What Happens When a Scotland Fan Becomes President
In 2006, the British historical drama The Last King of Scotland hit cinemas and earned widespread critical acclaim upon release. Forest Whitaker starred as a cunning, brutal, yet oddly charismatic Black African president. His performance masterfully captured the suffocating tension of “serving a tyrant, walking on thin ice every day.” Thanks to this mesmerizing portrayal, Whitaker won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2007.
The role that earned him the Oscar was none other than the man often ranked first among Africa’s three infamous tyrants: recipient of the Order of Merit and Military Cross, self-proclaimed Last King of Scotland, Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa and Uganda, Chancellor of Makerere University, and Professor of Geography.
Uganda sits in East Africa, a plateau nation straddling the Equator, with a total land area of 240,000 square kilometres. Its population stood at roughly 44 million in 2018. It remains one of the world’s poorest countries; its GDP per capita was only around 700 US dollars in 2019. A landlocked state with few mineral reserves, its top export is coffee. Winston Churchill once dubbed it “the Pearl of Africa.” That said, Britain’s “pearl” was much like a shop assistant calling every customer “handsome.” The British Empire had so many colonial “pearls” that even Jean-Bédel Bokassa’s imperial robes paled in comparison.
Uganda would likely have remained one of Africa’s obscure nations, had it not been for Idi Amin.
Idi Amin was born in 1926 in a small village in northwestern Uganda. His father was Karawa, and his mother Lukbara. His father abandoned the family early, leaving his mother to struggle and raise her children in grinding poverty. Amin only completed four years of primary school and remained barely literate all his life. Yet everyone who met him agreed that despite his lack of formal schooling, he was sharp, quick-witted and perceptive — a clever semi-literate man.
In the 1940s, the grown Amin took the only realistic path to advancement for young Ugandans at that time: military service. He enlisted in the British colonial army. As a Black recruit, he began not as a fighting soldier, merely a kitchen helper assisting the cooks. But Amin was not cut out for kitchen work. Though poor, he grew into an imposing physical specimen: 1.93 metres tall and weighing over 110 kilograms, a human tank. This physique caught the eye of British officers, and he was soon transferred to combat units to fight alongside British troops across the empire.
Amin fought with British forces in Burma and helped suppress uprisings in Kenya and Somalia. For his bravery in combat, he rose to the highest rank available to Black soldiers in the British army. The two top-ranked Black officers groomed by Britain and France were Amin for Britain, and Bokassa for France. One cannot help but marvel at how well Britain and France “picked talent.”
Amin was not just physically imposing; he was also a formidable boxer, among Uganda’s finest. Many accounts attest to his boxing prowess. During battles, when facing stubborn foes, he would sometimes drop his rifle and fight hand-to-hand. His reasoning: any enemy brave enough to stand up to British troops was no ordinary foe, so he had to land heavy punches.
A fascinating detail: while serving in the British army, he fought alongside the Scottish Highland Regiment. The Scots left a deep impression on Amin. He saw them as brave, steadfast warriors. He also believed Scotland’s subjugation under England mirrored Uganda’s own colonial plight. As a result, he developed a strange “homesickness” for a land he had never visited, regarding Scotland as his spiritual homeland. After becoming president, he often wore a kilt and played the bagpipes in the presidential palace, indulging in Scottish cosplay. He remained an avid Scotland fan for his entire life.
After nearly 20 years of service in the British army, Amin returned to Uganda, setting out on his path to presidency, this Scottish admirer.
Uganda gained independence in 1962 under British auspices, adopting a unique federal system. It preserved old kingdoms such as Buganda and Toro alongside modern institutions including a parliament and presidency. The president was elected by the kings of the constituent kingdoms. The first president was Mutesa II, King of Buganda. With kingdoms, a federal structure, and monarchs electing the head of state, the system echoed the Electoral College of the Holy Roman Empire. More than a century after the Holy Roman Empire dissolved, its “legacy” re-emerged in Uganda.
Yet the British-built framework was an empty shell. The old feudal elites of the kingdoms could not operate a modern state. After independence, real power rested with Milton Obote, Uganda’s first prime minister. A well-educated intellectual, Obote quickly seized military and political control, reducing the president and parliament to figureheads.
