a new district…was carved out of an older one, the residents of both were reclassified as “native” and “non-native.” The consequences were life-defining, for only natives had the customary right to land and to high political and administrative offices.
This simply isn’t true. Uganda’s 1995 constitution guarantees every citizen the same rights to live and run for public office anywhere in the country. Members of certain designated indigenous groups whose grandparents lived in Uganda gain citizenship at birth automatically. Others must satisfy a twenty-year residency requirement, which is how one Irish-born white doctor came to be the mayor of a Kampala suburb some years ago. As in many developing countries, there are also expedited pathways to naturalization for those who can find the right person to pay off. But once you’re a citizen, your rights are the same, wherever you live. It’s true that Museveni has created many new political constituencies and that some people who were in the majority ethnic group in their old one found themselves in the minority in their new one, but that is just old-fashioned gerrymandering, which happens everywhere.
Mamdani may be confusing Uganda’s political structure with its traditional kingdoms (there are five major ones and several smaller ones, as well as numerous chiefdoms). Sometimes one or another of Museveni’s stooges has claimed to represent a breakaway kingdom, which Museveni then promotes and officially recognizes. This tends to happen where opposition support is strong and the traditional sovereigns are popular, unlike Museveni himself. In order to weaken and infuriate members of the original kingdom, Museveni lavishes government resources, jobs, and scholarships on subjects of the upstart mini-kingdom. In return the new mini-kings encourage their subjects to support Museveni politically. The creation of mini-kingdoms, though enraging for many subjects of the original kingdom, largely affects ceremonial life. It does not affect the rights of citizens to live, vote, and run for public office wherever they wish, regardless of ethnicity.
This is not just a quibble about an arcane detail in the Ugandan constitution. What goes almost unmentioned in Slow Poison is that Museveni retains power by filling high military ranks with his own kinsmen, whom he instructs to inflict such terror that many Ugandans tell me they pine for Idi Amin. Museveni’s torture chambers easily rival Amin’s in their gruesome methods, including beatings, sometimes to death; the hammering of nails through feet; and the application of pliers to skin and testicles. To silence activists, Museveni orders his goons to gun down unarmed people, including small children. Politicians whose popularity threatens the regime, along with their supporters, and civil servants and military officials who don’t toe the line languish behind bars or succumb to mysterious poisonings, drive-by shootings, or what Ugandans call “scientific”—meaning staged—car accidents.
Mamdani mentions Museveni’s election rigging and bribery of voters and the opposition, and his account of the brutal conduct of government forces during the war in northern Uganda is powerful. He also refers late in the book to “widespread charges of kidnapping, torture, and killings” during the 2001 election campaign, but the regime’s violent suppression of democracy is otherwise virtually absent from Slow Poison.
For example, he attributes the failure of the 1979 demonstrations in support of Yusuf Lule, who held power briefly between Amin and Obote, to the protesters’ inability “to move from resistance to leadership” and their being too “ethnic in their conviction,” rather than to the fact that they were massacred by forces under Museveni’s command. Mamdani describes the opposition-led Walk to Work protest in 2011 yet fails to mention that it ended when security forces fired on unarmed marchers, killing nine of them, including a two-year-old girl. He mentions the Buganda riots of 2009,
in which some forty people were killed over two perilous days, attributing them to fury at the “impending partition” of the kingdom—meaning the creation of a mini-kingdom—but doesn’t mention they were also sparked by land grabbing and the abduction and torture of Buganda representatives.
After the popular opposition politician Bobi Wine was arrested in November 2020, demonstrators burned tires in the streets of downtown Kampala. Security force vehicles then fanned out around the city, gunning down over fifty people. An investigation later found that less than 10 percent of the victims were involved in the protests. Among them were a set of unborn triplets whose mother was shot in the stomach (she miraculously survived) and a fifteen-year-old boy who was shot in the face while walking with his mother. The purpose of this slaughter appears to have been to squelch any popular impulse to protest the rigging of the upcoming election. The Kampala massacre was widely covered in the international media, but Mamdani doesn’t mention it.
Also unmentioned is the 2016 Rwenzururu palace massacre, in which at least 160 people, including fifteen small children, were slaughtered by government forces. Mamdani mentions the veteran opposition leader Kizza Besigye, but not that he was illegally abducted in Kenya by Ugandan security forces in November 2024 and remains detained to this day on treason charges that are no doubt trumped up. Nor does he mention that in 2017 Museveni sent his security forces onto the floor of Parliament to halt the filibuster of a bill that would enable him to rule for life. One parliamentarian suffered a cracked skull and another had her spine crushed, deliberately, she says, by a group of operatives dressed in business attire to look like parliamentarians. A clip of the assault was posted on YouTube, where it has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people who no doubt found the unruly legislators ridiculous. I know some of the victims, and they are the bravest people I’ve ever met.
Why is it so difficult to see things plainly? Why do we, individually, and collectively as cultures and societies, repress the horrors we witness? Power creates a black hole for the truth, and our all-too-human impulse to erase and ignore makes it all too easy for evil to keep happening, again and again.
Another Ugandan election is coming up on January 15, but the question is not who will win—Museveni will ensure that he does—but how many people will die or be permanently disabled in the process. Already three opposition supporters have been severely wounded and one killed. And then there are the scientific accidents, about which we can only speculate. In the run-up to the 2021 election, Frank Senteza, a member of an opposition candidate’s security team, and the opposition activist Ritah Nabukenya were run over by security force vehicles. The opposition supporter Charles Mutyabule was run over at a campaign rally by what the police say was a hit-and-run driver, and the opposition supporter Dan Kyeyune was killed by what the authorities call a stray bullet.
In October, Angella Namirembe, a young aspiring opposition politician, was killed by a hit-and-run driver on the streets of Kampala. The city is festooned with security cameras, but the police quickly removed the recordings from those that would have captured the accident and refuse to share them with Namirembe’s family or their lawyers. Namirembe could have been Uganda’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She appeared regularly on TV and radio, “articulating her convictions with rare clarity,” writes her friend Elvis Kintu Nsonyi. She was in her last year of law school and had been asked to collaborate with the regime, a ticket to an easy life. But she refused, reportedly telling a regime bigwig, “Why would you want to exchange my small request for free speech with your big offers?”
As if to answer her question, Museveni said in a recent speech:
In the Bible, it says that in the kingdom of Heaven the lamb will lie in the bosom of the lion…. But here on earth, lions eat sheep…. So until you go to Heaven, if you are a lamb…you should be ready for eating.
—December 17, 2025
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s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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