In the late 1940s, with the British poised to leave Uganda, which had been a “region” under the jurisdiction of the British East African Company since 1888, stories began to drift around concerning the larger-than-life Lieutenant Idi Amin, erstwhile of the King’s African Rifles, a regiment of the British Army. There were strange rumours that in distant frontier villages, trussed-up captives were being bayoneted under the orders of a big, happy, laughing officer with a particular line in sadism. One of his fellow officers described him thus: “Not much grey matter, thick from the neck up, but a splendid chap to have about.” Others spoke of his prowess in the boxing ring, and on the rugby pitches (he was an unused substitute when Uganda played the British Lions in the 1950s). Maybe his superiors in the regiment should have investigated those bayoneting claims a little more closely but by then, with a raft of African states declaring their independence, the British had other issues on their minds. Some 20 years later, as he crushed Uganda within his mighty fist, Amin began to view football in the same way Mobutu had in Zaire: as a pathway to immortality and demigod status in Africa.
When Ugandan Prime Minister Milton Obote departed for a Commonwealth Conference in 1971 Amin, using his feral cunning, struck, and after a short coup he assumed power and promptly began slaughtering those whose loyalty was uncertain. Military officers were appointed to senior civil service posts and Amin’s particular brand of ‘justice’ was brutal. He realised that two things were required to survive beyond the short term; a strong and loyal military to protect him in his plush Kampala pile and sportsmen who could bring glory and prestige to his regime at home and abroad. He quickly got lucky. John Akii-Bua won a gold medal in the 400-metre hurdles at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and the athlete was rewarded with a car and a city bungalow and both a street and a sports stadium were named after him. However, his position as a national icon didn’t prevent Amin’s ‘State Research Bureau’ murdering three of Akii-Bua’s brothers.
It was football which began to dominate Amin’s attentions by the mid 1970s and, in line with his foreign policy, getting one over on arch-rivals and neighbours Tanzania. The 2006 film The Last King of Scotland, although only partly based on the truth, shows Amin (played by Forest Whitaker) kicking a ball around with his sons on the grass within his Kampala compound. The truth was that he was more of a boxing man, but he’d later use his pugilistic experiences to make a point to the football team. Although Amin had met Uganda’s two star footballers – Philip Omondi and Stanley ‘the Tank’ Mariba privately before (the pair were treated to luxury shopping trips in Tripoli after flying there on Amin’s private jet), his first face-to-face meeting with the entire squad happened in the early part of 1976, with Uganda poised to embark on a World Cup-qualifying session.
In the run-up to the campaign the six foot four, 18 stone Amin had begun to shower gifts on his star players and terrify journalists who dared to pen disparaging headlines about ‘the Cranes’, the national symbol of Uganda since imperial days. “My dreams always come true,” he informed the assembled Ugandan squad, “and I have foreseen that you will not only be Kings of Africa, but that you will also reach the World Cup Football Finals. You will be part of the new Uganda which will stun the world. You must reach the Finals at all costs.”
Amin had always insisted that his boys were fed green vegetables and red meat in order to build up there strength prior to an international match. One of the cooks, Dennis Oboda, who worked with the team in the late ’70s, recalls the sense of expectation as the squad prepared to welcome Amin to their training camp outside Kampala: “The whole party would form a guard of honour to welcome him, because he believed that everyone – players, cooks, trainers and administrative staff – were a unit. Amin was always a notoriously bad timekeeper. Then, in the distance, you would hear the convoy of jeeps approaching, a cloud of dust would fly up in the air and the vehicles would hove into view. Amin would be flanked by gun toting guards and he liked a grand entrance. He visited the training camp several times and he was usually dressed casually rather than in his military uniform with all the medals which clanked around as he walked. He’d usually head straight for Omondi and Mariba and embrace them before he set about advising us on how we should play. We generally only ever saw his playful side. He’d challenge the team to see if they could drop-kick the ball further than him. He always won! He was a powerful man and I think the players never knew whether they were expected to beat him or whether they should politely lose.
“‘Is anyone as strong as me?’ he’d bark. He’d walk around most of the squad, and shout at individuals ‘You – are you stronger than me?’ The players were usually open mouthed with the power of his personality. ‘You must play with both beauty and ferocity’ was one of his main phrases. He’d also repeat endlessly that he could see into the future. He’d close in on players until his nose touched theirs, and say, ‘I foresee your destiny. It is glorious, like that of Uganda.’ On one occasion, he challenged the players to a keepi-euppie competition. It was actually very funny, watching this great ox of a man trying to keep a heavy leather ball in the air in his leather shoes and his trousers. He was happy to act like a buffoon in front of people he felt comfortable with. That time he did lose, but he saw the funny side anyway and contented himself with setting up a competition to see who could kick the ball highest into the sky. ‘I think I can hit the sun,’ he’d joke. He won that high kicking competition, although he never actually hit the sun, to my knowledge.”
Amin’s main concern appeared to be whether the football team was physically strong enough on the pitch to see off opponents. He was once an East African heavyweight boxing champion and in 1974 he entered the ring at Lugogo to fight Peter Sseruwagi, the then national boxing coach, in an undercard fight that Amin won with a knockout. During his regime the national boxing team, ‘the Bombers’, was ranked third in the amateur boxing world. Stars like John ‘the Beast’ Mugabi and Cornelius Boza Edwards (‘Bother Edwards’) terrorised the boxing world after turning professional and Amin would use them in his lectures to the football team.
