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The Witch Doctor President and Other Horrific Rulers

Khalid Elhassan December 25, 2019 32 min

7. The Ugandan Monster

Idi Amin, center left, as chief of staff of the Ugandan army in 1966. Wikimedia

Dictator Idi Amin Dada (circa 1925 – 2003) was a Ugandan military officer who seized power in a 1971 coup, and ruled Uganda until 1979. His regime became infamous for repression, ethnic persecutions, human rights abuses, economic mismanagement, corruption, and nepotism. He is estimated to have killed up to half a million Ugandans, which was a significant percentage of his small country’s population. In addition to, and setting him apart from many other brutal and incompetent kleptocrats, was Amin’s sheer bizarreness.

He was commander of the Ugandan army when he got wind that he was about to be arrested for theft, so he overthrew the government and declared himself president. His behavior was odd from the start, and grew increasingly more erratic and unpredictable with time. He started off as a conservative, and was initially supported by the West and Israel, only to end up an ardent supporter of Libya’s Qaddafi and the PLO.

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.