How Amin met Obote: Amin was brought before Obote to face trial for a crime. Obote saw value in this giant, powerful man and spared him punishment, instead promoting him. Amin remained fiercely loyal to Obote and soon became the army’s second-in-command.
Once politically allied, Amin and Obote found a lucrative new racket: smuggling gold and ivory using state power, amassing huge fortunes. Their wealth drew public scrutiny, and calls for an investigation grew. President Mutesa also publicly criticised Obote. Obote thought: I hold all military and political power; how dare this ceremonial president challenge me? In February 1966, with Amin’s backing, Obote staged a coup, abolished the traditional kingdoms, turned Uganda from a federation into a republic, and installed himself as president.
But once Obote held power, the familiar historical pattern repeated. As Amin’s influence grew, he became a threat to Obote. Obote moved to strip Amin of authority and suppress him politically. Meanwhile, Obote leaned toward the Soviet Union and seized assets owned by Britain and the United States in Uganda, angering Western powers. Faced with these overlapping pressures, Amin decided to strike first.
On January 15, 1971, Idi Amin launched a coup and seized power, controlling the whole country within ten days.
Even during the overthrow of Obote, Amin’s brutal nature surfaced. Obote had deep roots, so Amin executed all his loyalists. The purges soon turned absurd: anyone with the surname “O” was treated as an Obote ally. Within three months of the coup, over ten thousand people with that surname were killed nationwide. Bodies piled up faster than they could be buried, and Amin’s men dumped them into the Nile. At one point, corpses clogged the river, shutting down hydroelectric power stations.
The Acholi and Langi peoples, Obote’s strongest supporters, faced total extermination. Amin locked more than 1,200 prisoners in a building and blew it up with explosives. At least 15,000 members of these ethnic groups were killed over time. Within months, nearly all adult men from these two tribes were wiped out. This wave of violent terror consolidated Amin’s grip on power. Obote fled into exile in Tanzania, and Uganda entered the Amin era.
If Amin’s rule belonged to any school of thought, it would be the surrealist school. After seizing power, he toured the country, gave speeches to every tribe, and kept marrying wives. His logic: one wife from each ethnic group. He had 13 wives, more than 50 recognised sons, and countless illegitimate children.
Amin was a passionate, charismatic orator who easily roused ordinary crowds. He made hundreds of promises across the country: abolish the secret police, rebuild the economy, invest in education and transport, stamp out corruption, expand social welfare, and more. Later research shows that while Amin was a disastrous ruler, he genuinely believed these promises when he made them. He sincerely hoped to lift poor citizens out of hardship and rolled out impractical populist policies. Compared with figures like Mobutu and Bokassa, Amin personally accumulated relatively little private wealth.
Amin wanted to deliver on his pledges, yet this former boxer had no talent for governance. After his regime fell, one of his former cabinet ministers gave this assessment in an interview:
“He could not sit in an office all day, nor focus on important matters for half an hour. He read no documents, signed nothing, and counted only on his fingers. He could not follow cabinet discussions, did not understand what others said, and would never sign reports. Ignorant of what was unfolding across the country, he relied solely on secondhand accounts and lived surrounded by rumours.”
Too lazy to read official paperwork, Amin issued national orders via radio, turning Uganda’s national broadcaster into his personal FM station. Over his eight years in office, he reshuffled his cabinet 19 times. Nearly all of Uganda’s educated elite were killed or forced into exile. Yet anyone who flattered Amin — cooks, gardeners, drivers, security guards — could rise instantly to minister or general. No formal appointment papers were needed; Amin’s spoken word alone could elevate a bus conductor to high office overnight.
In 1972, Amin claimed God had appeared to him in a dream, commanding him to expel Asians from Uganda and hand economic opportunities back to native Ugandans. Most Asians in Uganda were of Indian descent, who dominated the country’s trade and commerce. Amin ordered them to leave Uganda within three months. Soldiers looted Asian neighbourhoods. Unable to resist, tens of thousands of Asians fled. India severed diplomatic ties with Uganda over the crisis.
