The real reason was entirely different. With Medina and his mistresses, Amin had little time for his first three wives. He kept them locked up in one of the presidential lodges. Bored and frustrated, they took lovers. Kay became pregnant by Peter Mbalu-Mukasa, a doctor on the staff of Mulago Hospital and a married man with several children.
One night, the three women held a party for their lovers. Their guards were terrified that Amin would find out and phoned him directly. Furious, Amin got on the phone and told his wives that he was coming over to throw them out. They told him to keep Medina and go to hell. Then they locked the guards out and got on with their fun.
The following day, they heard about their divorces on the radio. Amin simply repudiated them three times, Muslim-style. Later he sent official letters of dismissal.
But, for Amin, this was not enough. A month later Malyamu was arrested for allegedly smuggling a bolt of cloth into Kenya. Refused bail, she was kept in prison for three weeks. In court, she was given a hefty fine and released.
The following year Malyamu was injured in an accident when one of Amin’s bodyguards drove into her car. When Amin heard about the incident, he said: “Is she dead?”
She was taken to hospital and lodged in a private ward at her own expense. An arm and a leg had been broken. She was put in traction and was in considerable pain when Amin turned up with a posse of journalists from the presidential press unit. He picked a fight with her in front everyone.
“You are a very unlucky woman. You cannot run your life properly,” he chided. He told her to go to a witch doctor whose magic would save her from future misfortune.
The next day, he ordered her removed from the private ward, even though she was paying for it herself, and put in a public ward.
In November 1975, she flew to London to seek medical help and never returned. She left her children with his other wives and her father took over her shop. Amin had the shop looted.
Kay’s father, the Reverend Adroa, contacted Amin and persuaded him to take her back. Amin, who had no idea she was pregnant, agreed to build her a house in his home town Arua, but she did not want to live there. Amin visited her in her flat several times and they had blazing rows. After one of these confrontations she was arrested for the possession of a gun and ammunition. When he turned up at the police station, the row continued through the bars of her cell.
“You can’t have me arrested for keeping a pistol which you yourself left in my apartment,” she screamed.
She was held overnight. In the morning, she explained to the magistrate that the gun belonged to her husband and she was released.
A few days later, her dismembered body was found in the trunk of her lover’s car. He had killed himself and had tried to kill his family. There are indications that he had tried to perform an abortion on her which went wrong and she bled to death. Why the body was dismembered remains a mystery.
Amin had it sewn back together again to show to their children.
“Your mother was a bad woman,” Amin told them. “See what happened to her.”
This humiliating harangue took place in front of reporters and the TV cameras. Amin did not attend Kay’s funeral, nor did he send a representative. There were no further investigations by the police and her name was never mentioned again.
Amin’s third wife Nora fared better and she continued running the business Amin had given her. This was probably for political reasons. She was a Langi, a section of the population he could not afford to alienate.
Medina was now the only wife and suffered for it. Their relationship was passionate — often violent. After one assassination attempt which he suspected she had had a hand in, he beat her so savagely that he fractured his own wrist.
He beat her up when she was pregnant, nearly causing her to miscarry. On another occasion, she was so badly beaten that she had to go to Libya for several weeks for medical treatment. When she returned she was still wearing dark glasses to hide the injuries around her eyes.
Amin’s fifth wife was Sarah Kyolaba, the eighteen-year-old go-go dancer with the jazz band of the “Suicide” Mechanized Unit, an army company named purely for dramatic effect. She was strikingly beautiful, but was living with the band leader, Jesse Gitta.
When she gave birth to a baby, Amin had her and the child transferred to a hospital in Kampala. Medina visited them there. The visit was covered on television and it was announced that President Amin had had another baby. There was no mention of who the mother was.
After she left hospital, Sarah went back to Gitta, who was the real father of the child, but periodically, Amin would send for tier. When Gitta tried to stop her going, he disappeared. Sarah suspected that Amin had had him murdered, but there was nothing she could do.
At the next OAU meeting in Kampala, Amin promoted himself to Field Marshal and invited the visiting heads of state to witness his marriage to Sarah. Part of the celebration was Operation Cape Town, where the Ugandan Air Force were to bomb an island in Lake Victoria, showing what it could do to a South African city. Things did not go well. The bombs all missed their target and fell harmlessly in the water. The head of the Air Force, Smuts Guweddeko, was dismissed. Later he was found murdered.
The next day, Amin dressed up in his Field Marshal’s uniform again to repeat the wedding ceremony, this time for the TV cameras. The resulting footage was broadcast to the nation every few days.
After Sarah married Amin, he forced her to write a satirical song about the disappearance of Jesse Gitta. Later she found Jesse’s head in one of Amin’s fridges. When he noticed that the fridge had been opened, he beat her.
There was little doubt that he ate his victims. One day in August 1975, Amin was talking to some officials who had been to Zaire where they had been served with monkey meat something unacceptable to Ugandans. Seeing the audience were horrified, Amin shocked them further, saying: “I have eaten human meat.”
Sensing he had gone too far, he added that for a soldier at war with no food, it is acceptable to kill a wounded comrade and eat his flesh to survive. Amin also freely admitted eating human flesh to his health minister, Henry Kyemba, who fled to Britain.
In exile, Amin again talked openly of eating human flesh and said he missed it. He could not remember whose heads he had kept in the fridge, but he thought that they might have been those of Chief Justice Ben Kiwanuka, Father Kiggundu and Archbishop Luwum, who he admitted he rather enjoyed killing.
He also claimed to be genocide champion of Africa, with half-a-million victims under his belt. He openly admired Hitler-though killing Jews, Amin thought, did not really count. Nevertheless, he renamed an area of south-eastern Uganda, Fuhrer, in the mistaken belief that it was the site of a World War I battle that had, in fact, taken place hundreds of miles to the south in Tanzania.
Besides his five wives, he had as many as thirty mistresses at any one time. They lived in fear, watched over by spies and afraid to go out with other men. His sexual energy, Amin thought, was a symbol of his power and authority.
“He never tries to hide his lust,” said Henry Kyemba. “His eyes lock onto any beautiful woman. His reputation for sexual performance is so startling that women often deliberately make themselves available, and his love affairs have included women of all colours and many nations, from schoolgirls to mature women, from street girls to university professors.”