Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

by Nigel Cawthorne

  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.”

  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 pay
ment 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.

  * * *

  Fortunately things are not always so gruesome in Africa. In April 1995, Omar Bongo, President of the west African state of Gabon since 1967, was implicated in a good old-fashioned sex scandal when a routine Parisian court case involving allegations of prostitution erupted into an affair of international dimensions. Bongo, the court was told, was regularly supplied with prostitutes by the Italian couturier who also supplied his made-to-measure suits.

  The trial of Francesco Smalto, the Paris-based menswear designer, became the setting for bizarre and extravagant allegations about the ferocious competition in the fashion world for free-spending celebrity clients. It also presented a wounding portrait of Bongo, a debonair autocrat who is reputed to b
e one of the wealthiest men in Africa.

  According to evidence presented to a Paris tribunal, prostitutes were terrified of having sex with Bongo because he refused to wear a condom. Bongo was not represented in court, but his Paris lawyer and doctor denied the allegations.

  Police interest in Smalto’s activities stemmed from an investigation started two years earlier into a Paris network of les call-girls de luxe. The local vice squad found a link with a small fashion-related business run by a young woman named Laure Moerman, who supposedly supplied models for shows.

  Several of the young women employed by Moerman told police that Smalto had hired them to take shipments of suits to Libreville, the Gabonese capital, where their duties apparently had more to do with removing Bongo’s clothes.

  In testimony read to the court by the presiding judge, a girl named Monica explained what happened on one trip: “It went very badly that evening. Bongo didn’t want to wear a condom, and as he had a friend who had died from Aids, I refused to make love to him.”

  Another girl, Chantal, testified that she had been told the going rate with Bongo was £6,000 without a contraceptive and £1,200 if he had to wear one.

  Having previously denied all knowledge of the affair, Smalto told the court that Bongo had been his best customer, spending £300,000 a year on suits and other clothes, and he had been frightened of losing him to a rival.

  “We knew that President Bongo was sensitive to a feminine presence, and that is why I sent a girl on every trip,” Smalto said. “I suspected that he kept her to sleep with, but I wasn’t sure.”