After the Asian exodus, ordinary Ugandans saw no improvement in living standards. Instead, the country’s commercial system collapsed entirely. Amin handed businesses abandoned by Indian merchants to his cronies, who knew nothing about running them. The enterprises failed one after another. In Kampala, people could not even buy matches. Government revenue dropped by 40 percent.
Plundering Asian property failed to rescue the economy, so Amin took another shocking step: nationalising all British-owned firms in Uganda. Britain never imagined the warlord it had helped create would turn against it. Amin had never trusted Britain; he knew he was only being used, and longed to break free from British control. After the seizure of British assets, Britain and the United States withdrew diplomats and cut trade links with Uganda.
Free of British influence, Amin grew increasingly delusional. He declared he had defeated Britain and awarded himself the title “Conqueror of the British Empire.” As a Scotland admirer, he also styled himself “Last King of Scotland.” He wrote to the British government, demanding he be appointed head of the Commonwealth. His provocations against Britain grew bolder. He sent a letter to Queen Elizabeth II: “Your Majesty, if you wish to know what a real man is, come visit Kampala.” For the Queen’s birthday, he wrote again, asking for her used underwear. Even for nations with strained relations, this was an outrageous diplomatic insult.
Why did Britain not respond aggressively? Sir Humphrey from Yes, Minister laid it out plainly:
“Practically speaking, we normally have six options: one, do nothing; two, issue a statement of condemnation; three, lodge a formal strong protest; four, cut aid; five, sever diplomatic relations; six, declare war.
Which do we pick?
If we do nothing, it looks like we accept the remark; If we issue a statement, we look ridiculous; If we protest strongly, he will simply ignore us; We cannot cut aid, because we give them none anyway; If we break diplomatic ties, we lose our ability to negotiate oil drilling contracts; If we declare war, we look wildly disproportionate.
In the old days, we would send a gunboat. That is no longer an option.”
Beyond taunting Britain, Amin claimed Uganda was the centre of the Earth and proposed moving the United Nations headquarters to Kampala. No one dared contradict his absurd claims. Amin viewed intellectuals as threats. Teachers and professors in Uganda were killed or fled, leaving Makerere University nearly empty. He then awarded himself the honorary title of Professor of Geography at Makerere University.
While provoking Britain, Amin kept serving up bizarre antics for the world. He offered to mediate the Sino-Soviet split. He wrote to Richard Nixon, pledging Uganda’s permanent support and hoping Nixon would return to power after Watergate.
Amin dared to make these grand global declarations because he thought he had secured a powerful patron. After breaking with Britain and the US, Uganda drew closer to the Soviet Union. At the height of Soviet power in the 1970s, Moscow supplied Uganda with large quantities of weapons and military instructors. But Ugandan troops left Soviet trainers aghast. The soldiers struggled to operate anything other than AK‑47 rifles. Eventually, instructors gave up training and even operated equipment themselves during military exercises.
The Soviet Union supplied arms, but no cash. To secure funding, Amin turned to Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi dreamed of uniting the Arab world, with little success, so he turned his gaze toward Africa. To win Libyan aid, Amin forged close ties with Gaddafi, who also connected him with Bokassa. Together with Mobutu, Amin’s existing contact, Africa’s four notorious tyrants formed an infamous alliance.
To win favour with the Islamic world, Amin sharply reversed his stance on Israel. He had previously maintained decent relations with Tel Aviv, but financial offers from Arab nations proved too tempting. To prove his loyalty, he publicly praised Hitler’s genocide against Jews and drafted a 24‑hour plan to wipe Israel off the map. After the Munich massacre, Amin publicly welcomed Palestinian terrorists to relocate to Uganda.
Israel, battle-hardened from decades of conflict, paid little mind to Amin’s verbal threats. Still, Amin’s public stance brought tangible rewards: Saudi Arabia poured funds into Uganda, becoming one of its biggest donors.
His attempt to impress Saudi Arabia led to a farcical incident. When King Faisal of Saudi Arabia visited Uganda, Amin deployed hostesses in miniskirts to greet the royal guest. Faisal, a deeply conservative leader, angrily ordered the women away. Amin rushed to apologise and immediately banned miniskirts nationwide. Two years later, he believed rumours and banned cosmetics and wigs, told that wigs were made from hair of Black soldiers killed in the Vietnam War. Later, on another rumour, sandals were banned. Two unlucky citizens caught wearing sandals were forced to eat their own shoes.
