Chapter 1Koboko

Foreword

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.

You have seen that before. Almost everyone has. It circulates as a list item, filed under the amusing self-descriptions of twentieth-century dictators, and it is genuinely absurd, and I have put it at the top of this book because the absurdity is the first thing standing between a reader and the subject.

Here is the other number. Between one hundred thousand and five hundred thousand Ugandans were killed during the eight years of his rule. The figure most often cited, three hundred thousand, sits inside that range rather than at either end of it. It is roughly where the International Commission of Jurists came down — the Commission would commit to no fewer than eighty thousand and thought three hundred thousand the likelier figure — while the half-million at the top of the range comes from a tally compiled by Ugandan exile organizations with Amnesty International's help. Nobody counted bodies. Nobody could. Every number in that range is a reconstruction from testimony, not a count.

Those two facts have coexisted in Western memory for fifty years, and the first one has been doing the heavier work. The buffoon was easier to look at than the killer. A man who awards himself the Victoria Cross and offers to lead the Commonwealth can be watched as farce, and a country being emptied of its educated class cannot, and the international press of the 1970s made its choice about which story it was covering. The caricature was not merely a failure of seriousness. It functioned, for several governments, as a convenience.

I have spent twenty years in and around places where power is held rather than lent, and the question that interests me about any strongman is never whether he was mad. Some are. It explains very little. A man with Amin's psychological equipment born into a society with a functioning judiciary, a professional civil service and a military under civilian command becomes a violent criminal and is dealt with as one. He does not become head of state. The psychology produces the individual. Something else produces the dictator.

This book is an attempt to name the something else, and the naming is uncomfortable in more than one direction.

He entered the King's African Rifles in 1946, a colonial army that recruited from the north of Uganda because the colonial administration had designated the north as a supplier of military labor and the south as the place where education and commerce would happen. That division was policy. It was still operating when he enlisted, it produced the army he would later command, and its shape is still visible in Ugandan politics today.

Independence transferred power to civilian politicians and did not transfer the army's loyalty with it, leaving a state whose soldiers had no ethnic or institutional stake in the government they were meant to obey.

In 1962, during operations in Turkana, prisoners died after beatings by troops under his command. The question of prosecution reached the last colonial governor, Sir Walter Coutts, who judged that trying one of the army's only two African officers weeks before independence would be politically impossible, and referred it to Milton Obote, the incoming prime minister. Obote decided a severe reprimand would do. Neither man was a monster; both were making the pragmatic calculation available to them. It was the wrong one, and nothing in the following seventeen years corrected it.

Then the Cold War, which made a dictator's domestic conduct close to irrelevant provided he stood on the useful side of a line. Then an international legal order that treated the killing of Ugandans by the Ugandan state as an internal matter. Then the Organisation of African Unity's non-interference doctrine. Then Britain, which had intelligence foreknowledge of the January 1971 coup, recognized the new government with unusual speed, and went on trading long after the evidence of mass killing had stopped being deniable.

None of that excuses him. I want to be exact about this, because a book that explains a killer can very easily be read as a book that forgives one. He chose. The State Research Bureau was his instrument and its cells were real and the people in them were real. What the systemic account does is refuse the more comforting story, in which a monster appeared from nowhere, was eventually removed, and taught us nothing that requires anybody outside Uganda to change anything.

On the record itself, one warning that should come at the front rather than be discovered halfway through.

It is very thin exactly where it matters most. The regime did not keep the names of the people it killed. That was not carelessness; a machine designed for disappearance does not generate paperwork. The governments that followed did not recover them, the international community never demanded them, and the Commission of Inquiry set up in 1986 was working against scarce resources, continuing insecurity in the north, and communities that had since been displaced by other wars. A handful of the dead can be named because their deaths generated diplomatic cables. The overwhelming majority cannot be named at all.

So this is a biography of the man who did the killing, assembled from the records that survive, which are the records of power. It is not, and cannot be, a book about the people who were killed. That asymmetry is built into the form, I have not found a way around it, and the honest thing is to say so on the first page rather than let the fluency of the narrative disguise it.

Chapter 1 · Koboko

The British colonial government of Uganda did not record the birth. There was no hospital in Koboko in 1925. There was no registry office. There was no civil infrastructure of the kind that would have produced the piece of paper that says: on this date, in this place, a child was born, and this is his name. The absence of the record is the first fact of the biography, and it is not a neutral fact. It is an artifact of a system that did not consider the births of African children in the far northwestern corner of the Uganda Protectorate to be events worth documenting. The British Empire, which by 1925 had administered Uganda for approximately thirty years, maintained detailed records of cotton yields, of tax collection rates, of the movements and promotions of its own officials, of the price of groundnuts at the trading posts along the Nile. It did not maintain records of the children born in Koboko.

