He boasted that he had fathered the children of twelve women from different tribes. He said that he believed in having blood ties throughout East Africa.
Besides the official wives, there were at least ten unofficial ones. One, Sauda Amin, used his name. She bore him twins and had them named in a mosque. She fell out with him because of his womanizing. Others were afraid to cross him because of his murderous reputation. Henry Kyemba employed one of Amin’s girlfriends — whose husband, a university professor, Amin had murdered — as a secretary. Amin also had the manager of the Tororo Hotel, a Mr Nshekanabo, killed when he took a fancy to his wife. Amin had the payment on Nshekanabo’s life assurance policy rushed through to the widow. And the husband of a senior woman police officer was killed when Amin wanted his wife.
Amin considered nurses employed by the Ministry of Health his personal harem. A student nurse in Jinja fled to Kenya when he took an interest. Another girl at Mulago Hospital knew she was in trouble when Amin’s bodyguards turned up at her parents” house with salt, sugar and 700 shillings in cash. When the girl’s parents saw the gifts, they burst into tears. This girl, too, went into exile.
Amin was not a very liberated man when it came to other people’s sexuality. Sexual promiscuity was frowned on and Amin warned students against venereal disease. There was some speculation that he was suffering from tertiary syphilis, which would have explained some of his bizarre behaviour. One former lover claimed to have been infected by him and rendered infertile. Amin denied this.
Amin had the author Denis Hills arrested after he wrote The White Pumpkin which passed comment on some of the excesses of the Amin regime. When British Prime Minister Jim Callaghan intervened to get him released, Amin denounced Hills as a sex maniac and drunkard who mixed with prostitutes in Uganda. Indeed, Hills” book gives useful tips on how to pick up Ugandan prostitutes in bars and how to make love to them. But Amin, himself” , used prostitutes — as spies. Highly trained and hand-picked by Big Dada himself, they were sent out around the world to lure secrets out of foreigners.
Despite the fact that he had killed tens of thousands of his own people, Amin was seen merely as a buffoon. His curious turn of phrase made him good for a laugh. When Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia criticized him, Amin told him to cry into “a twenty-five-year-old pair of the Queen’s knickers”.
Amin’s regime was brought down in 1979, when soldiers of his strayed over the Tanzanian border and raped a group of women. Tanzania could sit idly by no longer and invaded. Amin fled to Libya where he was treated well, and given his own villa.
Amin claimed to have married four Arab women to make up for the wives he had left behind. One of them was said to be Zurra Qaddafy, Colonel Qaddafy’s daughter, though the rumour continued that she had left him because her father thought Amin was becoming an alcoholic. Even Colonel Qaddafy found this too much to bear and Amin moved on to Jeddah, where, he said, the
Saudi Arabian monarch had invited him to do some sunbathing. He is still alive and living in Saudi Arabia.
Amin was a fan of another cannibal, Emperor Jean Bokassa, who Amin claimed had “put the Central African Republic on the world map”. He certainly did that.
Born in Bobangui, Lobay, Jean Bedel Bokassa joined the French army at the age of eighteen in 1939. He moved steadily through the ranks, and when the republic gained its independence in 1963, he was made commander-in-chief of the army. Two years later he led a coup overthrowing President David Dacko, annulled the constitution and made himself life president.
On 4 December, 1977, Jean Bedel Bokassa followed in the footsteps of his hero Napoleon and crowned himself Emperor in a lavish ceremony in Bangui, capital of what had been, until then, the Central African Republic.
The coronation of Bokassa I cost a third of the newly renamed Central African Empire’s $70-million annual budget. For several days before the ceremony an inner circle of six hundred of the two thousand five hundred invited guests were treated to meals at leading restaurants. They were put in the best hotels or in special housing provided by the South African government at the Emperor’s expense.
On the day of the coronation, Bokassa rode to the “coronation palace” — Bangui’s stadium — in a brand new coach drawn by fourteen of the sixteen imported Normandy horses that had survived the shock of the climate change.
Bokassa wore an ankle-length tunic, a thirty-foot crimson velvet, gold-embroidered, ermine-trimmed mantle which weighed over 701b, and shoes made of pearls. He walked up to the red-velvet imperial throne, which was trimmed with gold. The back was a huge gold eagle. Another gold eagle perched on the heavy crown which he raised to his own head. A sword was buckled on and, with an ebony staff in his hand, he swore a solemn oath to continue the Central African Empire’s democratic evolution.
Empress Catherine, dressed in gold, knelt at his feet as he crowned her. She was a white woman and the favourite of his nine wives, who had between them presented him with fifty-four legitimate children. He had several illegitimate children too. While he was a sergeant in the French army, he had served in Indochina. As head of state, he sent word to Vietnam that the children he had had with local girls there should come to the Central African Republic. When a bunch of Vietnamese orphans turned up, Bokassa discovered that they probably were not his at all and they disappeared.
After the coronation, Emperor Bokassa and Empress Catherine rode in state to Notre Dame de Bangui where the archbishop consecrated the coronation with a High Mass. He bestowed the “kiss of peace” on the newly crowned Emperor and the papal nuncio read personal greetings from the pope. After the Te Deum, Bokassa gave a banquet for four thousand guests, with French food of course. The language of the imperial court was French, rather than Sango, the local language. A French Navy band played waltzes. Bokassa I, in the uniform of a Marshal, and Empress Catherine, in a Parisian gown, opened the dancing.
At the end of the evening, the Emperor retired to his imperial abode at Berengo, about fifty kilometres from Bangui. But this was no Versailles. It looked more like a cheap motel in an army compound.
Two years later, there were widespread protests against imperial rule. Bokassa responded by killing a hundred schoolchildren and on 21 September, 1979, French troops deposed him and installed the former president, David Dacko, as head of state.
A search of Kologa Palace led to the discovery of human corpses stuffed with rice and prepared for eating.
Bokassa fled to his delightful eighteenth-century chateau near Paris. Stories in the French press about Bokassa’s generous gift of diamonds worth £250,000 to President Valery Giscard d’Estaing helped to lose him the presidential election in 1981.
Meanwhile, in Bokassa’s absence, charges were made against him in the Central African Republic. These included conducting cannibalistic rites, procuring bodies for cannibalistic purposes, personally murdering seven out of as many as two hundred schoolchildren who went, missing following protests against him, and ordering the killing of numerous fellow ministers, politicians, officials and army officers.
Once Giscard d’Estaing was out of office, the French authorities revoked his asylum and Bokassa moved to the Ivory Coast. Fed up with living in exile, he adopted the pseudonym “M. Christian Sole” and, wearing a white cassock and carrying a cross given to him by Pope John Paul II, went home to be tried.
He lost the case and was condemned to death, but the sentence was unaccountably commuted to ten years imprisonment. Released after seven in 1993, he now lives in straitened circumstances in Bangui.
Meanwhile, the French are chasing him for £300,000 in back taxes. To raise the money, he has had to sell his chateau to the National Fighters” Circle, a group of ultra-right-wing veterans of French colonial wars. The National Fighters” Circle, which is associated with Jean Marie Le Pen’s anti-immigration party, had been renting the chateau since Bokassa left France in 1986.