Two Pleasant Encounters with a Violent Dictator

My dad’s meetings with Idi Amin

It was January 26th, 1971 when Army Commander Idi Amin forcibly took power in Uganda. At that same time, my mother was 9 months pregnant with me, and living with my dad in the capital city of Kampala.

In the aftermath of the ‘coup’, Amin ordered a complete lockdown of the country. Nobody was allowed to leave their houses.

This posed a problem for my parents, as I was due to be born on February 6th, and they would need to be transported to the hospital for the delivery. If the country was in lockdown, how could they do this?

Amin was trying hard to portray himself as a liberator, and his predecessor, Prime Minister Milton Obote, as a corrupt politician.

In the newspapers, he announced that, if any Ugandan needed help during this time, they could call him directly.

And he posted his personal phone number.

The Butcher of Uganda. The Self Declared President. The Last King of Scotland…Yeah, that guy basically told the country ‘hey, give me a call some time’.

And so my dad did the unthinkable. He called Idi Amin.

The Call

How does the Butcher of Uganda answer the phone, you ask?

It was something like “Idi Amin here, how can I help you sir?”

My dad explained to Amin that my mom was pregnant and would be delivering a child within the next two weeks, and he was worried that, with the lockdown, he would not be able to get her to the hospital.

Amin said that it would not be a problem. He would organize a convoy to take my mother to the hospital when the time came.

Problem solved.

In the following days, the lockdown was lifted during daylight hours, and my mother was able to attend several appointments at the hospital. In her final appointment, the nurses told my mother not to trust Amin’s word. It was too dangerous, they said. They told her it was safer if she just spent the remaining few days there at the hospital until her baby was born.

My parents never called Amin back.

A Second Encounter

Later that same year, after I was born, my Dad was sent to a government office to do a presentation to the Ugandan military. His company, Burroughs, was trying to sell them one of those gigantic main frame computers, and my dad was the point person.

They gathered in a boardroom — my father’s sales team, with members of the military, waiting for the President to arrive. My father was nervous — the presentation was having technical issues.

At some point, the doors to the boardroom swung open, and there stood Idi Amin in his full military style suit.

Looking directly at my dad, he said “Hello, thank you for coming today. I am very sorry but I will not be able to take part in the meeting, as I have some urgent business. But please — continue without me”.

And, for my father, that was the end of two entirely polite, entirely pleasant encounters, with one of the most notorious and cruel tyrants in world history.

If you enjoyed this story, considering reading this one: