Speaker 1: Mmm, hello friends, and welcome back to Behind the Bastards.
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans, and this is the show that tells
Speaker 1: you everything you don't know about the very worst people
Speaker 1: in all of history. Today. My guest who I will
Speaker 1: be who's coming in cold with this tale, and who
Speaker 1: I'll be reading a story too, is Brodie Reid, comedian. Hello,
Speaker 1: Hey Steamed Steamed guest, Yes, yes, Esquire. Brodie read Esquire.
Speaker 1: I think means you're the editor for Esquire magazine. Right,
Speaker 1: I'm a lawyer and I'm also the head editor of
Speaker 1: Esquire Magazine. Those are my credits and I won't change them.
Speaker 1: That's what that means. Uh. Now, we're doing a little
Speaker 1: bit different today. Normally we're pretty upfront about who the
Speaker 1: subject of the podcast is, but there's a lot of
Speaker 1: background to get to before we can really properly introduce
Speaker 1: this guy. So I'm kind of curious as to when
Speaker 1: you figure out who we're talking about. And I also
Speaker 1: kind of wanted to be a little bit of a
Speaker 1: surprise for the audience. So if you're good, I'm just
Speaker 1: going to get into it. Okay. I mean I'm kind
Speaker 1: of like an amateur private investigator, so I might get
Speaker 1: it real off the bat and I want to ruin
Speaker 1: your flow or anything. But um, let's let's try. All right,
Speaker 1: let's let's let's see how this goes. I'm on o'clock.
Speaker 1: Maybe this will be you know, my, my, my, great disaster,
Speaker 1: but I think it'll be fun. Yeah, alright, So today,
Speaker 1: you know, right now two eighteen, Britain is a tiny,
Speaker 1: adorable nation filled with wizards and a conspicuously broad definition
Speaker 1: of the word pudding. It's easy, I'm going to guess Baltimore. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm just getting it that. It's easy for
Speaker 1: us to forget today considering how docile the British people
Speaker 1: are that for a while they ruled the entire world.
Speaker 1: The British Empire was the largest empire in human history.
Speaker 1: The Mongol Empire, at that's height, held about twenty four
Speaker 1: million kilometers in area, six percent of the world's population.
Speaker 1: The British Empire was over thirty five million kilometers in
Speaker 1: area and ruled nearly a quarter of the planets. Trust me,
Speaker 1: I did not forget that they polonize everything. Yeah, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: and they I think what's most shocking to me when
Speaker 1: I read about this is that they controlled that huge
Speaker 1: chunk of the planet with probably the smallest army than
Speaker 1: any empire has ever had. You know, the Roman Empire
Speaker 1: at height was about seven hundred and fifty thousand regular soldiers. Um.
Speaker 1: The British Empire at its height before the World War
Speaker 1: started was about a hundred and twenty thousand British soldiers.
Speaker 1: They never spent more than about two and a half
Speaker 1: percent of their GDP on defense, which is a regular
Speaker 1: soldiers were like super serium, like Captain America. So you
Speaker 1: have predicted a little bit where this is going. Now.
Speaker 1: These soldiers are regular soldiers. They're volunteers, which is different
Speaker 1: from most Most militaries in this period are not volunteer,
Speaker 1: permanent standing military. So the British are a little bit
Speaker 1: different there. But they're just normal, you know soldiers. They
Speaker 1: have machine guns, which certainly helps with the whole colonizing thing.
Speaker 1: Um or they have machine guns for a chunk of this,
Speaker 1: but um, you know, it does beg the question. We've
Speaker 1: only got a hundred and twenty thousand guys and from
Speaker 1: most of the British Empire they don't have machine guns.
Speaker 1: How do you hold a quarter of the planet in
Speaker 1: bondage for two hundred years. But the whole army that's
Speaker 1: a little larger than the modern Coast Guard in the
Speaker 1: United States nukes? Is that the correct? No? No, I
Speaker 1: mean you you get the locals to oppress themselves. Yeah, yeah, so.
Speaker 1: Michael Codner, who was the head of Military Science for
Speaker 1: the Royal United Services Institute, described the British Empire's military
Speaker 1: is essentially quote the Royal Navy and a system of
Speaker 1: indigenous constabularies overseen by a small but professional British Army. Now.
Speaker 1: I found that quote in a BBC article from back
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eleven. The article also quoted a
Speaker 1: military historian named Dr Hugh Davies who noted that all
Speaker 1: of British in Bia was controlled by just thirty thousand
Speaker 1: British troops supervising hundreds of thousands of local Indian soldiers
Speaker 1: or set boys. He was quoted as saying, the empire
Speaker 1: had to pay for itself, and it had to be profitable,
Speaker 1: and if you put too much into building up the army,
Speaker 1: the empire is no longer a profitable enterprise. He sounds
Speaker 1: like the rap mogul, so that sentence sounds in his defense,
Speaker 1: I don't think he's justifying imperial realism. I think he's
Speaker 1: just explained this was the attitude that the imperialists had
Speaker 1: is we can't spend too much money on the army,
Speaker 1: otherwise everything is for profit. Um. And British India was
Speaker 1: conquered in the first place by a for profit corporation,
Speaker 1: the East India Trading Company. The East India Company had
Speaker 1: a private army of over a quarter of a million men.
Speaker 1: Most of those were indigenous soldiers. So you know, local Indians,
Speaker 1: people from Burma, whatever, local job. Yeah, no, yeah, exactly
Speaker 1: by local very very ethical with our modern yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: So the East India Company started taking over India in
Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds, and by eighteen o three they controlled
Speaker 1: most of what's now India, Pakistan and Burma. In eighteen fourteen,
Speaker 1: this giant multinational corporation declared war on Nepal, which was
Speaker 1: at that point known as the Kingdom of Gorka. They
Speaker 1: fought for two brutal years before the kingdom seated a
Speaker 1: third of its territory to the company in exchange for peace.
Speaker 1: The British one, but the Gorkas had put up a
Speaker 1: really vicious fight in the East India Company was impressed
Speaker 1: by their warriors, so they started recruiting these men into
Speaker 1: their army. At first, these Gurkhas were used to keep
Speaker 1: the peace and ever rebellious India, but the gurk Has
Speaker 1: quickly proved themselves to be very capable warriors. In eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty eight, when the Queen formally took control of India
Speaker 1: away from the Company, Gurkas were integrated into the Greater
Speaker 1: British Army. They served as elite shock troops in World
Speaker 1: War One and two. The British Army today still fields
Speaker 1: battalions of Gurkhas recruited basically as mercenaries from Nepal and
Speaker 1: paid far less than their British citizen counterparts. Sound that
Speaker 1: sounds like some unsolid It's a little bit like that.
Speaker 1: Now the British like the Gurkhas because they were loyal
Speaker 1: and just incredibly deadly. They carry these big knives called
Speaker 1: kukries in there. There's a lot of if you go online,
Speaker 1: you can find threads today where British veterans talk about
Speaker 1: the stories their n c o S told about Gurkhas
Speaker 1: and like there's a common one where you have to
Speaker 1: tie your shoes a certain way because the Gurkhas cut
Speaker 1: your foot off, well, know that. They when they're doing
Speaker 1: espionage missions in the night, they'll tell who they want
Speaker 1: to kill by feeling their bootlaces. They could tell like
Speaker 1: in World War Two, they knew what German bootlaces felt like,
Speaker 1: and so if an Allied soldier took boots off of
Speaker 1: a dead German, he might get cut by a Gurkha
Speaker 1: like this. It's a possibly apocryphal story, but variants of
Speaker 1: it are still told today. So they'll kill you if
Speaker 1: you tied your shoes wrong, essentially, if you tied your
Speaker 1: shoes like the enemy. Yeah I heard that. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: the Gurkhas were like super soldiers of the British Empire
Speaker 1: what you were getting in Yeah, they sound like sword
Speaker 1: guys to me. Yeah, yeah, they're they're they're scary um.
Speaker 1: And they weren't the only super soldiers in the British Empire. Um.
Speaker 1: Over their period of time conquering huge chunks of the world,
Speaker 1: the British encountered a number of warrior people's. Some of
Speaker 1: these people's, like the Gurkhas, had their own well developed
Speaker 1: warrior culture already when the British arrived, and the British
Speaker 1: just exploited it. But in other parts of the world
Speaker 1: the process occurred less naturally. Take the tribes of the
Speaker 1: West Nile region of Africa. Their first contact with more
Speaker 1: technologically advanced people's came in the early eighteen hundreds when
Speaker 1: successive groups of Arab slavers started praying on them. Certain
Speaker 1: tribes who were the best fighters were enslaved by these
Speaker 1: Arab slavers and used the soldiers to capture other Africans
Speaker 1: who were then sent off to markets in North Africa
Speaker 1: in the Middle East. Yeah. Yeah, it's a bomber. This
Speaker 1: whole story is going to be a kind of a bomber.
Speaker 1: Oh great, Yeah, when you're talking colonialism, it's it's never
Speaker 1: not a heartbreak. I mean, when aren't you talking colonialism?
Speaker 1: If we if people want to get real, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: and that's that's one of the points. Like when you
Speaker 1: start talking about dictators, especially from the seventies, eighties, nineties,
Speaker 1: you can trace nearly all of them back to colonialism.
Speaker 1: Yeah for sure. Yeah, that's that's that's more or less
Speaker 1: this story. Um So, by the eighteen seventies, the British
Speaker 1: had become abolitionists in a big way, perhaps because they
Speaker 1: felt kind of bad about, you know, the whole Atlantic
Speaker 1: slave trade thing, but mostly because it was a way
Speaker 1: to justify conquering colonies in Africa, saying, we're going to
Speaker 1: stop the Arab slave traders, but we have to conquer
Speaker 1: this whole chunk of Africa in order to stop the
Speaker 1: slave trade. Right way to do it. They're a good
Speaker 1: guy with a gun with a lot with all the yeah,
Speaker 1: um so, the British took over a huge chunk of
Speaker 1: North Africa, including the Sudan, and with public pressure behind them,
Speaker 1: they sent armies down to stop the slave traders. These armies,
Speaker 1: like all British armies, were made mostly of locals. Many
Speaker 1: of those locals were recently freed slave soldiers that the
Speaker 1: British were happy to induct into their army. So they
Speaker 1: would free these slave soldiers from the Arab slave traders,
Speaker 1: and then they would induct them into a colonial military
Speaker 1: and use them to fight slave traders. Sounds like college,
Speaker 1: sounds like the job market. I thought you were going
Speaker 1: to compare this slight college football, but I was, well,
Speaker 1: yeah's absolutely um so. One such army of former slaves
Speaker 1: was headed by a German doctor and a Muslim convert
Speaker 1: named Emin Pasha. In the eighteen eighties, Immin Pasha and
Speaker 1: his army were besieged by an Islamic army during the
Speaker 1: Modest Insurrection. They were eventually freed by a guy named
Speaker 1: Henry Morton Stanley, who regular listeners of the podcast will
Speaker 1: recognize as the guy who mapped the Congo for King
Speaker 1: Leopold of Belgium. Stanley took Pasha with him when he left,
Speaker 1: and Pasha's men stayed behind in the West Nile region
Speaker 1: garrison duty for a few years until they were picked
Speaker 1: up by agents for the Imperial British East Africa Company.
Speaker 1: Now the company representatives were always alert for new warrior
Speaker 1: people to enlist, and they considered these men to be
Speaker 1: quote the best material for soldiery in Africa. These tribes
Speaker 1: came to be called Nubi or Nubians and became the
Speaker 1: British empires shock troopers in Africa. The East Africa Company
Speaker 1: used their Nubians to carve an empire out of the
Speaker 1: continent's heart. They named their new colony Uganda. As the
Speaker 1: British Empire grew, the Nubians were inducted into the regular
Speaker 1: British army and became the elite fourth Battalion of the
Speaker 1: King's African Rifles. They were Muslims, which differentiated them from
Speaker 1: most of the peoples they were sent to suppress in
Speaker 1: Central and West Africa. The British basically turned the Nubian
Speaker 1: people into a living, breathing factory for the production of
Speaker 1: the deadliest colonial soldiers in Africa, and yes, being bred
Speaker 1: for war had a negative impact on the Nubians themselves.