Verbal diplomatic provocations were one thing, but Amin acted on his threats.
On June 27, 1976, an Air France flight departing Athens carrying 258 passengers was hijacked by Palestinian terrorists. On board were 105 Israeli nationals. After multiple stops, the plane landed at Entebbe Airport in Kampala. Amin gave the hijackers and hostages a warm reception. The terrorists demanded Israel release Palestinian militants detained across the globe.
Israel tried diplomatic negotiations to secure a peaceful hostage release, but Amin rejected every proposal. With no other option, Israel planned a legendary special forces raid. They built a full-scale replica of Entebbe Airport in Israel and drilled the rescue mission repeatedly. Approved by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, over 200 Israeli commandos boarded four C‑130 transport planes for the mission. They flew more than 4,000 kilometres over eight hours, disguised as civilian aircraft, and landed at Entebbe.
Commandos stormed out of the planes, killing dozens of Ugandan guards and hijackers in under ten minutes. They rescued the hostages and evacuated quickly, while destroying 11 Ugandan MiG fighter jets parked at the airfield, wiping out nearly Uganda’s entire air force. The whole operation lasted just 53 minutes, becoming one of the most celebrated special operations in military history and a defining moment for Israel.
The only Israeli soldier killed in the raid was Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, the mission commander, who died from grenade machine-gun fire.
After the raid, Amin called Israel to denounce the “sneak attack” and complain he was being bullied as a man in his fifties. Yet at the end of the call, he conceded: “As a professional soldier, I have to admit the Israeli boys did an outstanding job.”
Operation Entebbe destroyed Amin’s credibility across the Islamic world. In 1977, Amin personally had Archbishop Janani Luwum of Uganda killed.
While Amin played the clown on the world stage, his crimes at home were endless. The government had no economic planning, and Uganda’s finances collapsed completely. Amin’s simple solution: money was just paper, so print more. Inflation spiralled year after year under his rule. Combined with mass business failures, the economy crashed. To weaken Amin’s regime, the United States halted imports of Ugandan coffee, worsening the crisis.
Worse than economic collapse was Amin’s notoriously brutal rule. The self-proclaimed “purest son of Africa” had only one response to opposition: murder. Between 1971 and 1979, Amin slaughtered an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 Ugandans, nearly wiping out multiple tribes that resisted him.
When executing opponents, victims were stripped naked, their eyes gouged out, and local residents forced to watch the public torture. Amin himself would attend these executions, play the accordion, drink and watch the torment. He showed no mercy to political rivals, subordinates, or even family members. Ministers and officers could be executed for a single displeasing remark. Within five months, he killed nearly all of Uganda’s experienced senior military officers. One wife he suspected of adultery was dismembered, and her body displayed to their children to warn them of the fate awaiting disobedience.
Under this reign of terror, huge numbers of Ugandans fled abroad and formed anti-Amin groups in exile. Former president Obote enjoyed a close friendship with Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere. After fleeing to Tanzania, Obote rallied his old troops to plan an invasion of Uganda.
In 1978, global coffee prices crashed, devastating Uganda’s economy. Meanwhile, a power struggle erupted within Amin’s government. Vice President Mustafa Adrisi grew powerful and threatened Amin. In May 1978, the vice president was seriously injured in a suspicious car crash. Amin sent him abroad for treatment and stripped him of all authority.
Adrisi’s men feared they would be next in Amin’s purges and rose up in rebellion. Amin sent troops to crush the uprising, but his army was defeated by rebels and exiled anti-Amin refugees. With domestic tensions exploding, Amin decided to launch a foreign war to divert attention from the crisis. The country was already in ruins, yet he insisted on fighting.