The child who became Idi Amin Dada was born there sometime around 1925. The year itself is an approximation. Some sources give 1923. Some give 1928. The man himself, later in life, would give different years depending on the context and the audience. The place is somewhat more certain: Koboko, in the West Nile District of the Uganda Protectorate, in the extreme northwestern corner of the territory, close to what is now the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan. The ethnic group is Kakwa, a people whose traditional territory straddles the borders that the European colonial powers drew across the map of Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 without consulting a single African and without any regard for the ethnic, linguistic, or political realities on the ground. The Kakwa lived in what became, depending on which European power was doing the claiming, Uganda, the Belgian Congo, and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The borders cut through them. The borders cut through everyone.

His father was Andreas Nyabire, a Kakwa man who had converted to Islam and taken the name Amin Dada. His mother was reported to be a Lugbara woman named Assa Aatte. The details of the family's circumstances in the mid-1920s are sparse. What is known, through oral histories collected decades later and through the fragmentary records that do exist, is that the family was poor, that the father left when Idi was young, and that the boy was raised largely by his mother and by the extended family network that was the primary social structure in the region. His mother appears to have been a herbalist and, in some accounts, a practitioner of traditional medicine who served the soldiers at various military barracks in the region. This detail would matter later. The barracks would become the defining institution of her son's life.

To understand what Koboko was in 1925, and to understand what it meant to be born there, requires understanding the specific geography of colonial Uganda and the British Empire's specific decisions about which parts of Uganda mattered and which did not.

The Uganda Protectorate, established in 1894, was organized around the Kingdom of Buganda, in the central-southern part of the territory, where the Kabaka ruled a sophisticated political system that the British found useful. The British colonial strategy in East Africa was, in essence, to identify existing African political structures that could be co-opted, to co-opt them, and to use them as the administrative apparatus through which British economic interests could be served. Buganda was the centerpiece of this strategy. The Kabaka and his chiefs were incorporated into the colonial governance system through the Uganda Agreement of 1900, which gave Buganda a privileged position within the Protectorate and established the template for what the British called "indirect rule", the governing of colonized peoples through their own traditional leaders, under British supervision, for British benefit.

The system was elegant and ruthless. The traditional leaders kept their titles, their compounds, their retinues. In exchange, they enforced British tax collection, organized British-directed labor, facilitated British-controlled trade, and maintained the social order that the British required. The Baganda, the people of the Kingdom of Buganda, became, in the colonial hierarchy, the privileged African group, the group most educated by the missionaries, most employed in the colonial administration, most integrated into the economic structures that the British had built. The rest of Uganda's ethnic groups were arranged, in the British imagination and in the British administrative system, in descending order of usefulness.

The West Nile District, where Koboko sat in the far northwestern corner of the territory, was at the bottom of this hierarchy. The region had no centralized kingdom for the British to co-opt. The Kakwa, the Lugbara, the Madi, the Alur, the peoples of the northwest, had decentralized political systems, organized around clans and lineage groups rather than around kingdoms and chiefs. The British found this arrangement inconvenient. Peoples without centralized authority structures were, from the colonial perspective, more difficult to govern, more resistant to the extraction systems that indirect rule was designed to facilitate, and less useful to the colonial economy.

The economic geography of the Protectorate reinforced the political geography. Cotton, which the British had introduced to Uganda as a cash crop in the early 1900s and which would become the colony's primary export, grew well in the central and eastern regions of the territory. The south had coffee. The northwest had neither in commercially significant quantities. The result was a territory in which economic development, education, infrastructure, and political power were concentrated in the south and center, and the north and northwest were treated as labor reserves, regions whose primary economic function was to provide the bodies that would work the cotton fields, build the roads, and, crucially, fill the ranks of the colonial military.

This last function, the military function, is the most important for understanding the biography of Idi Amin. The British colonial army in East Africa, known as the King's African Rifles, recruited heavily from the northern and northwestern regions of Uganda. The recruitment was deliberate. The British had developed, across their empire, a racial theory of military capability that they called the "martial races" doctrine. The doctrine held that certain ethnic groups were inherently more warlike, more physically capable, more suited to military service than others. In India, the doctrine had been used to justify the preferential recruitment of Sikhs, Gurkhas, and Pathans. In East Africa, the doctrine was used to justify the preferential recruitment of northerners, of Acholi and Langi from the north, and of Kakwa and Lugbara and other groups from the West Nile District.