Speaker 1: Here's what one former commanding officer of the King's African
Speaker 1: Rifles wrote about them. Quote, the Nubians became the most
Speaker 1: feared and influential ethnic group, and you Ganda mercilessly suppressing
Speaker 1: uprisings and tribal supproots at the behest of their British masters.
Speaker 1: It was the success of these early operations that gave
Speaker 1: them contempt for all pagan and Christian tribes in the country.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy four, a journalist named David Martin echo
Speaker 1: the sentiment quote. Among their fellow countrymen, they enjoyed an
Speaker 1: unenviable reputation of having one of the world's highest homicide rates.
Speaker 1: The Dubians were renowned for their statistic brutality, lack of
Speaker 1: formal education, for poisoning enemies and for the refusal to
Speaker 1: integrate even in the urban centers. Martin was in Uganda
Speaker 1: to write about one Nubian in particular, one of the
Speaker 1: deadliest warriors to ever serve in the King's African Rifles,
Speaker 1: a man named Idy. I mean, okay, wow, okay, so
Speaker 1: that's this guy. Sounds like Black Republicans to me are
Speaker 1: on the wrong team. I mean they're like, did they
Speaker 1: ever have a choice? Like, yeah, exactly, you're right, highlights.
Speaker 1: If you recruited people as soldiers for a hundred years
Speaker 1: and don't really give them any other options for anything
Speaker 1: to do, it's it's it's not going to be pretty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I hear that. I mean I grew up in a
Speaker 1: bad neighborhood also, but I didn't become a tough warrior.
Speaker 1: I just became a comedian with a smart mouth. I'm
Speaker 1: sure there were a few Nubian comedians and that like
Speaker 1: part of the difficulty here is like all these stories
Speaker 1: about how brutal they are coming from like British and
Speaker 1: American white guys. Yeah, totally, they're probably just like pretty cool.
Speaker 1: They're probably just like I don't know, trying to invent
Speaker 1: whatever sports game that they had trying to play some
Speaker 1: football and they were like, well, these guys are brutal,
Speaker 1: they're kicking our ass. Well, I mean it's like British football,
Speaker 1: So yeah, for sure, can it be? I mean, I
Speaker 1: feel like if colonizers came over to Africa and then
Speaker 1: the Africans just like dunk to basketball, they'll be like, wow,
Speaker 1: these brutal power. It's a shame of basketballers over there. Um.
Speaker 1: So Idi Amine was born sometimes between n we don't
Speaker 1: really know for sure. Um he was probably born in
Speaker 1: the village of Cococa in northwest Uganda. He was for
Speaker 1: sure a Kakwa, which were one of the Nubian tribes
Speaker 1: that British considered to be a warrior people. Now. Eddie's
Speaker 1: father served with the British Army and the King's African
Speaker 1: Rifles and was generally out of the picture. His mother
Speaker 1: is usually described as a witch or a self proclaimed sorceress. Um.
Speaker 1: I watched the documentary when I was sort of prepping
Speaker 1: for this thing that was called, i mean, The Rise
Speaker 1: and Fall, and it was it was a terrible documentary.
Speaker 1: It's one of those like nineties made for TV movies
Speaker 1: where all the actings bad and it's very sensational, super biased,
Speaker 1: and it leans into this stuff that I think most
Speaker 1: people have heard about idi amine, which was like witchcraft, cannibalism,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing, which will be we'll be talking
Speaker 1: about a little bit later. But is uh, I mean
Speaker 1: that just sounds like Los Angeles culture, witchcraft, astrology, and
Speaker 1: the veganism not much, not so much cannibalism. Yeah, yeah, yeah, veganisms. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a better ism than CA's. But we're we're going to
Speaker 1: get into, uh sort of how a lot of these
Speaker 1: facts are unreliable about Ittie. But the way that this
Speaker 1: terrible documentary summed up Ittie's childhood I found humorous, which
Speaker 1: is the child grew up by the river learning the
Speaker 1: ways of manhood and the spells of witchcraft, which that
Speaker 1: sort of sums up I think the general common popular
Speaker 1: perception of who this guy was. It sounds like a
Speaker 1: fished a lot boy. Yeah, And there's always there's gonna
Speaker 1: be a lot of dark stories about rivers. Whenever you
Speaker 1: read about the scary Yeah, how did the ocean get
Speaker 1: to the land that way? Yeah, it's one of those
Speaker 1: like anytime you read about a place with that's like
Speaker 1: famous for its rivers, and they have some sort of
Speaker 1: like horrible butchery happened. There's just always tons of stories
Speaker 1: about kids finding heads in the rivers. We were just
Speaker 1: in the Cambodia when it was the same thing, just like,
Speaker 1: I mean, you find all kinds of weird stuff in there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, the witchcraft stuffed is almost certainly racist bullshit.
Speaker 1: What witchcraft wasn't is still common in parts of Uganda.
Speaker 1: I mean, was it practicing Muslim? You on? And Muslims
Speaker 1: had their own kind of witchcrafty tradition where people would
Speaker 1: use the Koran to foretell the future, and he certainly
Speaker 1: used that, but he wasn't doing like pagan blood magic
Speaker 1: or anything like that. Yeah, all of this sounds like
Speaker 1: astrology so far. What was the sign doesn't say? Well,
Speaker 1: it was like the Islamic version of astrology, but I
Speaker 1: don't know, probably queries yea um Witchcraft was less of
Speaker 1: a factor in his regime than the traditions and rituals
Speaker 1: of his beloved British army. Um so it he was
Speaker 1: eventually abandoned by his father and by some accounts his
Speaker 1: mother too. It's kind of hard to tell what happened there.
Speaker 1: He got as far as the fourth grade before he
Speaker 1: dropped out of school. When he was at most seventeen,
Speaker 1: a British colonial army officer noted his tremendous size and
Speaker 1: recruited him into the King's African Rifles. He started his
Speaker 1: service as a cook's assistant, literally peeling potatoes, which is
Speaker 1: like the stereotypical bottom of the wrong army job. But
Speaker 1: he seems like if you're big, that you shouldn't be
Speaker 1: a rifleman. We're gonna make you target. You're a pragmat man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I would only recruit the little guys, the
Speaker 1: most weird army ever. Um, he didn't stay at the
Speaker 1: bottom long it. He was gigantic. He was like six
Speaker 1: ft four, well over two hundred pounds, and he was
Speaker 1: in his younger days. He gets kind of heavier as
Speaker 1: an older guy, but like you could get picture him
Speaker 1: and he's young, he is solid muscle, like he is
Speaker 1: just a mountain of a man. Yeah, me too. He's
Speaker 1: got about three inches and that's about it. So he
Speaker 1: was a perfect candidate to become a heavyweight boxer, which
Speaker 1: is exactly what happened. According to Robert Keeley, Deputy chief
Speaker 1: of the US Mission in Kempoala quote. His advancements came
Speaker 1: essentially through boxing. He was very tall, with a tremendous
Speaker 1: reach in big hands. He was big and strong and tough.
Speaker 1: In general. You could picture him in any culture as
Speaker 1: a heavyweight champion, and that's what he was. The Ugandans
Speaker 1: are very fine boxers. They still prove it to this
Speaker 1: day in the Olympics. They have a strong boxing tradition
Speaker 1: which the British encouraged. The main avenue for advancement in
Speaker 1: the army was boxing. Um So I mean eventually became
Speaker 1: the heavyweight champion of the Army and in nineteen one
Speaker 1: to fifty two the heavyweight champion of all Uganda. His
Speaker 1: ability to punch people proved useful in maintaining discipline among
Speaker 1: other soldiers in his unit. Here's another quote from Keiley.
Speaker 1: Uh Idi Amine became prominent as the link between the two.
Speaker 1: The officers sitting around sipping their tea or their brandy
Speaker 1: or their port, upon hearing some noises and disruptions outside,
Speaker 1: would call in Sergeant Amine and tell him to take
Speaker 1: care of the problem. I Mean goes out. There are
Speaker 1: some shouts and screams as he knocks him heads together
Speaker 1: and kick some butt and then silence. The officers resumed
Speaker 1: their sipping in a very appreciative of performance. They eventually
Speaker 1: made him the top sergeant o um, because of course
Speaker 1: sergeant was as high as an actual African could raise
Speaker 1: in the King's African Rifles. And we're not allowed to
Speaker 1: have any Africans be officers in any of the British
Speaker 1: colonial armies out of the world, or I think in
Speaker 1: India for that matter, which is, you know, if you're
Speaker 1: a racist colonial power, you don't want anybody in your army.
Speaker 1: You can't have like you've got to recruit soldiers from
Speaker 1: the locals, but you don't want them learning about supply
Speaker 1: lines and logistics and stuff. Yeah good, Yeah, then they'll
Speaker 1: know how to, you know, overthrow the seven guys that
Speaker 1: you have there. Yeah, that's why I'm I haven't been
Speaker 1: promoted to any officer ranks. I mean, how's your boxing?
Speaker 1: I mean very very, very bad. But if we're talking
Speaker 1: about a wee game, then still very bad. So we
Speaker 1: need an army where yeah, where we as the product
Speaker 1: I mean with drones nowadays, that's that's the future. I
Speaker 1: feel like that's the future. I hear you. Um. So
Speaker 1: he was the perfect soldier for the British Empire. Everyone
Speaker 1: who served with him in those days was impressed both
Speaker 1: by his toughness and by his almost superhuman strength. His
Speaker 1: commanding officer, Ian Graham, said that his body was quote
Speaker 1: like that of a Grecian sculpture during one terrible march,
Speaker 1: when all of the other men could barely continue quote,
Speaker 1: one man was an example and an inspiration to us all.
Speaker 1: As we finally passed the finishing post, Idioman was marching
Speaker 1: beside me at the head of the column, head held
Speaker 1: high and still singing for all he was worth. Across
Speaker 1: one shoulder were two in guns, and a brin is
Speaker 1: a like a machine gun. It's like a twenty two
Speaker 1: pound like machine gun that you you know, put on
Speaker 1: a tripod on the ground. So two of those in
Speaker 1: one hand and over the other was a crippled a scari,
Speaker 1: And the ascari was a British word for like a
Speaker 1: local soldier. So he had one of his wounded comrades
Speaker 1: on one arm and two machine guns on the other.
Speaker 1: That's like the kind of soldier he made. He was
Speaker 1: just he was. He was like he was. He was
Speaker 1: a super soldier. Man He invented CrossFit, apparently some Joe
Speaker 1: Rogan alpha brain kind of guy. Now. Ian Graham said
Speaker 1: that seeing this reminded him of a translation of another
Speaker 1: of a King's African Rifles marching song that I'm about
Speaker 1: to read you the song, which is explained sort of
Speaker 1: how the British viewed men sing Oh boy, that's I
Speaker 1: think I can do a good British accent here, but
Speaker 1: I don't know that I can sing it rhyme. It does.
Speaker 1: It definitely rhymes, and it's a bit racist. Now for this,
Speaker 1: you know, you need to understand the word suity is
Speaker 1: another word for Nubian, like it's like a local term
Speaker 1: for like people who are from his group of of Uganda's.
Speaker 1: So here's the British fighting song that this guy thought
Speaker 1: of when he saw Idio I mean marching. It's the Suiti,
Speaker 1: My boy, it's the Suiti with his grim set, ugly face.
Speaker 1: But he looks like a man and he fights like
Speaker 1: a man, for he comes of a fighting race, which
Speaker 1: that's exactly what these people were to the British. I
Speaker 1: assume there was more, but this was the lion that
Speaker 1: this guy recalled, which is like, it shows you exactly
Speaker 1: what the British thought of these guys is that they
Speaker 1: are soldiers. That's why, and that's what they were bred
Speaker 1: for and encouraged for. And they didn't have to do
Speaker 1: People of like the Coquit tribe, didn't have to do
Speaker 1: anything other than send their sons to fight for the
Speaker 1: British army and the British would take care of them.
