# The Last King *A Biography of Idi Amin* — Legendary Biographies No. 039 - **Subject:** Idi Amin Dada Oumee - **Written by:** Vivian Ashcombe - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / World Politics - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 198 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-488-9) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-477-3) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/039-the-last-king.html ## About this book Amin oversaw the killing of 300,000 Ugandans and died in a Saudi hospital bed. The figure is the conservative one, the estimate Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists were willing to stand behind. The bed was in the King Faisal Specialist Hospital, in 2003, at the end of a long Jeddah retirement paid for by his hosts. Between the two facts sit eight years of rule. Idi Amin Dada Oumee came out of the West Nile region of the British protectorate of Uganda, around 1925. He served in the King's African Rifles of the British colonial army and rose to major-general in the post-independence Uganda Army under Milton Obote, whom he deposed in a military coup on January 25, 1971. Over the next eight years he expelled the country's Asian community and gave himself a title: His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular. He had served that empire as a soldier. Vivian Ashcombe's biography traces the arc through the colonial military service, the 1971 coup, the 1972 expulsion of 80,000 South Asians, the 1976 Israeli raid on Entebbe that rescued 102 hostages from an Air France hijacking, the long Anglican-bishops killing of 1977, and the 1978 Tanzanian invasion that drove Amin into exile. What emerges is a portrait of a Ugandan military dictator whose eight years of personal rule remain the country's worst political wound, and of a long, quiet exile that the African political-history literature is still working out how to account for. ## Contents 1. Koboko 2. The King's African Rifles 3. The Colonial Soldier 4. The Coup 5. The Honeymoon 6. The Expulsion 7. The State Research Bureau 8. The Killing Fields 9. The Wives 10. The Economic War 11. The Diplomacy of Madness 12. Entebbe 13. The Last Years 14. The Kagera War 15. The Exile 16. The Death 17. The Body Count 18. The System ## Questions **Who is The Last King about?** Idi Amin Dada Oumee. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Last King — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,308 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 198 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Vivian Ashcombe spent twenty years as a foreign correspondent before she started writing books. She reported from Moscow, Jerusalem, and Kyiv for the Financial Times and The Atlantic, with stretches embedded in Tehran and Damascus. Her biographies trace power and the people who hold it. Drawing on decades of notebook-shorthand and archival research, her books examine the intersection of public policy and private influence. In her biographies, including The Consulate, The Moscow Exile, and The Pont de l'Alma Tunnel, she reconstructs historical events through meticulous primary-source analysis. She lives in south London, where she spends her spare time restoring mid-century furniture and volunteering at a local community archive.