The reasoning was circular and self-serving. The northern and northwestern groups were designated "martial" partly because they were physically large, the Nilotic and Sudanic peoples of the north tend, as a population, to be taller and more powerfully built than the Bantu peoples of the south, and partly because their relative poverty and lack of education made them, in the British assessment, better suited to the specific kind of military service the colonial army required. The British did not want soldiers who could read or think critically or question orders. They wanted soldiers who could fight, who could endure physical hardship, who could be trained to follow commands and to deploy violence on behalf of an authority they had no reason to understand and every reason to obey. The north provided those soldiers. The arrangement was, from the British perspective, efficient. From the perspective of Uganda's future, it was catastrophic.

The arrangement meant that by the time of independence in 1962, Uganda's military was disproportionately northern and northwestern, while its political and economic leadership was disproportionately southern. The people with the guns were not the people with the education, the economic power, or the political connections. The people with the education and the economic power and the political connections did not have the guns. The British had built this imbalance deliberately, because it served the colonial system: the southern elites administered the colony, and the northern soldiers enforced the administration's authority, and the British sat above both and collected the profits. When the British left, they left the imbalance behind. The imbalance would tear Uganda apart.

Idi Amin was born into the bottom of the bottom of this system. He was Kakwa, from the West Nile District, from one of the most economically marginal regions of one of the most economically marginalized zones of the colony. He had no access to the education that the missionaries provided in the south. He had no connection to the political structures that the British had co-opted in Buganda. He had no path into the administrative or commercial classes that the colonial economy was producing. He had one path. The path that the British had built for young men from his region, from his ethnic group, from his economic circumstances. The path led to the barracks.

The childhood itself is difficult to reconstruct with precision. The sources that exist are later accounts, many of them filtered through the mythology that would grow around Amin during and after his rule. Some accounts say he grew up in Koboko. Others say his mother moved with him to Jinja, in the eastern part of Uganda, where she worked as a camp follower, a woman who provided services, including traditional medicine, to soldiers at the military barracks there. Still others place the family in various military garrisons across the territory, following the pattern of women from the northwest who attached themselves to the military economy because the military economy was the only economy available to them.

What is consistent across the accounts is the absence of formal education. Amin attended, at most, a few years of Islamic school. He did not attend the missionary schools that were producing Uganda's future political and administrative elite. He did not learn to read or write with fluency. This fact would be used, later, to construct the narrative of Amin as a primitive, as a man of animal cunning rather than intelligence, as the "village tyrant" who ruled by instinct rather than by plan. The narrative was racist. It was also wrong in ways that mattered. Amin was not stupid. He was uneducated. The distinction is important. Uneducated men can be shrewd, perceptive, manipulative, strategic. They can read situations, read people, read the dynamics of power in a room, with a clarity that formal education does not necessarily provide and sometimes actively obscures. Amin had these abilities. The British officers who later promoted him through the ranks of the King's African Rifles would comment, repeatedly, on his intelligence, his ability to read tactical situations, his capacity for command. They would also comment on his lack of education, and they would treat the lack of education as a feature rather than a bug. An African soldier who could command but could not read British newspapers or engage with British political ideas was, from the colonial military's perspective, the ideal product.

The military barracks that Amin's mother served — the specific garrisons where she practiced traditional medicine for the soldiers — were the institutions that gave the future dictator his first understanding of how power operated in the colonial world. The barracks were where the British had concentrated their coercive capacity, where the men with the weapons lived in a community organized around the weapons, where the hierarchy was explicit and enforced and where advancement was possible for a man who performed well within the system's terms. The barracks were the only institution in the region that offered the combination of food, shelter, income, status, and a path upward that colonial Uganda did not provide through any other mechanism to a man of Amin's ethnic background and educational circumstances. The missionaries offered education but not income. The colonial administrative service offered neither to men from the West Nile. The barracks offered both, in their specific forms — not income by any grand measure, and not status in the broader Ugandan society, but income and status within the world of the barracks, which was the world that mattered to the people who lived in it.

The physical characteristics were noted early. Amin was, by all accounts, enormous. He would grow to approximately six feet four inches tall and weigh, at his peak, over 250 pounds. In a region where malnutrition was common and where the average adult man was considerably smaller, his size was exceptional. He became, as a young man, the light heavyweight boxing champion of Uganda, a title he would hold from 1951 to 1960, nine consecutive years. His physicality was not incidental to his career. The British colonial military valued physical prowess in its African soldiers in a way that was directly connected to the racial theories that underpinned the entire colonial military enterprise. Large, powerful African men were, in the British imagination, natural soldiers. The imagination was a construction, but the construction had material consequences. Amin's size opened doors that his education never could have.

The West Nile District's physical remoteness in the 1920s was not metaphorical. The nearest major town, Arua, was a modest administrative post that served primarily as a regional hub for tax collection and for the recruitment of labor. The roads that connected Arua to Kampala, a journey of approximately 500 kilometers, were dry-season tracks that became impassable in the rains that fell from March to May and from August to December. A letter from Koboko to Kampala could take weeks. A government official traveling from Kampala to inspect the district might spend more time on the road than in the district. The physical isolation reinforced the administrative marginalization: the colonial government could not easily supervise what it could not easily reach, and what it could not supervise it did not fund, and what it did not fund it did not develop.

The missionary presence that was transforming the educational landscape of southern Uganda had not, by 1925, established itself firmly in the West Nile District. The Africa Inland Mission maintained a presence at Arua, and the Catholic Verona Fathers had a station at Gulu, to the east, but the penetration of mission education into the rural areas around Koboko was minimal. The missionary schools that were producing Uganda's future political and administrative elite — schools like Budo, in Buganda, that educated men who would become ministers and professors and judges — were institutions of the south. The north had barracks. The south had schools. The distinction would shape the country's future for a century.

The question that the early biography must ask, and that most accounts of Amin's life have failed to ask with sufficient seriousness, is: What kind of man does this childhood produce?

Not the man himself, the specific individual, with his specific psychology, is the subject of the chapters that follow. But the type. What does a colonial system that denies a child education, that designates his ethnic group as suitable for military service but not for political leadership, that provides exactly one institutional path from poverty to power, and that path is the barracks, what does that system produce?

It produces a man who understands violence as the primary mechanism of advancement. It produces a man who understands loyalty as transactional, you are loyal to the institution that feeds you, promotes you, gives you authority, and you withdraw your loyalty when a different institution offers a better transaction. It produces a man who understands authority not as a function of law or legitimacy or consent but as a function of force, the man with the gun gives the orders, and the man without the gun obeys them, and the distinction between the two is the only distinction that matters. It produces a man who understands ethnicity as the organizing principle of power, not because ethnicity is inherently political, but because the colonial system has made it political, has built its entire administrative and military structure around ethnic categories, and has taught everyone within the system that your ethnic group determines your role, your status, your access, your future.

This is not a description of Idi Amin. It is a description of the system that formed Idi Amin. The distinction matters because the biography that follows is not, fundamentally, the story of a monster. It is the story of a system that manufactured a specific kind of man and then expressed surprise when the man behaved as the system had trained him to behave.

The British built the system. They built it across their empire, in Uganda and Kenya and India and Nigeria and Palestine and everywhere else they governed. They built it because it worked, because the system of dividing colonized populations into administrative classes and military classes, of recruiting soldiers from marginalized communities and officers from elite ones, of maintaining power through ethnic competition and mutual suspicion, was the most efficient mechanism they had found for controlling populations that vastly outnumbered them. The system worked for as long as the British maintained it. When they left, the system continued to work, but it worked for different masters and toward different ends, and the ends were, in case after case across the decolonizing world, catastrophic.

In Uganda, the catastrophe had a name. The name was Idi Amin. But the catastrophe did not begin with Amin. It began in 1894, when the British declared the Uganda Protectorate and began the process of organizing the territory's peoples into the hierarchies that would outlast the British themselves. It began in the schools they built in the south and did not build in the north. It began in the cotton fields they cultivated in the center and the barracks they filled in the northwest. It began in the racial theories they imported from India and applied to East Africa. It began in Koboko, in the West Nile District, in the extreme northwestern corner of a colony designed to serve interests that had nothing to do with the people who lived there.

The child was born. The birth was not recorded. The child grew up without education, without economic opportunity, without political connection, in a region that the colonial government had designated as a supplier of military labor. The child was large and strong and intelligent and poor. The child's mother was connected to the military barracks. The only institution that offered the child a future was the institution that the British had built specifically to absorb young men like him: the King's African Rifles.

He joined in 1946. He was approximately twenty-one years old. The army would not let him go for the rest of his life. And the army, the British colonial army, with its specific culture, its specific values, its specific relationship to violence and authority and race, would make him into everything he became.

The specific decision to join was not, in the West Nile District of 1946, a difficult decision to analyze or to understand. The alternatives were subsistence farming, casual labor on construction projects organized by the colonial public works department, and the domestic service industry that the British colonial presence had created in the towns. The army offered regular pay, housing, medical care, and a career structure. The army also offered something that none of the alternatives could: status. In the specific social world of the West Nile District, with its limited exposure to the mission-educated southern elite's model of status through education and professional achievement, the soldier's uniform and the soldier's pay and the soldier's ability to send money home were forms of prestige that the available alternatives could not match. Amin's mother's connection to the military barracks gave him both a familiarity with the institution and a contact through which to approach it. He presented himself. He was accepted. He became Private Amin of the 4th (Uganda) Battalion, King's African Rifles, and the biography's story began in earnest.

The biography begins where the British Empire began in Koboko: with an unrecorded birth, an absent education, and a barracks waiting to receive the product of its own design.