Speaker 1: And then they respond with their own distract or. Um,
Speaker 1: this is a distract at that point, bad, Yeah it is,
Speaker 1: and it gets yeah, it gets better. Um. So young
Speaker 1: Aman was sent to war several times on behalf of
Speaker 1: the British Empire. In he went to Malia to suppress
Speaker 1: the Shift of Rebellion. In nine fifty two he went
Speaker 1: sent to Kenya to suppress the Mau Mau uprising. We
Speaker 1: don't talk about the Mau Mau uprising a lot these days,
Speaker 1: but it basically started as a bunch of Kenyan rebels
Speaker 1: who were angry, angry because the British were whipping people
Speaker 1: half to death, which is that's how British kept discipline
Speaker 1: and all their African colonies was just horrific amounts of whipping. Um.
Speaker 1: So these guys rose up and they killed some British
Speaker 1: people in the British sent an army and brutally suppressed it.
Speaker 1: They put more than one and a half million Kenyans
Speaker 1: in concentration camps. They hanged thousands of them. Eat probably
Speaker 1: would have been doing a good amount of the hanging um.
Speaker 1: And he also killed the number of warriors in vicious
Speaker 1: battles in places like Kenyoma and Kenema. So he's been
Speaker 1: raised just as a soldier and now he's been brutalized
Speaker 1: suppressing multiple colonial wars very violently. Man, successful black man.
Speaker 1: And then he just turned around betrays culture. Classic story.
Speaker 1: I mean, he kind of starts with the betrayal, right
Speaker 1: and later well we'll get too later right now. Actually,
Speaker 1: oh man, there's more. There's a lot. So by the
Speaker 1: late nineteen fifties, Iddy had risen as high as an
Speaker 1: African could in the King's African Rifles, which is sergeant.
Speaker 1: The British, yeah, as I said, didn't let their locals
Speaker 1: be officers in their armies. Uh. This policy came back
Speaker 1: to bite them in the ass in the late fifties
Speaker 1: because by that point it had become clear that colonialism
Speaker 1: was on its way out. The British were preparing to
Speaker 1: release Uganda as an independent nation. Unfortunately, the British hadn't
Speaker 1: governed any of their colonies as countries. They basically just
Speaker 1: treated them as money making enterprises corporations, essentially, with all
Speaker 1: the business of statecraft kept out of the hands of
Speaker 1: the locals. The British were required by international you know,
Speaker 1: the international community, to leave Uganda with an army so
Speaker 1: it could defend itself, but they hadn't trained any sort
Speaker 1: of officer corps into Uganda, um, which is an important
Speaker 1: thing to have, which is why every military in the
Speaker 1: world has an officer corps. You know, you train people
Speaker 1: to do certain jobs. But the Ugandans just didn't have that,
Speaker 1: and rather than spend more money in time to build
Speaker 1: an officer corps for their soon to be country, the
Speaker 1: British just randomly promoted the sergeants they liked best. One
Speaker 1: of those sergeants was a boxer with a fourth grade
Speaker 1: education named Idie I mean yeah. He was commissioned in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two, right before uganda independence. He found himself
Speaker 1: in charge of a platoon in northwest Kenya, captured a
Speaker 1: bunch of prisoners and ordered them to be executed. The
Speaker 1: British governor of Uganda. Sir Walter Coates vetoed the possibility
Speaker 1: of Ittie being charged for this war crime. I mean,
Speaker 1: was one of the few African soldiers in the entire
Speaker 1: officers in the entire army, and prosecuting him right before
Speaker 1: independence was named politically undesirable. No one stopped to consider
Speaker 1: whether or not it might be bad for Uganda if
Speaker 1: one of their high ranking military leaders was a war criminal. Okay,
Speaker 1: So when we get back, we're going to get into
Speaker 1: how Idi Amine rose to power and to be the
Speaker 1: president of Uganda and what happened next, which it's going
Speaker 1: to be a dark story, but we we have we
Speaker 1: have some ads first off, and before we get into
Speaker 1: some ads. Uh, you know, I've been talking a lot
Speaker 1: about the Rito's people. We're trying to get der Ritos
Speaker 1: to sponsor the pot oh I hear you. I love
Speaker 1: that crunchy crunch that the Rito's chip. Nothing washes the
Speaker 1: horrible taste of colonialism out of your mouth like a
Speaker 1: cool ranch. I was gonna say nacho cheese. But that's
Speaker 1: what's great about der Rito's is freedom. That the freedom
Speaker 1: to cleanse your palette with whatever exciting flavor combination you want.
Speaker 1: How are they not a sponsor yet? I will maybe
Speaker 1: they will be after this video. Let's hear from some
Speaker 1: other sponsors and we're back. Sorry. So, um yeah, I
Speaker 1: did want to get into before we dig into the
Speaker 1: rest of the story, what you recall about Idiomine before
Speaker 1: we get into his career. Not much. I have heard
Speaker 1: the name before. I've heard there was a president. If
Speaker 1: you're going to who's a bad guy. I don't know
Speaker 1: the details. I mean already I've learned way more than
Speaker 1: I thought. Uh yeah, before you know, it was even
Speaker 1: it even became an independent nation. I didn't realize that.
Speaker 1: You know, they killed so many people. Yeah, well, it
Speaker 1: was one of those things I hadn't I had vaguely
Speaker 1: heard yet. As president of Uganda, there were these rumors
Speaker 1: of witchcraft and cannibalism. Um. I hadn't known any of
Speaker 1: this stuff about sort of how the British military worked
Speaker 1: at the time, and the fact that he was basically
Speaker 1: bred to suppress insurgencies, like that's what the British used
Speaker 1: his people for, was controlling populations through brutality. Um, which
Speaker 1: I think is an important thing to get into here
Speaker 1: because otherwise it's just a story of like this dictator,
Speaker 1: but he didn't rise up out of anything. He was
Speaker 1: like and I think he went up to the system.
Speaker 1: He paid his dues, and he was also trained, like
Speaker 1: you're going to where when we get into the things
Speaker 1: he did in Uganda that were brutal, they're all echoes
Speaker 1: of things he was doing for the British, like they
Speaker 1: it's it's not just a story of like some horrible
Speaker 1: dictator rose up and did terrible things. It's the British
Speaker 1: trained this guy to do terrible things on their behalf
Speaker 1: and then abandoned the country if you gone to him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is basically this guy is completely might meets right
Speaker 1: and um, yeah, that's dangerous. It's really dangerous, and it's
Speaker 1: dangerous if you don't. Like. People like that exist in
Speaker 1: every culture. We've got more than our fair share of
Speaker 1: them in the United States. We have a we have
Speaker 1: structures built up to like make sure that those people
Speaker 1: don't wind up in charge of the military or whatever. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: at least not to the extent where it's like there's
Speaker 1: a reason we've never had the army sees power like
Speaker 1: it's it's in our country. Yeah, we've definitely, well, it's
Speaker 1: it's because we give them so much money. Um. Okay,
Speaker 1: so not just cool cool ranch, let's get back to Idio.
Speaker 1: I mean, um, but seriously, Dorito's people send us a drop,
Speaker 1: us a home. We're at Bastard's pot on Twitter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Idi Amine has just committed a war crime right before
Speaker 1: you got an independence, and the British governor of Uganda
Speaker 1: has sort of hushed up the whole thing because he's
Speaker 1: one of the only officers and they didn't want to,
Speaker 1: you know, they just they just didn't want any complications.
Speaker 1: They said it would be politically undesirable if this came
Speaker 1: up right before independence. So uh, Idi Amine, now an officer,
Speaker 1: rises again rapidly through the ranks. According to Robert Keeley,
Speaker 1: he advanced by eliminating his rivals in one fashion or another,
Speaker 1: either physically or by discrediting them, or by scaring them
Speaker 1: or somewhere or another. His promotions came frequently, so he's
Speaker 1: good at working the system. Um, he understands how the
Speaker 1: British military works. And yeah, and if there's one man
Speaker 1: who knows how to hustle, it's Idi Amine. Now. On
Speaker 1: October nine, ninety two, Uganda gains its independence from Great Britain. Uh,
Speaker 1: you got His first prime minister was a guy named
Speaker 1: Milton Aboute, and the president was a guy named Edward Mutessa.
Speaker 1: Mutessa was also the king of the Wanda, who were
Speaker 1: a southern tribe in Uganda. He was better known as
Speaker 1: King Freddie. Uh. For a little while, Mutessa and a
Speaker 1: Bote co existed and things were all right in Uganda. Um.
Speaker 1: Milton Aboute, like idi Amine, came from northern Uganda. He
Speaker 1: advocated for a great African awakening. He was a socialist,
Speaker 1: although not a very dogmatic one. The West generally disliked him. Um.
Speaker 1: But he was also super corrupt, which is going to
Speaker 1: be a theme in this story. So by nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: idi Amine had been named deputy army commander under a
Speaker 1: dude with the really cool name shaban ap a Lot,
Speaker 1: which is one of my favorite names that I've encountered
Speaker 1: in this podcast research. Um. He saw action again, fighting
Speaker 1: alongside Katanga rebels who were battling the government of Zi
Speaker 1: year It. He took gold and diamonds from the rebels
Speaker 1: and gave them guns from the Uganda Army in exchange.
Speaker 1: He then sold the lute for cash. A Botte, the
Speaker 1: president got it on the racket. There was a brief
Speaker 1: parliamentary inquiry, but Abote had all the other people in
Speaker 1: the scheme arrested and so he and he and Ittie
Speaker 1: were fine. Um. Now, nineteen sixty six, a Bote got
Speaker 1: tired of sharing power and susp end at the constitution.
Speaker 1: He sent Colonel Idi Amine to attack the palace and
Speaker 1: bring the king back dead or alive. The king managed
Speaker 1: to flee the country, but the coup succeeded in a
Speaker 1: vote was left as the sole power in Uganda. Now,
Speaker 1: this did not make the British happy. Um. The Baganda
Speaker 1: where their favorite tribe in Uganda. Winston Churchill, under Secretary
Speaker 1: of State for the Colonies from nineteen o five to
Speaker 1: nineteen Yeah, super good guy. Never caused a famine half
Speaker 1: million people. Yeah, not not even well once. But led
Speaker 1: he among us who was not starved, we all cause
Speaker 1: a couple of famines, you know. Uh. He considered the
Speaker 1: Baganda to be civilized, um, which means basically that they'd
Speaker 1: all converted to Christianity easily. Their territory was just where
Speaker 1: the British wound up putting the railroad and their administration buildings.
Speaker 1: So the begun is where the people. The British had
Speaker 1: spent the most time within Uganda. They considered them civilized
Speaker 1: because they acted like British people are the good Yeah, exactly. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: the Ugandan people, most of whom weren't begun and supported
Speaker 1: aboutees kicking down the king Um. They saw him as
Speaker 1: casting down a British backed monarch. They saw this as
Speaker 1: a true break from the past and chance at a
Speaker 1: new beginning. It was an exciting time, but the excitement
Speaker 1: soon faded in the reality of about his ridiculous corruption.
Speaker 1: People protested, of course, in by nineteen sixty nine, the
Speaker 1: government could only stay in power with the military's backing.
Speaker 1: Uh Edi had been popular with the British because he
Speaker 1: was a great soldier and because he spoke English with
Speaker 1: just the right accent that made them think he was
Speaker 1: cute and dumb because they were racist as fuck. But
Speaker 1: Iddy was not dumb. While the government had grown more
Speaker 1: dependent on his military, he started recruiting hundreds of his
Speaker 1: relatives and fellow Nubians into the army and putting them
Speaker 1: in the positions he would want them in when it
Speaker 1: was time to take power. UM. This was disrupted in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy when an assassin tried to kill President Aboute
Speaker 1: and shot him through the mouth. American diplomat Bovu now
Speaker 1: recalled the army went a muck and for about twelve hours.