On October 30, 1978, Amin declared war on Tanzania, and Ugandan troops invaded the Kagera region. Tanzania was caught off guard and retreated. Kagera fell within days, and Ugandan soldiers looted and killed civilians. The region held only 50,000 people, and at least 8,000 were murdered during the occupation. Amin taunted Nyerere, challenging him to settle their dispute in a boxing match. Since Nyerere was elderly, Amin even offered to fight with one hand and one foot bound; if Nyerere won, Ugandan troops would withdraw.
No one understood where Amin’s confidence came from. Tanzania was no pushover. It maintained close ties with China, which provided extensive aid and sent military advisers to train Tanzania’s People’s Defence Force. The Tanzanian army was equipped with J‑7 fighters, Type 59 tanks and Katyusha rocket launchers. The nickname “East African PLA” often given to Tanzania is overstated. Armies across Africa are notoriously difficult to train, a fact well known to the permanent five members of the UN Security Council. Even with Chinese training, Tanzanian troops only mastered basic infantry-artillery coordination, barely managing to avoid running over their own men. Their tactical skills remained poor. Still, this was more than enough to defeat Uganda’s army.
At the start of the Uganda–Tanzania War, Tanzania hoped for international mediation. Seeing the world stand by, President Nyerere abandoned hope and ordered national mobilisation. Within weeks, Tanzania’s army expanded from 40,000 to 100,000 soldiers, conscripting militia, reservists, police and even prison guards. They soon halted Uganda’s advance.
By December 1978, Ugandan troops had been driven entirely out of Tanzanian territory. Chinese military advisers drafted Tanzania’s battle plan. Aware of the Tanzanians’ technical limitations, they designed an extremely conservative strategy: artillery bombardment first, tanks leading the advance, infantry marching closely behind the armoured vehicles. Progress was slow, fighting with twentieth-century weapons in a style reminiscent of line infantry warfare. The advantage was clear: low casualties and few desertions. Ugandan troops were incapable of flanking or encirclement tactics, so slow progress was acceptable.
Events proved this approach effective. After years of Amin’s misrule, Uganda’s army was already fragile and broke easily under pressure. In January 1979, more than 10,000 Tanzanian soldiers crossed into Uganda. Seeing the collapse approaching, Amin begged Gaddafi for help. Gaddafi responded quickly, sending a force of over 2,000 Libyan troops to Uganda. Libyan forces were stunned by their allies’ behaviour: Ugandan soldiers, relieved to have Libyan troops as a shield, fled en masse with looted goods, leaving the Libyans to fight alone on the front line.
Libyan troops were no tactical masters either. Armed with heavy Soviet hardware, even strategic bombers, they failed to destroy any targets effectively. Africa’s military landscape was truly a case of mismatched opponents; brilliant battlefield tacticians were rare on the continent.
The Libyan reinforcements could not turn the tide. By late March 1979, Tanzanian troops reached the outskirts of Kampala. On March 27, Amin fled the capital as defeat loomed. On April 10, Tanzanian troops entered Kampala, facing only scattered resistance.
After abandoning the capital, Amin retreated to Jinja, Uganda’s second-largest city. Tanzanian troops closed in quickly, forcing Amin to flee the country with four wives, several mistresses and more than twenty children. He first escaped to Libya, then moved to Iraq, before settling in Saudi Arabia.
The Uganda–Tanzania War ran from late October 1978 to early April 1979, lasting nearly six months. Both sides mobilised almost 200,000 men, deploying tanks, rocket artillery and strategic bombers. The war nearly bankrupted Tanzania. Casualty figures after the war: 373 Tanzanian troops killed; up to 1,000 Ugandan dead; up to 600 Libyan fatalities. The Ugandan army collapsed after sustaining just a 1.3 percent combat loss. For this massive conflict involving hundreds of thousands of men and heavy weapons, the average daily death toll was roughly ten people.
Amin’s fall did not bring peace to Uganda. Civil wars raged for years, and civilians endured terrible hardship. It was not until 1986, when a new leader seized power by force, that Uganda finally enjoyed a long period of stability, with modest progress in economic and social development.
As for Amin in exile, Saudi Arabia granted him asylum. Many of his children lived with him there. The Saudi government covered all his living expenses, on the condition that he never take part in politics. He lived in a villa with generous material comforts. In 2003, he died in hospital in Saudi Arabia from hypertension, aged 78.
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