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Bizarre: Some of the Modern Era’s Oddest Rulers

Khalid Elhassan January 21, 2025 14 min

Bizarre - The coronation of Emperor Bokassa I — The coronation of Emperor Bokassa I. Wikimedia

7. A Personal Life as Bizarre as the Public One

Idi Amin’s personal life was no less bizarre, with plenty of macabre added in. A polygamist, Amin married at least six women, at least one of whom he murdered and dismembered. In 1975, a nineteen-year-old go-go dancer caught his eye. She had a boyfriend, however. Amin had him beheaded. He then married her in a lavish wedding that cost about ten million US dollars, at a time when many Ugandans were hungry and malnourished. Estimates of Amin’s victims range from 100,000 to half a million. A boneheaded attempt to seize a province of adjacent Tanzania led to a war, which Amin swiftly lost. He was forced to flee in 1979, first to Libya, and then to Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royal family gave him asylum, refused to honor requests for his extradition, and generously subsidized him until his death in 2003.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.