Speaker 1: It was a pretty horrifying situation. It appears to have
Speaker 1: gotten confused and thought the attempt was a coup against
Speaker 1: both him and a Bote, so he ran uh he
Speaker 1: quote jumped out the back window of his house and
Speaker 1: his pajamas and disappeared, which really mystified us all because
Speaker 1: they were expecting that this assassination attempt was him seizing power,
Speaker 1: but it was just somebody else. So he was mocked
Speaker 1: for weeks in the wake of the attack because he
Speaker 1: ran out in the night in his pajamas, and a
Speaker 1: number of people counted him out as a force in
Speaker 1: Ugandan politics at this point. But Idio embarked on a
Speaker 1: redemption tour. Part of that was having a bunch of
Speaker 1: people clandestinely executed in the night. Part of it was
Speaker 1: showing up in public with a bunch of his armed
Speaker 1: friends and just scaring people. Uh. No, All was there
Speaker 1: for part of that too. He was at at a
Speaker 1: bar one night and he quote you know, he saw
Speaker 1: he saw it quote I walked out of the bar
Speaker 1: and there was a mean, a huge man, an enormous fellow,
Speaker 1: with his officers and their weapons, sitting in the main lounge,
Speaker 1: sitting at attention, not talking, just looking around. I thought, Jesus,
Speaker 1: what's going to happen. They sat there for about half
Speaker 1: an hour, and then Aman said something in one of
Speaker 1: the local languages, and they all got up and walked
Speaker 1: out of there. What it was, I'm convinced to this day,
Speaker 1: was a threat on part on the part of a
Speaker 1: mean about re establishing his position. He knew that he
Speaker 1: was laughed at because he ran away. This was his reprisal,
Speaker 1: his counter threat, and it worked. People were scared to death.
Speaker 1: So they might have been more scared by the fact
Speaker 1: that Diddie had had a number of people killed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the fact that he just sat there for half hour. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a little bit like some guy just sits
Speaker 1: in the bar staring at you with like his friends
Speaker 1: and all their guns. You know, that's intimidating. So yeah.
Speaker 1: And Ieen seventy one, president of BOTE, went to Singapore
Speaker 1: for a conference. Before he left, he put out the
Speaker 1: order that Idioman was to be arrested for massive corruption
Speaker 1: and murder, which Iddie was guilty of, but which Abote
Speaker 1: was guilty of too. Before the warrant could be served,
Speaker 1: idi Amine launched launched his coup. The killing started right away.
Speaker 1: At least a thousand soldiers from tribes that it he
Speaker 1: didn't trust were massacred. The river filled with corpses um,
Speaker 1: which is you know, when you tell the story, like
Speaker 1: when I hear stories like this, I'm like, I don't
Speaker 1: even know where all these people. How many people are
Speaker 1: are they going to kill before they just completely run
Speaker 1: out of people? You know, It's like, yeah, they really
Speaker 1: go pretty far. And by the time this is all
Speaker 1: over it, he will have killed at there's something like
Speaker 1: one in fifty seven of the people in Uganda. Um
Speaker 1: and he's not the worst of them, which we'll get
Speaker 1: to as well. Oh my god, he's just the one
Speaker 1: that everyone focuses on because there's rumors that he ate people.
Speaker 1: Um Sonal was the American diplomatic officer in Uganda, so
Speaker 1: he had responsibility for all of the eight hundred Dish
Speaker 1: American citizens in country. Uh. He told those people to
Speaker 1: hold fast and chill at home, and that went fine,
Speaker 1: but there was also a tourist group in town who
Speaker 1: were furious that this coup got in the way of
Speaker 1: their vacation. So I want to read this story just
Speaker 1: because it's a little levity. It's just American. It's rich
Speaker 1: Americans acting like rich Americans in the middle of a coup.
Speaker 1: That's life and death for the people in Uganda. We
Speaker 1: just wanted to go on a nice vacation on some
Speaker 1: endangered animals. I said to them, look, the airport is closed.
Speaker 1: And later the tour leader turned to me and said, well, Mr, now,
Speaker 1: these are important people. They haven't got time to wait around.
Speaker 1: They're going to miss their connections in Nairobi. I said,
Speaker 1: you're damn right. They're going to miss their nections in Nairobi,
Speaker 1: and they're going to get hungry, they're going to get tired,
Speaker 1: they're going to get dirty, and they're going to want
Speaker 1: to get their laundry done. And it's not going to
Speaker 1: be done because I don't see any chance of these
Speaker 1: folks leaving for four or five days. And that was
Speaker 1: just the case. They were furious. One guy, the president
Speaker 1: of this big liquor distributing company in Hartford, Connecticut, High
Speaker 1: Blood or Hue Mind or something. He beat me about
Speaker 1: that on the head and shoulders. He said he had
Speaker 1: to get back to sign a contract. I said, you
Speaker 1: can't do it. There are soldiers at the airport who
Speaker 1: will kill you. Um, which I just love. Like, there's
Speaker 1: people getting murdered in the street and you're like, I've
Speaker 1: got a contract to get back to. Yeah. That sounds
Speaker 1: like every screenplay or a businessman is inconvenience. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, there's a terrorist hijacking the airplane and
Speaker 1: he's like, I'm gonna miss the account. I gotta get
Speaker 1: home for Christmas. Um So, Okay, that was a nice
Speaker 1: little interlude. So in short order, idi Amine is the
Speaker 1: new president of Uganda. That's a position he would hold
Speaker 1: for more than eight years. The West Stern powers, mainly
Speaker 1: the British and the Americans, were hopeful. At first. They
Speaker 1: hated a Botte because he was a socialist and because
Speaker 1: he was even more corrupt than they were prepared to forgive.
Speaker 1: Idiomine had a good reputation among the British. He trained
Speaker 1: as a paratrooper in Israel, so Israel really liked the
Speaker 1: guy too. Um So, yeah, at first, it seems like
Speaker 1: this new dictator is going to be great for white people. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, Lady Listowell, who was a Hungarian noblewoman and
Speaker 1: a journalist who became Adie's first biographer, met him around
Speaker 1: this time. And here's how she described meeting him for
Speaker 1: the first time, to give you an idea of like
Speaker 1: how this guy comes across quote. I looked into the
Speaker 1: smiling face of a tall, muscular officer with shrewd eyes
Speaker 1: who invited me to a cup of coffee. He was
Speaker 1: a hoaking figure of a man, and I was fascinated
Speaker 1: by his hands. Beautiful, slim hands with long, tapering fingers.
Speaker 1: We gotta your horny gotta, I just love. We did
Speaker 1: a podcast on King Leopold of Belgium, the guy who
Speaker 1: massacred fifteen million people in the Congo, and in his
Speaker 1: biography there's like a whole paragraph talking about how beautiful
Speaker 1: his hands work. So I just that's apparently that's now.
Speaker 1: If I can find one more that's officially hands were
Speaker 1: beautiful hands. I'm just always shocked that apparently some people
Speaker 1: are really staring at hands a lot. Yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: and you never hear about like, you know, his cuticles
Speaker 1: weren't not well manicured, his figures were a little long.
Speaker 1: It was really Yeah. Yeah, there were actually reasons that
Speaker 1: a reasonable person who wasn't you know, purely looking at
Speaker 1: this from like the British point of view, might have
Speaker 1: thought Idiom and had a shot at being a good president. Uh.
Speaker 1: For one thing, he was a fun guy. Everybody who
Speaker 1: met him really spoke highly of him, Like everybody, like
Speaker 1: even people who later were like, oh yeah, he definitely
Speaker 1: committed atrocities. He was charming. It was a fun guy
Speaker 1: to be around. Yeah. I met him and I was
Speaker 1: so scared. I was like, this guy is going to
Speaker 1: kill me. And so I was like, nice guy, great guy. Um.
Speaker 1: He was obsessed with Scotland, which is one of the
Speaker 1: famous things about Idiom. Yeah, all of the officers and
Speaker 1: um yeah, and he had he loved people playing bagpipe weird.
Speaker 1: All of the officers in the King's African Rifles have
Speaker 1: been Scottish and so Dye just really loved Scottish culture.
Speaker 1: He had huge He had a whole plane. Do you
Speaker 1: remember seeing him in like clothing and he's wearing like
Speaker 1: plaid and stuff. And there's a movie about him that's
Speaker 1: not super accurate. It's called The Last King of Scotland. Yeah, yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: And he had a whole plane dedicated just bringing Scottish
Speaker 1: whiskey into uh Uganda, Like there was like a presidential plane.
Speaker 1: That's it's just the Whiskey Express, which is a cool
Speaker 1: thing to differ. Yeah no, that's that's that's legitimately fine.
Speaker 1: Um yeah no, we have a vodka guy, fly the
Speaker 1: Whiskey Express. He's fine until he gets home. Uh Idy
Speaker 1: adopted a number of British military traditions for his own military.
Speaker 1: He sent a musician to Scotland for year to learn
Speaker 1: the bagpipes. He also established a state military jazz band
Speaker 1: with perhaps the best name of for a band I've
Speaker 1: ever heard, the Revolutionary Suicide Jazz Band, also known as
Speaker 1: the Revolutionary Suicide Mechanized Regiment Band or the Suicide Mechanized
Speaker 1: Jazz Band. And here's there a punk band. No, they
Speaker 1: were just a jazz band. They should have been a
Speaker 1: punk band. Suicide they were. This is a really great picture.
Speaker 1: They were the regimental band. They were a military band,
Speaker 1: and the band they were a unit for was one
Speaker 1: of the elite mechanized regiments in the Ugandan Army that
Speaker 1: was a suicide mechanized regiment. So it was like to
Speaker 1: try to make them sound scary. These guys don't care
Speaker 1: if they die. They're a suicide regiment for sure. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this amazing picture, with several others will be up
Speaker 1: on our website behind the Bastards dot Com. You owe
Speaker 1: it to yourself to check it out. Um. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: it also seems I should know that from from reports
Speaker 1: at the time, most of the musicians in the Suicide
Speaker 1: Revolutionary Jazz Band were sort of press ganged and forced
Speaker 1: to play. Um. They don't look exactly happy, but they
Speaker 1: don't look jazz wow. Um. Sotty's rain was brutal by
Speaker 1: all measures, uh, and got increasingly brutal ass time went on.
Speaker 1: There are a number of theories as to why Robert
Speaker 1: Keeley thinks he was just promoted out of his depth.
Speaker 1: Like Michael Scott. Basically was a fine sergeant, but he
Speaker 1: never should have been an officer, let alone running the nation,
Speaker 1: which is one way or another probably fair. Keely says
Speaker 1: quote he had learned to use his fists and translated
Speaker 1: that into how you hold your position, how you protect yourself.
Speaker 1: He applied all of the brutal boxing lessons he had
Speaker 1: learned against his rivals. Uh. Lady Listowell also thought that
Speaker 1: this poor guy had just been forced to jump into
Speaker 1: a position too complex for his mind. Quote the Kakua
Speaker 1: have a great respect for personalities, but not for rank
Speaker 1: or position. They never had chiefs or recognized clan leaders.
Speaker 1: I mean was brought up to believe that all Cowqua
Speaker 1: tribesmen are equal. Some of his recent measures illustrate all
Speaker 1: too well that he had to leap from a peasant
Speaker 1: background into the complicated politics of the modern world without
Speaker 1: any intermediate feudal preparation. I think this attitude that Eddy
Speaker 1: was just a guy that who got promoted to be
Speaker 1: on his talents is inaccurate and based pretty heavily in racism.