“One time, Amin turned up with ‘Bother Edwards’ in tow,” recalls Dennis Oboda. “We were in awe of him, but we wondered why he’d been brought along. Amin explained that his boxers used to complain to him that white judges were biased against them and they didn’t know what to do about it. ‘I told them to knock out their opponents,’ barked Amin. ‘Then there is nothing to debate. The fight is won. That is what you must do on the football pitch. Do not be afraid to be physical, to knock out opponents’ teeth or break their limbs. Show them that the Ugandan man is the strongest man of all.’ Then he growled at us like a lion. Later many of the squad laughed, as these words suggested Amin knew little of football’s rules.”
In 1976, Uganda was drawn against neighbours Tanzania in the first round of qualifying for the 1978 World Cup. This time Amin appeared at the training camp in full military regalia. The relations between both nations were complex. Although the Soviet Union supplied both nations with arms, Amin’s major ally was Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi. The socialist regime in charge of Tanzania was pushing through its grand socialist plan, which involved destroying existing farms and villages and forcing all agricultural workers to live in collectivised farms. From 1976 onwards there were sporadic uprisings throughout the region as workers, many of whom were now starving, protested about what was happening. Amin seized upon this and announced that Tanzania’s Kagera province would soon belong to Uganda.
“‘You are my football soldiers,’ he told his assembled squad,” recalls Dennis Oboda. “‘You will crush them. You will destroy them,’ he went on. He told the players that we would surpass what Mobutu had achieved with the Zairean national team at the last World Cup. Then he trotted out some well-worn clichés. ‘Uganda is a paradise in Africa. If you have a shirt and trousers you can live in Uganda for years.’ He was ignoring the fact that by then he had expelled around 100,000 Muslims who had been the backbone of Ugandan business and that the country was about to slide into anarchy.
“Around that time, as stories of atrocities within Uganda spread, his team-talks grew more serious. We were told not to make any sudden movements. His guards had their weapons permanently cocked in our direction. He was still friendly, but more tense. We presumed it was the pressure of his job, although I later heard it was due to the impact of prescription drugs. But he made the team chant in unison about killing Tanzanians and off he went in his jeep.”
A week before the showdown was due to kick off – the talk in Kampala was of little else – the match against Tanzania was abruptly called off, as Uganda’s neighbours descended into civil chaos and were forced to withdraw from the qualifying rounds.
Amin was on the one hand delighted, citing Tanzania’s “cowardice” as their reason for pulling out, but he knew that he’d lost out on a golden propaganda opportunity. The Cranes received a bye to the next round and, in February 1977, they faced Zambia in a two-legged play-off which they lost 4–3 on aggregate.
According to Dennis Oboda, Amin was relatively magnanimous in defeat, suggesting his team turn its attentions to the forthcoming African Cup of Nations. There are numerous stories of him terrorising journalists who dared to pen critical commentaries of his team’s matches. Voice of Uganda (the government newspaper of the time) sports editor Sam Katerega fled to Kenya without even bothering to clear his desk after discovering he’d been fired while listening to a 1pm news bulletin. The story went that star player Denis Obua complained directly to Amin about Katerega’s acidic pen. Obua claimed that by criticising the national team, Katerega made himself a sworn enemy of the national team. Amin promptly announced Katerega’s sacking to the team before moving onto other business. A scout was dispatched to the radio station to inform them of the newspaper editor’s dismissal.
“On the whole,” explains Dennis Oboda, the majority of players realised that Amin was their benefactor and that through their position in the football team they enjoyed privileges which were deprived to others in the country at that time. How could they dare challenge him – without putting themselves at enormous risk?”
Milton Asamba played twice for Uganda in the late 1970s and recalls the mixture of respect and terror which Amin stirred within the players. “One of the initiation ceremonies for young players who seemed gullible, was to get them to shout ‘Down with Amin,’” he recalls. “It was considered that this would test whether a player really had the stomach to play for Uganda or not. Some would-be debutants agonised for hours about whether or not to say it. After all, it only took one grass and that player would be dead. Several young payers opted not to play for Uganda at all rather than put their lives at risk in such a manner.”
In 1978, Amin’s sporting officer, Major Nasur Abdallah, disbanded Express FC, one of the country’s leading clubs. He accused it of having connections with Tanzanian exiles and two national team players, John Ntensibe and Mike Kiganda, were jailed at the infamous Makindye military barracks. When word filtered back to Amin that two of the Cranes’ leading stars were languishing behind bars, he ordered their immediate release. “Many of Amin’s men were football fanatics,” explains Milton Asamba, “and although they could be barbaric, there are countless examples of lives being saved simply because potential victims played football. There are many former footballers who continue to see the positive side of Amin, even if the majority of Ugandans view him as a devil.”
In 1979, Tanzanian-based Ugandan exiles began to close in on the dictator and his regime and Amin fled into the arms of Colonel Gadaffi. As the economy collapsed and the whole nation descended into chaos the football team also disintegrated and Uganda was forced to withdraw from the qualifying rounds of the 1982 World Cup on the grounds of internal instability.
To this day, an East African side has never reached the World Cup Finals, or indeed produced a world star of note, and in a region beset by conflict, (Uganda v Tanzania, Ethiopia v Eritrea and Hutus v Tutsis), widespread corruption and political infighting, the chances of any of these sides doing so in the near future appear as remote as ever.
Milton Asamba is convinced that but for Idi Amin’s manic sabre-rattling in the late 1970s, which hurried the onset of the Tanzanian war, Uganda’s Cranes could have been the best of an admittedly bad bunch. “But then,” he admits, “if he hadn’t opened his bank account for the team back then, the Cranes would never have taken off in the first place.”