Speaker 1: It shifts the brain the blame over to Uganda for
Speaker 1: letting such a man rise that high, and I think
Speaker 1: the real blame lies with the British. Again, there's guys
Speaker 1: like Idy in every country. Violent authoritarians who seek to
Speaker 1: impose their will on others. Established nation's build antibodies, up
Speaker 1: checks and balances and legal systems, and established bureaucracies to
Speaker 1: stop men with fourth grade educations and histories of head
Speaker 1: injuries from heading the army. Well that sounds nice right
Speaker 1: about now. Well, clearly ours aren't perfect. Um so, but
Speaker 1: you know Uganda didn't have any any of that. The
Speaker 1: British didn't put any of that in place before. They
Speaker 1: just abandoned them. Um. I Like it's one of those
Speaker 1: things where if you look at what was set up
Speaker 1: when the Uganda was freed, I don't see someone like
Speaker 1: idy was bound to at least try to take control. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounds like they set up the country like a
Speaker 1: reality show. Yeah, yeah, it is almost like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were like here, you guys, go here, some sticks
Speaker 1: survive and they didn't. They didn't consider any of the
Speaker 1: ways it could go badly. Um and they didn't like
Speaker 1: they know, like the British have never had a military
Speaker 1: coup and they have an officer cadre for a reason.
Speaker 1: They like set like they know how you set up
Speaker 1: a military so it doesn't destroy the country. And they
Speaker 1: didn't do any of that in Uganda because they were
Speaker 1: lazy and they didn't care. Uh So, fun the fun
Speaker 1: the British and Flint Michigan still doesn't have clean water. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fun us too, for sure, for sure, for sure this
Speaker 1: one is actually this one's sort of are bad too,
Speaker 1: because we're we we we supported the Idiomine regime for
Speaker 1: a while, we being the United States, fuck everybody, funck
Speaker 1: everybody except for Uganda. They didn't deserve for Dorrito's. Now,
Speaker 1: Derrito's had nothing to do with this good That's that's fair.
Speaker 1: And and you could argue that Derritos has stopped similar
Speaker 1: monsters from arising in other countries by filling them with
Speaker 1: nachio goodness. Yeah, that's right, you stop the monster of hunger.
Speaker 1: As far as we know, Idiomane never got to experience
Speaker 1: extreme nacho flavor, and that might be the secret of
Speaker 1: his madness. The only extremism he should have been into
Speaker 1: is na jesu. So yeah. When the British first started
Speaker 1: the Ugandan colony, they had carried out a policy of
Speaker 1: ringing in South Asians, mostly from India, to Uganda to
Speaker 1: quote service a buffer between Europeans and Africans in the
Speaker 1: middle runs of commerce and administration. This had started when
Speaker 1: the British brought thirty Indians over to build railways in Uganda.
Speaker 1: Uh these folks had a lot more experience with Western
Speaker 1: style capitalism in the average Ugandan and as a result,
Speaker 1: they saw great success setting up businesses in the new colony.
Speaker 1: By the early nineteen seventies, Ugandan Asians owned nine of
Speaker 1: the country's businesses and contributed of its tax revenue, despite
Speaker 1: making up a small minority of the actual population. UH.
Speaker 1: This has obviously caused a lot of unrest between native
Speaker 1: ethnic Ugandans and the Ugandan Asians. President de Boute had
Speaker 1: pursued a policy called Corchanization, which attacked Ugandan Asians with
Speaker 1: laws aimed at reducing their economic dominance it. He expanded
Speaker 1: on that policy and added in a healthy dollop of
Speaker 1: straight up raisism. He announced that the government would be
Speaker 1: reviewing the status of Ugandan Asians who'd been given citizenship.
Speaker 1: So basically they're looking at naturalized Yuganan citizens and finding
Speaker 1: excuses to take away their citizenship. Yeah, that's what's happening
Speaker 1: right now. Yes, it's exactly what's happening right now to
Speaker 1: naturalized American citizens. UM, which is uh, huge bummer, huge
Speaker 1: bumber weird. How these shitty guys have the same playbook
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases. UM. I mean also canceled
Speaker 1: all in progress citizenship applications from Asians UH. And then
Speaker 1: in August of nineteen seventy two, who gave all Asians
Speaker 1: in Uganda ninety days to vacate the country. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna get into how that policy went and what a
Speaker 1: cluster fuck ensued afterwards, and what happened once the West
Speaker 1: finally decided that Idi Amine wasn't their man. But first
Speaker 1: we've got some some capitalism to get into. Yeah, capitalism,
Speaker 1: the thing that has nothing to do with the tens
Speaker 1: of millions of death STI colonialism not a thing. Not
Speaker 1: a thing. Here's some ants and we're back. So as
Speaker 1: the story has has come up here, Idioman has seized power.
Speaker 1: He's executed a bunch of people, and he has decided
Speaker 1: to expel all of the Asians in Uganda. He's given
Speaker 1: him ninety days to vacate the country. This policy affected
Speaker 1: eighty five thousand people, twenty three thousand of whom were
Speaker 1: already citizens of Uganda. I'm gonna play a clip of
Speaker 1: Idi Amine talking to the press to hear how he
Speaker 1: justified the policy. And I think what's interesting about this
Speaker 1: is how friendly the foreign press is to him, which
Speaker 1: sort of gives you an idea of how charming this
Speaker 1: guy was in person. So even though he's introduced, he's
Speaker 1: talking about something pretty awful, like people are they just yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll play decision for the economy of Uganda, and I'm
Speaker 1: he makes you that every Ugandans get a fruit of
Speaker 1: independent since independent actually Uganda is not yet independent. I
Speaker 1: will say that even when the British handed over on
Speaker 1: the ninth of October nineteen sixty two, the Uganda still
Speaker 1: not yet independent. Uganda will be independent after this my decision.
Speaker 1: After I want to see that the whole Kampala street
Speaker 1: is not full of Indians. It must be proper black
Speaker 1: under administration in those shops is run by the Ugandans.
Speaker 1: Would you like to get all actions out of Really? Yes,
Speaker 1: they must go to their country, even nationals of Uganda.
Speaker 1: If they want to go there, they're they're they're They're
Speaker 1: welcome to go. Also happened to these people If they
Speaker 1: don't go over the time, I think they will be
Speaker 1: sitting like they're sitting on the fire. I will tell
Speaker 1: you this. You just wait. After three months, okay, you
Speaker 1: will see. I think they will not city comfortable here
Speaker 1: in Uganda. I will tell you this. I must actually
Speaker 1: tell you the truth to take for them. If they're
Speaker 1: not doing I am not responsible for building them plans
Speaker 1: to camp. Have you asked the British to take the way. Yes,
Speaker 1: it is a British High commission is here his responsibility.
Speaker 1: I have told him. You've said you wanted to teach
Speaker 1: Britain a lesson? President, why is that? And that is
Speaker 1: now a lesson I'm teaching the British. I am teaching
Speaker 1: now the lesson because I am correcting them from the
Speaker 1: mistake they had made. If they had to think before
Speaker 1: earlier that that as the African here who can even work,
Speaker 1: and the building the railway with the instruction given to
Speaker 1: them by the British, this problem will not happen. Well,
Speaker 1: I was like a MOUNTI python. Yeah, it's remarkable that
Speaker 1: he's like talking about like people, terrible things will happen
Speaker 1: in that they don't leave. And then all of these
Speaker 1: guys laugh like just because it's it's yeah, and it's so.
Speaker 1: I mean, he has a point at the end there
Speaker 1: when he says like it was fucked up the British
Speaker 1: to bring these people into build railroads and not just
Speaker 1: have us build railroads because it's our fucking country, which
Speaker 1: is you know, a fair point. But at this point
Speaker 1: these guys are like third generation Uganda's like it's messed
Speaker 1: up to kick people out of your country and take
Speaker 1: their businesses. It's just weird to me. How friendly the
Speaker 1: press was to him still at this point, Well, they
Speaker 1: were all British guys and they didn't really give a
Speaker 1: funk about brown people either way. They were just there
Speaker 1: because they had to be yeah, and they thought he was.
Speaker 1: He was fun and they liked yeah, it's yeah, so
Speaker 1: Itdi's main defense of his policy was that he was
Speaker 1: trying to give you guna back to Ugandans. He also
Speaker 1: said that God had told him in a dream that
Speaker 1: South Asians were to blame for Uganda's economic woes and corruption.
Speaker 1: It's probably that this policy had a lot to do
Speaker 1: with the fact that Great Britain had just refused to
Speaker 1: sell him guns so he could invade hands and Ea.
Speaker 1: So he was basically just being like, Okay, Great Britain,
Speaker 1: you have to deal with eighty thousand refugees now because
Speaker 1: you wouldn't give me the weapons I needed to fund
Speaker 1: with my neighbor. Itty was brutal to the Ugandan Asians,
Speaker 1: but he was equally brutal to ethnic Ugandans. His particular
Speaker 1: targets were a Cholly and Langi tribesman. In the first
Speaker 1: few days of his regime, he executed more than a
Speaker 1: thousand members of these tribes in the army as his
Speaker 1: rain war on the purchase spread from the military to
Speaker 1: the general population. Bullets were in short supply in the
Speaker 1: country and desperately needed for all the wars Itty planned
Speaker 1: to start, so the murder squads he dispatched had to
Speaker 1: find other ways of doing their work. Their preferred tools
Speaker 1: were sledgehammers, crowbars, and sometimes crocodiles. Yeah yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: if you have crocodiles, every problem looks like crocodiles. No
Speaker 1: one he's ever wielded a crocodile has been a good guy.
Speaker 1: It's never a tool of the good guy. What about Yeah?
Speaker 1: Uh So, the most feared government agency, sort of the
Speaker 1: Idioman equivalent of the German SS, was the State Research Bureau,
Speaker 1: which is maybe my favorite name for like a secret
Speaker 1: police organization. Just sounds so like it seems like the
Speaker 1: guys who should be like, oh yeah, your soils pH
Speaker 1: is off. But these are the murder police, as opposed
Speaker 1: to you know, countries where all of the police and
Speaker 1: the murder police. Um. Anyway, Apollo Lo Walco survived a
Speaker 1: hundred ninety six days in the pink stucco building where
Speaker 1: they tortured and executed their captives. He gives us our
Speaker 1: clearest picture of what life was like for people deemed
Speaker 1: by Idioman to be enemies of the state. Quote, when
Speaker 1: the prisoner's name was called out, the guards would go
Speaker 1: and grab him. We were all in handcuffs already. We
Speaker 1: were in handcuffs twenty four hours a day. But they
Speaker 1: would change the position when they called a man, putting
Speaker 1: them on in back, and then they would place a
Speaker 1: long rope with a loop around his neck. Then someone
Speaker 1: would drag him by the rope along the staircase going
Speaker 1: up to the ground floor, and people would be beating
Speaker 1: him on all parts of his body. Then his head
Speaker 1: would be beaten in. By the time he reached the
Speaker 1: top of the stairs, he was dead. So Looco claims
Speaker 1: the guards made sure the prisoners saw every execution. That
Speaker 1: was part of the point. He claims that between a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty and two hundred people were executed every
Speaker 1: night while he was there in nineteen seventy seven. Looco
Speaker 1: believes he saw more than fifteen thousand Ugandans clubbed and
Speaker 1: beaten to death over just five months, at least two
Speaker 1: hundred fifty thousand Ugandans perished during an idiot means terror.
Speaker 1: In the real number maybe more like half a million,
Speaker 1: roughly one in every fifty seven where to die over
Speaker 1: the next eight years. So Itty himself is said to
Speaker 1: have participated in a number of these murders. Looco claims
Speaker 1: to remember seeing him beat men to death with sledgehammers
Speaker 1: while wearing a gas mask. Quote, I mean was actually participating.
Speaker 1: He turned to us at one point and told us
Speaker 1: to relax. The state research bowmen were mostly Nubians, like Itti,
Speaker 1: former super soldiers of the British Empire, doing what they'd
Speaker 1: always done, just for themselves now. Um, and again, this
Speaker 1: is not savagery that he's executing suddenly now that he's
Speaker 1: in charge. This is exactly what he was doing on
Speaker 1: British orders in Kenya. You know, I'm gonna go ahead
Speaker 1: and get us that when he was president. Is not
Speaker 1: the first time he had people killed with sledgehammers, like
Speaker 1: it's it never sees this to amaze me, Just the
Speaker 1: capability of brutality of some people. Know, and these all
Speaker 1: all these deaths, like obviously these deaths are an idioman,
Speaker 1: but they're also on colonialism, which is well, yeah, for sure,
Speaker 1: I blame everything on colonialism, just so straight and that
Speaker 1: you can it's totally fair. Um, it's like being being
Speaker 1: a white kid who was educated in the South, I
Speaker 1: did not hear very much about colonialism growing up, and
Speaker 1: so it's once I've started researching a lot of these
Speaker 1: guys in the show and learning about King Leopold in
Speaker 1: the fifteen million who died in the Belgian Congo, which
Speaker 1: is probably the worst single crime of colonialism that I've
Speaker 1: come across. But like it's I think it would probably
Speaker 1: be fair to say that, like if you add together
Speaker 1: the Nazis and the Stalinist and Maoist communists and all
Speaker 1: the people they killed, it doesn't come close to the
Speaker 1: deaths to colonialism absolutely, and you know, in a shorter time,
Speaker 1: you know, the Nazis were great at killing people fast,
Speaker 1: but there's I will never know most of what was
Speaker 1: done in behalf of the British Empire. Yeah. Anyway, so
Speaker 1: all most secret police organizations wore you know, wear leather
Speaker 1: trench coats and dressing all black, like you know, like
Speaker 1: a c your cat. You're in central casting, you're trying
Speaker 1: to like cast its secret police. Like they're all in black.
Speaker 1: They look like the Matrix guys. Yeah, they were in turtlenecks,
Speaker 1: not the men of the Research Bureau. They wore wore
Speaker 1: flowered Hawaiian shirts, platform shoes, and sunglasses. Oh no, they're
Speaker 1: dressed real cool like me. Oh I, I appreciate someone
Speaker 1: doing it different. If you're if you're gonna massacre hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of people, at least trying new. You know,
Speaker 1: there's no arm bands here, it's it's yeah, dresses, we're sandals.
Speaker 1: If m if Jimmy Bufett carried out a massacre, it
Speaker 1: would look like this, yeah every time. Y Yeah, well
Speaker 1: you know they're all drunk. They've got a whiskey plane.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. Uh So. The Research Brea headquarters was connected
Speaker 1: to president a Means Home by an underground tunnel, so
Speaker 1: we could show up and participate in the executions when
Speaker 1: he wanted to. Most of the work was headed by
Speaker 1: a man named Major Farouquin Minawa. He was sort of
Speaker 1: the Lavernty Barrier type figure, and Barrier was the head
Speaker 1: of the KGB for a while under Stalin. Uh So,
Speaker 1: he's the kind of guy who could murder his own
Speaker 1: friends after a night of drinking and hanging out with him.
Speaker 1: At one point he had his wife and three daughters executed.
Speaker 1: That guy should have waited till a grand theF Ato
Speaker 1: came out, just to get it out of his system.
Speaker 1: I think so. Um he suspected his wife and daughters
Speaker 1: were helping guns and rebels because they were Baganda Baganda's
Speaker 1: which is like the tribe, one of the tribes that
Speaker 1: he hated. Um. So yeah, It's important to understand that
Speaker 1: all the oppression apparatus ITDDI created was very decentralized, so
Speaker 1: most of the deaths during this period were not idio
Speaker 1: means signing someone's death warrant. It was as a result
Speaker 1: of the fact that all soldiers and intelligence officers in
Speaker 1: his country were allowed to arrest or kill any person
Speaker 1: they considered dangerous to peace and good order. So Iddie
Speaker 1: gave his men a legal excuse to pursue their personal
Speaker 1: grudges and steal from people. Polished. You guys just dropping
Speaker 1: out in their no and that is the official line
Speaker 1: of the podcast is abolish ice, bider ritos. I'm drinking
Speaker 1: all water lukewarm until ice is a bolish It is
Speaker 1: funny that like our Gestapo equivalent is ice, because if
Speaker 1: they had known fifteen years ago, they probably would have
Speaker 1: named it something cooler. Ice is. Yeah, it's not that cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean gave his men excuses yet to pursue personal
Speaker 1: grudges and steal from people. One survivor recalled, quote, everything
Speaker 1: you have seen in Wild West movies was everyday life.
Speaker 1: Here someone bumping off the husband and publicly taking the wife,
Speaker 1: or someone bumping you off and openly driving off with
Speaker 1: your car. So I hope we presented kind of a
Speaker 1: picture of how brutal a means regime was. Let's dig
Speaker 1: a little deeper into the man himself. You can't understand
Speaker 1: Idioman without understanding that he was great at fucking great
Speaker 1: that well, at least he needed everyone to believe that
Speaker 1: he was great at fun So one way or the other,
Speaker 1: it's important understand that that was a part of his
Speaker 1: public image that was bad. Ladies now and and almost
Speaker 1: all like the only person, the only famous person I'm
Speaker 1: convinced who was ever actually good at fucking I was
Speaker 1: gonna say Marlon Brandon, but oh yeah, yeah, well Marlon
Speaker 1: Brandon makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was method so
Speaker 1: he was method Um anyway, Yeah, so uh, I mean
Speaker 1: was it was important to him that there'd be a
Speaker 1: public image that he was virile and good at sex.
Speaker 1: His former Minister for Health, Henry Kimba, said this besides
Speaker 1: his five wives. Also, he had five wives, honestly for
Speaker 1: what I thought. Yeah, No, he's he's he's he's a
Speaker 1: conservative fellow. Besides his five wives, I mean, has had
Speaker 1: countless other women, many of whom have borne him children.
Speaker 1: His sex life is truly extraordinary. He regards his sexual
Speaker 1: energy as a sign of his power and authority. He
Speaker 1: never tries to hide his lust. His eyes lock onto
Speaker 1: any beautiful woman. His reputation for sexual performance is so
Speaker 1: startling that women often deliberately make themselves available, and his
Speaker 1: love affairs have included women of all colors in many nations,
Speaker 1: from schoolgirls to mature women, from street girls to university lecturers.
Speaker 1: Which is who knows how true that is? It sounds
Speaker 1: like a lot of it. Definitely, definitely a lot, because
Speaker 1: there's a ton of stories from having husbands executed so
Speaker 1: we could suck their wife. Um, but this is you know,
Speaker 1: his former minister of health giving what is this is
Speaker 1: what Idioman wanted people to hear about him that he's
Speaker 1: because this was important, of course. Yeah, I'm great at
Speaker 1: fighting and I'm great at fucking. Yeah, he sounds like
Speaker 1: World Chamberlain. There's just something about authoritarian assholes and needing
Speaker 1: people to believe they're tough and good at fucking. I
Speaker 1: want everyone to know I am bad at sex, which
Speaker 1: means very ladies, good sex over there. Yeah, I'm trying
Speaker 1: to think about which of our presidents were definitely the
Speaker 1: bit because I hear JFK was terrible. Really, yeah, I've heard.
Speaker 1: I've heard lb J said JFK was terrible. Well, you
Speaker 1: can't trust that guy. You can't trust that guy was
Speaker 1: jealous and he called his dick jumbo, which means he
Speaker 1: did well, maybe that's true. Then I don't know. Nixon
Speaker 1: seems pretty bad. Nixon can't have been good, right, No, Um,
Speaker 1: I feel like Teddy Roosevelt. Well he was in a wheelchair.
Speaker 1: That was FDR. Never mind, Well he was a big
Speaker 1: stick guy, right, it was a big stick guy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that guy can suck. That guy could fun. And I
Speaker 1: feel like FDR was probably pretty good, but like he
Speaker 1: would have been like a hands and oral man. That's
Speaker 1: my guest for FDR. I think he leaves them satisfied.
Speaker 1: As what I'm saying, I don't think. Yeah yeah, um
Speaker 1: so idi Amin again had five wives. His favorite wife
Speaker 1: was a lady named Sarah. He met her when she
Speaker 1: was eighteen and a go go dancer for the Revolutionary
Speaker 1: Suicide jazz band Um stories. All this time Eddie fell
Speaker 1: in love, but tragically, Sarah already had a fiance and
Speaker 1: she was pregnant, so when she gave birth on Christmas
Speaker 1: Day nineteen seventy four, it he just told everyone the
Speaker 1: kid was his and had the birth announced on state television.
Speaker 1: Sarah's fiance was not happy with this, but he died
Speaker 1: in our car crash immediately after this, so it worked out.
Speaker 1: No suspicion but then at all Nope, just a random
Speaker 1: car crash, the like the day that he complains, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I shouldn't laugh there. I may be getting a little
Speaker 1: callous of all these stories. I mean it's hard not
Speaker 1: to disassociate a little bit. I mean, so far in
Speaker 1: the last hour, I've learned of many millions of people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's horrific. Um so Idy I mean married
Speaker 1: Sarah Knight was a small private ceremony, but Idy was
Speaker 1: concerned that having a small private ceremony might be portrayed
Speaker 1: or might be seen as excluding the people of Uganda,
Speaker 1: so he remarried her in a gigantic televised ceremony. Yes
Speaker 1: or Era Fat was his best man. The banquet cost
Speaker 1: two million dollars, the banquet, not the whole wedding, just
Speaker 1: that which I would kind of want to check out it.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've seen Super sixteen, you know whatever it's called.
Speaker 1: So President, I mean cut the red and wedding cake
Speaker 1: with a sword. Knowing his history, there's no chance he
Speaker 1: didn't also use that sword to stab people. Obviously, sword
Speaker 1: guys sort of the problem. That's how you know someone's
Speaker 1: trusted if they're a fucking sword guy. Machine eddie is
Speaker 1: a people's weapon. While you were learning about colonialism, I
Speaker 1: was studying a block change. Uh. So Idy had five
Speaker 1: wives and something like forty or fifty children. Uh. He
Speaker 1: married his first two wives in the same year, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty six, when he was twenty eight. One of those
Speaker 1: marriages went all right and produced several children, but his
Speaker 1: second wife, Kay, divorced him, and he murdered the best
Speaker 1: man and then murdered Kay. Her arms and legs were
Speaker 1: found in a sack in the trunk of a car,
Speaker 1: so Idi had her body sewn back together and marched
Speaker 1: around in front of his children and other wives, or
Speaker 1: he didn't. So this is again where we get into
Speaker 1: some controversy. Because his kids are still around and talking
Speaker 1: today and do speeches and like several of them have
Speaker 1: have they don't necessarily doubt the crimes that were committed
Speaker 1: in their dad's reign, but they are all pretty consistent
Speaker 1: about the fact that no, he was a good dad
Speaker 1: and very normal around us. So it's possible this is
Speaker 1: this story is a lie, like the witchcraft stuff. Hard
Speaker 1: to tell because again, his kids even today, are all
Speaker 1: pretty much he was He was fun um, so he
Speaker 1: might not have brought it home. I really don't know.
Speaker 1: I wasn't there. Yeah, okay, there's it's It's one of
Speaker 1: those things. It's impossible to know the truth their stories
Speaker 1: that he was brutal to his kids and fucking had
Speaker 1: corpses training around them, and then his kids say stuff
Speaker 1: like here's a quote from his son, it was fun
Speaker 1: with my dad all the time. It was fun. His daughter,
Speaker 1: my muna Amin said he was such a lovely man,
Speaker 1: so good, so lovely. He never beats any children when
Speaker 1: he's at home. He just wanted us all to be
Speaker 1: on him. He's like a mother, a father, a sister,
Speaker 1: a brother in one. He loved music and he's always
Speaker 1: on his accordion singing. Wow, what a revisionist history. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's also possible that he was a brutal
Speaker 1: monster everywhere outside of the home and was fine with
Speaker 1: his kids. Yeah, and they just never heard about They
Speaker 1: heard about it, but again they don't. A lot of
Speaker 1: them don't deny that brutality of the regime. They're just
Speaker 1: like at home, he was a normal guy, which that happens. Like.
Speaker 1: You can find plenty of stories about people hanging out
Speaker 1: with Hitler and being like he was super nice and
Speaker 1: he was like my uncle. And yeah, people always say
Speaker 1: dictators are charismatic and stuff. I mean, even if we
Speaker 1: feel the same thing with celebrities. I don't really know,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I I and I can't know. What we
Speaker 1: do know, and what we do know for certain is
Speaker 1: that Idi Amine played the accordion fucking constantly. He was
Speaker 1: apparently if you're an accordion guy, he was apparently good
Speaker 1: at playing the accordion and here's here's a picture of
Speaker 1: him doing the weird ol thing o. God right, it's
Speaker 1: weird that dorks are truly the worst people in the
Speaker 1: world because that guy's in the swords, accordions, bagpipes. This
Speaker 1: guy has a bad taste. Everyone with bad tish needs
Speaker 1: to be called. And if he had grown up now, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he would still play the accordion and have a bunch
Speaker 1: of swords, but he would also be able to talk
Speaker 1: to you about anime for sixteen hours. Oh yeah, absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry anime fans, I mean, enemy is pretty cool, yeah,
Speaker 1: some of it. So the stuff Idie I mean is
Speaker 1: probably most famous for is again cannibalism, witchcraft in his
Speaker 1: obsession with Scotland, because that's like the sensational stuff for sure.
Speaker 1: People we don't know again, that's one of those Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're about to get into that. Um. So it's an
Speaker 1: arguably true that he loved Scotland. There's a shipload of
Speaker 1: documented evidence of that. And maybe he just was eating
Speaker 1: some haggas and or they just wished it was exactly
Speaker 1: oh please eat some people stuff with that ship. It
Speaker 1: is very much up for debate as to whether or
Speaker 1: not he was really into black magic and cannibalism. The
Speaker 1: rumors that he was in the magic and eating people
Speaker 1: started with the Begundans Uh and the Begundans where the
Speaker 1: people from South Uganda and they did not like the
Speaker 1: people from North Uganda Um. A lot of these rumors
Speaker 1: originate from one begund And who served in Idia Means cabinet.
Speaker 1: He wrote in his book, which was one of the
Speaker 1: major sources for the last King of Scotland, quote a
Speaker 1: means bizarre behavior derives partly from his tribal background. Like
Speaker 1: many other warrior societies, the Kakwa Means tribe are known
Speaker 1: to have practiced blood rituals on slain enemies. These involved
Speaker 1: cutting a piece of flesh from the body to subdue
Speaker 1: the dead man's spirit, or tasting the victim's blood to
Speaker 1: render the spirit harmless. Such rituals still exist among the Kakwa.
Speaker 1: If they kill a man, it is their practice to
Speaker 1: insert a knife in the body and touch the bloody
Speaker 1: blade to their lips. I have reason to believe that
Speaker 1: it means practices do not stop at tasting blood. On
Speaker 1: several occasions, he has boasted to me and others that
Speaker 1: he has eaten human flesh. He went on to say
Speaker 1: that eating human flesh is not uncommon in his home area.
Speaker 1: It's possible that this is true. The British noted that
Speaker 1: the Kaqwa engaged in quote sacrifices of humans and animals,
Speaker 1: but it's also worth noting that most of the claims
Speaker 1: about cannibalism came from Idye's enemies. A major source for
Speaker 1: this podcast was an article from the University of Graneingen
Speaker 1: in the Netherlands titled idi Amine Icon of Evil. This
Speaker 1: article notes that the witchcraft and cannibalism myths may have
Speaker 1: started as a result of local racism within Uganda, so
Speaker 1: racism from southern Ugandans towards no Northern Ugandans quote. The
Speaker 1: southern Ugandans are particularly contemptuous of the Southern Sudanese and Newbies,
Speaker 1: not of other northern tribes as wild and uncivilized. It
Speaker 1: is from them that we have reports, if I mean
Speaker 1: and his Newbies tasting the blood of their victims and
Speaker 1: eating their livers. And the explanation that's such a custom
Speaker 1: is either a nubie or coqua one, So we don't know.
Speaker 1: It's possible he licked blood it's possible he ate flesh.
Speaker 1: It's also possible that's just racism from people in the
Speaker 1: sun would argue, you know, you kill thousands of people,
Speaker 1: that is worse anyway. I mean, like, I'm wouldn't be
Speaker 1: completely surprised if you know, he got into desecrating some
Speaker 1: bodies at all, It wouldn't be beyond the pale to assume.
Speaker 1: But it's also I think this is something that happens
Speaker 1: in Western media a lot with these dictators where if
Speaker 1: you can get like that, there's a bunch of stories
Speaker 1: about the North Korean regime that are are bullshit that
Speaker 1: that have no basis in reality about like and it's
Speaker 1: always like the cookie ones about like ridiculous claims the
Speaker 1: Kim's made, and like the stuff that that sounds really funny,
Speaker 1: like that you can laugh at. And some of those
Speaker 1: are true because like any authoritarian regime is going to
Speaker 1: have some silly stuff around it because it's a silly thing, um.
Speaker 1: But a lot of it's just lies, and it's the
Speaker 1: same thing. It's lies that make it seem like something
Speaker 1: other than what it is, which is a brutal dictatorship
Speaker 1: as opposed to like, no, it's this crazy cannibal man
Speaker 1: man who ruled the country. And it's like, well, no,
Speaker 1: there's nothing really crazy. He's just a monster like all
Speaker 1: of the other That's less scary to me than just
Speaker 1: a person who knows exactly what they're doing and does
Speaker 1: it anyway. That's like if an oil tycoon or something.
Speaker 1: And then there was a rumor though, like did you
Speaker 1: hear that he litters? Yeah, he's running the environment. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I that's kind of why I wanted to dig
Speaker 1: into these myths about him a lot, because that's what
Speaker 1: most people know about Idio mean, which I think is
Speaker 1: less I think the fact that the idea that, oh,
Speaker 1: maybe this guy was a cannibal and a dictator is
Speaker 1: less interesting than like, this guy was trained to be
Speaker 1: a brutal dictator in the British Army who raised him
Speaker 1: to be a soldier and then abandoned him and his
Speaker 1: country to whatever was going to happen next, which I
Speaker 1: think is a more accurate story. Um. And but that
Speaker 1: one isn't fun for Americans because it implicates all of
Speaker 1: Western civilization as opposed to some cannibal gotten in charge
Speaker 1: over there in Africa. Um. Anyway, that's that's you know,
Speaker 1: my thinking on the matter. Um, so obviously by this time,
Speaker 1: uh and you know, by the middle of his reign,
Speaker 1: kind of the bloom was off the rose. The British
Speaker 1: were no longer fans of idi Amin word if his
Speaker 1: atrocities had filtered out to the world. Europe turned away,
Speaker 1: and idi did what he always did when someone questioned him.
Speaker 1: He flipped out and attacked. He declared himself conquer of
Speaker 1: the British Empire. He had T shirts printed up with
Speaker 1: his face on it and Conquer of the British Empire
Speaker 1: printed beneath, which is a pretty pretty pro move. He
Speaker 1: developed a love for having white guys, particularly British guys,
Speaker 1: bow to him. So there's a bunch of picture is
Speaker 1: like this of British businessmen like I'm wearing oaths to him. Now,
Speaker 1: this is the first thing that oh, just away because
Speaker 1: it's about to get fucking better. Because at one point
Speaker 1: he made a bunch of British businessmen carry him around
Speaker 1: on a sedan chair while a crowd cheered, which is
Speaker 1: that's a solid move. Yeah, I do like that. Sorry
Speaker 1: not to support that. He's got a little he's got Okay,
Speaker 1: someone's holding an umbrella for him. Yeah, and that's the
Speaker 1: kind of wackiness that we know went down. And again
Speaker 1: he's not all wrong, like the whiskey plane was a
Speaker 1: solid idea. Yeah yeah, um. So Eddie desperately wanted to
Speaker 1: be a major player on the global stage. He wasted
Speaker 1: no opportunity to wade into any global conflict that he could.
Speaker 1: When the Watergate scandal broke, he sent a letter to
Speaker 1: Richard Nixon and gave him advice on how to handle Watergate.
Speaker 1: Nice quote. When the stability of a nation is in danger,
Speaker 1: the only solution is, unfortunately, to imprison the leaders of
Speaker 1: the opposition. Yea. The longer he was in power, the
Speaker 1: more unhinged in braggy he became president. I mean, started
Speaker 1: to inflate the stories of his military service, claiming he'd
Speaker 1: fought in Burma during World War Two. He offered to
Speaker 1: marry Princess Anne of Great Britain. He also offered to
Speaker 1: become King of Scotland and lead the Scots to independence
Speaker 1: from Britainin Britain, for the most part, the international response
Speaker 1: to Idi Amine was laughter, the same kind of laughter
Speaker 1: you find today when people talk about ridiculous with Korean propaganda.
Speaker 1: Alan coren A British comedian had a popular column in
Speaker 1: Punch magazine where he'd write out fake idi Amine speeches
Speaker 1: that were very racist. If you've got Spotify, you can
Speaker 1: find the album that was made based on these columns
Speaker 1: with a white guy doing IDE's voice. It is it was.
Speaker 1: I mean, this was like in the mid seventies. Um
Speaker 1: if you look up Idiomine on Spotify, you'll find the
Speaker 1: album and it's like infuriating because it's just it's joking
Speaker 1: about what was in reality a horrific, crime filled regime,
Speaker 1: making fun of the fact that Idioman talks funny, which
Speaker 1: he doesn't even talk that funny. He speaks better English
Speaker 1: than I do fucking Uganda. Um so uh yeah. But
Speaker 1: this is again that's the international reaction is they're laughing
Speaker 1: at this guy, They're making fun of him. He's like,
Speaker 1: this horror show is playing out in Africa and it's
Speaker 1: being treated as kind of like a freak show to
Speaker 1: the rest of the world. Um so yeah. The caricature
Speaker 1: of idi Amine Um is based a lot in white
Speaker 1: European racism, but it's also based in some local Ugandan
Speaker 1: regional racism. So they're north North of Uganda is basically
Speaker 1: the social equivalent of the American South and the well educated,
Speaker 1: well to do Southern Uganda's considered idi Amine to be
Speaker 1: like a hillbilly. They thought his accent when he spoke
Speaker 1: in Yugan and they thought his accent was painful. Um.
Speaker 1: So it's basically he was like to a lot of
Speaker 1: people in Southern Uganda. He was like if we had
Speaker 1: a president who came from the dirty South and talked
Speaker 1: like he was grew up on the body. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: That That is the attitude that like the Southerners have
Speaker 1: towards him. Um. In reality, Idioman was a pretty smart guy.
Speaker 1: He wasn't educated obviously, but he was. He had a
Speaker 1: lot of intelligence, because you don't carry out a regime
Speaker 1: like this and keep it going for eight years without that.
Speaker 1: Most of his actions were pretty logical. Uh. Mass murder
Speaker 1: is a time honored way to stay in power. Exiling
Speaker 1: the Asians tank Ugana's economy, but it provided itdie with
Speaker 1: a host of businesses that he could give away to
Speaker 1: his supporters in exchange for their loyalty. And for a
Speaker 1: while his tactics worked pretty well, but he made more
Speaker 1: mistakes as time went on. One of those was alienating Israel.
Speaker 1: He had initially been friendly to the country, he'd trained
Speaker 1: there again as a paratrooper, but he wound up switching
Speaker 1: around and backing the Palestinian cause, which is fine, but
Speaker 1: he also descended into horrific anti Semitism. In nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: the he told the UN Secretary General that Hitler had
Speaker 1: been quote right to burn six million Jews, and he
Speaker 1: promised to build a monument to Hitler in kampala Uh.
Speaker 1: He was eventually convinced to cancel this plan because everyone
Speaker 1: around him was like, that's bad idea, idio mean, but
Speaker 1: he continued pissing off Israel as the years rolled by.
Speaker 1: On June nine, six and Air France flight with two
Speaker 1: forty eight passengers was hijacked by two members of the
Speaker 1: Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Now this was
Speaker 1: back in the day when terrorist plane hijackers didn't kill
Speaker 1: people as a general rule. They just kind of have
Speaker 1: the plane flown to an airport and hold everyone hostage
Speaker 1: until their comrades were released from prison or they got
Speaker 1: a bunch of money or whatever. This was like a
Speaker 1: common thing. There's a period of time in the seventies
Speaker 1: where every week there'd be a new fucking hijacking. Um So,
Speaker 1: these particular hijackers and this plane most of the passengers
Speaker 1: there is Rali. So these particular hijackers land first in
Speaker 1: Libya and then at Entebbi Airport in Uganda. President I
Speaker 1: mean welcomed them enthusiastically. This proved to be a mistake
Speaker 1: when one week later Israeli commandos raided the airport, liberated
Speaker 1: the captives, and destroyed a sizeable chunk of the Ugandan
Speaker 1: air force while it was sitting on the tarmac. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a movie called Raid on Entebbi about it. It's
Speaker 1: a very famous like commando raid thing. Um So, Itty
Speaker 1: flipped out of this. He'd already switched from ing pro
Speaker 1: is Real to pro Palestine, of course, but he went
Speaker 1: over the deep end. He had a seventy three year
Speaker 1: old Jewish woman and a you gun in hospital named
Speaker 1: Dora block Uh, pretty brutally murdered, and then he went
Speaker 1: on kind of a world insult tour. Um So, this
Speaker 1: is kind of a little bit and and there's growing
Speaker 1: local resistance to him at this point too. So he's
Speaker 1: he starts to in the late seventies go off the
Speaker 1: rails a bit. Uh. He called the President of Tanzania
Speaker 1: a coward, an old woman in a prostitute. He called
Speaker 1: the President of Zambia an imperialist puppet and boot liquor.
Speaker 1: He called Henry Kissinger a murderer and a spy, which
Speaker 1: was pretty fair. Uh. He also said that Queen Elizabeth
Speaker 1: should send him her twenty five year old knickers to
Speaker 1: celebrate her silver jubilee. So he was like the semi
Speaker 1: year old underwear Queen of England, which is I appreciate this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's solid. Uh. He steadily expanded his list of
Speaker 1: titles over the years. In nineteen seventy seven, he announced
Speaker 1: that he must now be addressed as quote his excellent
Speaker 1: see Field Marshal Al Haji Dr Idi Amine data life,
Speaker 1: President of Uganda, Conqueror of the British Empire, Distinguished Service
Speaker 1: Order of the Military Cross, Victoria Cross, and Professor of Geography.
Speaker 1: What a good tag at the end. This guy is funny. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That professor of geography thing is really what sets it off. UM.
Speaker 1: On October thirty made the biggest mistake of his dictator career.
Speaker 1: He invaded Tanzania. Um. This was over a pretty useless
Speaker 1: piece of land like there was no good reason to
Speaker 1: attack the spot that he did. Tanzania counterattacked, and since
Speaker 1: their military was much more functional than the Ugandan military,
Speaker 1: the Ugandans were quickly thrown back. Next, Tanzania marched on Uganda.
Speaker 1: Aided by the Gandan Ugandan exiles, they moved to unseat
Speaker 1: Ittie from power. For his part, Idi Amine announced that
Speaker 1: he now loved the Tanzanian president and quote would have
Speaker 1: married him if he had been a woman. This didn't
Speaker 1: work and did not turn back the Tanzanian army, so
Speaker 1: Idi Amine had to flee from power, first to Libya
Speaker 1: and then to Saudi Arabia, where he spent the rest
Speaker 1: of his life in exile. Uh somehow, not being a
Speaker 1: warlord anymore seemed to calm him down. He lived a
Speaker 1: quiet life, regularly visiting Mecca and living with just one
Speaker 1: wife and several of his children. Yeah. Yeah, he's one
Speaker 1: of the ones who got away with it. Um Idi
Speaker 1: explained in a rare nineteen interview that quote, when I
Speaker 1: am no longer president, some of them say they don't
Speaker 1: want me. I accept it. Frankly. I have had one
Speaker 1: wife since and have found also to have one life
Speaker 1: is better. So idi Amine lapsed into a coma on
Speaker 1: July nineteenth, two thousand three. He was put on life
Speaker 1: support at a hospital in Jetta. His family had begged
Speaker 1: the new ugun And government to let him return home
Speaker 1: to die. They were told he'd have to stand trial
Speaker 1: if he returned, So I mean he didn't go back,
Speaker 1: and in August sixteen, two thousand and three, Idi Amine
Speaker 1: died peacefully in a hospital bed in Saudi Arabia. And
Speaker 1: that's unfortunately not the end of the story or Uganda's problems,
Speaker 1: because President of the Ghosts is going to happen um.
Speaker 1: President of Bote returned after Iddie was ousted. Aboute was
Speaker 1: not outwardly ridiculous. He didn't make crazy claims about the
Speaker 1: Holocaust or randomly insult foreign leaders. He didn't have a
Speaker 1: wacky title. What he did do was vastly expand the
Speaker 1: purges that Idi Amine had begun. While Amine had mostly
Speaker 1: targeted certain tribe members in the military and government, a
Speaker 1: Bote targeted huge chunks of civilians based on their tribe.
Speaker 1: He probably killed more people in his second term than
Speaker 1: died during the entirety of Idi Amine's reign. Jesus A.
Speaker 1: Bote was eventually overthrown by a general named Bazello olauo Okello,
Speaker 1: who was violently overthrown by Yoweri Musaveni's Natural National Resistance
Speaker 1: Army in nineteen six. Musaveni is still the president of
Speaker 1: Uganda today. He had term limits abolished in two thousand
Speaker 1: five and removed the presidential aid limit in two thousand seventeen.
Speaker 1: Uganda has to this day never seen a peaceful transition
Speaker 1: of power. Wow. So that's the story. That's a heartwarming time.
Speaker 1: It is it is uh And it's a tale where
Speaker 1: like I mean, Idiomine is the the organ through which
Speaker 1: all of this repression and violence was executed. But the
Speaker 1: real bastard of this is the British Empire in my
Speaker 1: opinion at least, Yeah, for sure. I mean, I mean
Speaker 1: I'll trace all the blame back to white people at
Speaker 1: any time, for sure. But man, I really just can't
Speaker 1: imagine living in a country or so much bloodshed is
Speaker 1: like happening constantly all the time. Politically, Um, yeah, I
Speaker 1: would move away so fast. Well, And that's it's one
Speaker 1: of those things that how are you gonna? But yeah,
Speaker 1: how are you gonna? And it's you get all these
Speaker 1: people in Europe and the United States now because most
Speaker 1: of the people who like flee parts of Africa are
Speaker 1: going to wade heading to Europe because it's very it's
Speaker 1: easier to get there than it is to get to
Speaker 1: the US. And you know, get this, like what is
Speaker 1: our We can't take all care of all these people.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, you could steal the ship for two
Speaker 1: hundred years, like and then leave them without because Uganda
Speaker 1: there at no point in prior history they were like
Speaker 1: kingdoms and states and whatnot all over Africa, but there
Speaker 1: was there never been a Uganda, Like all of these
Speaker 1: groups of people had never been forced together before the
Speaker 1: British did that. And if you're going to do you
Speaker 1: shouldn't do that in the first place. But if you're
Speaker 1: going to do that, if you're going to force these
Speaker 1: people into a state, you owe it to them to
Speaker 1: like create a functional state before you leave. Which, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's up, it's real fucked up. Well, I hope you
Speaker 1: learned something today. I did somehow left more grim than
Speaker 1: than it came in. Um that's the fun of colonialism.
Speaker 1: But that's okay. I mean, like sometimes you got to
Speaker 1: know the monstrous capabilities of um what you know what
Speaker 1: we can do as human beings to prevent it. Yeah, Um, jeez,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, it's hard to take a good
Speaker 1: lesson out of this, other than don't be a colonialist
Speaker 1: and don't take a people and train them to be
Speaker 1: soldiers and nothing else for a century. Yeah, don't. Um,
Speaker 1: what are some other things? Don't play bagpipes and play
Speaker 1: the accordions? Well that's okay, let's not attempt the swords.
Speaker 1: Let's attack the bagpipes aren't the problem here. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know what else to learn. I mean with you
Speaker 1: about accordions? Yeah, I mean I haven't watched Um, what's
Speaker 1: it called Last King of Scotland? Have you watched? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's I don't. I didn't enjoy it very much. Is
Speaker 1: it too? Is it sympathetic or no? It's it plays
Speaker 1: into the brutality of one thing that does a decent
Speaker 1: job of this, showing you how he might have charmed
Speaker 1: people earlier. But I think it leans more into the
Speaker 1: sensational side of things, which eating people and stuff and
Speaker 1: it Yeah, and it does, isn't. It doesn't talk at
Speaker 1: all about a means past in a meaningful way. And
Speaker 1: that's why I lead this by talking about British military
Speaker 1: policy and their colonies, because I don't think you can understand,
Speaker 1: I mean, without understanding where he and his people came from. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that alone is interesting by itself. Is a story,
Speaker 1: I mean, not a not a fun story, but it's
Speaker 1: definitely not a fun story, but it's an important one. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I will say, if you are starting a punk
Speaker 1: band in the near future, the Suicide Revolutionary Jazz band,
Speaker 1: it's pretty fucking they honestly sound like a scar bandy
Speaker 1: and look like one. They do look like a scar band.
Speaker 1: They're all dressed nice, they got their shirts tucked in.
Speaker 1: Ah man, I could go for some suicide revolutionary SCA music. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: I think the worst part of that story was that
Speaker 1: he died peacefully. That is, it's always a bummer when
Speaker 1: that happens, because like we're I think a daffi is
Speaker 1: going to be running shortly before this podcast comes out,
Speaker 1: and that's a story where the monster gets Like, that's
Speaker 1: what you want to see happen to these guys as
Speaker 1: they get dragged out into the street and murdered by
Speaker 1: their own people. They sucked over. Yeah, I can think
Speaker 1: of a couple of people would like to see that
Speaker 1: happened to Yeah, yeah, whose names we won't give because
Speaker 1: there are laws against that sort of thing. But there's
Speaker 1: it's hard not to want certain people dragged out into
Speaker 1: the street and at least like, you know, maybe not
Speaker 1: even killed, just pete on by dozens of people. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess there's nothing left for us to do but
Speaker 1: for me to ask you to cool. You could uh,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, maybe get some laughs from looking at
Speaker 1: some videos. I don't know how to transition this either
Speaker 1: that hasn't videos on my website Bertti Rida com. You
Speaker 1: can follow me on Twitter at ao bro bro um,
Speaker 1: where I just usually complain about um. People can cat
Speaker 1: us in Hollywood and making some jokes and you can
Speaker 1: see me performs with jokes all around l A and um.
Speaker 1: You know, if you have any more questions, I will
Speaker 1: refer you to this guy because I don't know anything.
Speaker 1: You know, if you like complaining about casting, they did
Speaker 1: just cast a new Idioman movie. Uh yes, Scarlett Johansson's
Speaker 1: gonna play him. You got me, you got me? Um.
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: I write okay, just the two letters there, I get
Speaker 1: a book on Amazon called A Brief History of Vice.
Speaker 1: You can find that on Amazon. You can find this
Speaker 1: podcast at behind the Bastards dot com, where we will
Speaker 1: have pictures of the incredible Suicide Revolutionary Jazz Band and
Speaker 1: some other pictures from A Means Rain, as well as
Speaker 1: links to all the sources for this podcast. I really
Speaker 1: do recommend reading that University of Gronigan article. It's a
Speaker 1: fascinating analysis of why Idi has seen sort of the
Speaker 1: way he is today and where he came from. Um
Speaker 1: so uh. You can also find us on Twitter and
Speaker 1: Instagram social media at Bastards pods, so so look us up,
Speaker 1: check us out. This has been behind the Bastards for
Speaker 1: the week I've been Robert Evans. Check back in next Tuesday,
Speaker 1: when we will be talking about someone else who is
Speaker 1: also terrible. H