
00:00 / 13:44
The roads to Entebbe pulsed with exhaustion. Tanzanian soldiers, their uniforms caked in red dust, trudged past the skeletal remains of Amin’s regime—charred tanks, looted checkpoints, and the eerie quiet of abandoned barracks. Kampala, liberated but shattered, teetered between euphoria and dread. Crowds tore down Amin’s portraits, dancing on the rubble of his torture chambers, while others scavenged for food in markets picked clean by retreating soldiers. In the city center, a Tanzanian commander set up headquarters in the bullet-riddled Nile Hotel, its lobby strewn with champagne bottles from Amin’s last party. “We’ve traded a devil for a void,” muttered a Ugandan exile, eyeing the foreign troops now patrolling his streets.
Eastward, the chase dragged on. Tanzanian battalions fanned out toward Jinja, hunting whispers of Amin’s convoy. Along the Nile, villagers pointed soldiers to abandoned safehouses, where Libyan ammunition crates and half-eaten meals hinted at a frantic escape. Near the Owen Falls Dam, troops found a lone Simba Battalion officer—drunk on stolen gin—who slurred, “He’s gone! Even the crocodiles won’t claim him.” The Libyans, Amin’s erstwhile saviors, became prisoners or fugitives; a handful surrendered in exchange for bread, their green uniforms mocked by children throwing mango pits. By the time Tanzanian scouts reached the Sudanese border, Amin was already in Tripoli, spinning tales of martyrdom to a bemused Gaddafi.
Back in Kampala, Yusuf Lule, the academic thrust into power, pleaded for unity from a bullet-pocked podium. His voice, thin and bookish, faltered against the cacophony of a broken nation. Former exiles—royalists, socialists, Obote loyalists—jostled for scraps of influence, while Tanzanian officers grimly policed a capital descending into warlord fiefdoms. In the countryside, vengeance erupted. In Luweero, a mob hanged a collaborator from a mango tree; in Gulu, elders buried bones exhumed from shallow graves. Lule banned alcohol and begged for aid, but his decrees evaporated like Kampala’s afternoon rains.
By May, the Tanzanians began to leave. Their trucks rumbled back south, past mass graves and villages still smoldering from Amin’s scorched retreat. Lule, outmaneuvered, resigned within months—a footnote in a saga he’d never controlled. Obote, patient and calculating, crossed the border from Tanzania, his return whispered in barracks and markets. The “liberation” had ended Amin’s nightmare, but not Uganda’s. The guns, now in the hands of boys turned soldiers, waited. Somewhere beyond the Nile, a new war breathed.
#ughistory #kampala_tiktokers #liberation #lule #1979 #tanzania #tanzaniatiktok #amin #ugandanstiktok
Eastward, the chase dragged on. Tanzanian battalions fanned out toward Jinja, hunting whispers of Amin’s convoy. Along the Nile, villagers pointed soldiers to abandoned safehouses, where Libyan ammunition crates and half-eaten meals hinted at a frantic escape. Near the Owen Falls Dam, troops found a lone Simba Battalion officer—drunk on stolen gin—who slurred, “He’s gone! Even the crocodiles won’t claim him.” The Libyans, Amin’s erstwhile saviors, became prisoners or fugitives; a handful surrendered in exchange for bread, their green uniforms mocked by children throwing mango pits. By the time Tanzanian scouts reached the Sudanese border, Amin was already in Tripoli, spinning tales of martyrdom to a bemused Gaddafi.
Back in Kampala, Yusuf Lule, the academic thrust into power, pleaded for unity from a bullet-pocked podium. His voice, thin and bookish, faltered against the cacophony of a broken nation. Former exiles—royalists, socialists, Obote loyalists—jostled for scraps of influence, while Tanzanian officers grimly policed a capital descending into warlord fiefdoms. In the countryside, vengeance erupted. In Luweero, a mob hanged a collaborator from a mango tree; in Gulu, elders buried bones exhumed from shallow graves. Lule banned alcohol and begged for aid, but his decrees evaporated like Kampala’s afternoon rains.
By May, the Tanzanians began to leave. Their trucks rumbled back south, past mass graves and villages still smoldering from Amin’s scorched retreat. Lule, outmaneuvered, resigned within months—a footnote in a saga he’d never controlled. Obote, patient and calculating, crossed the border from Tanzania, his return whispered in barracks and markets. The “liberation” had ended Amin’s nightmare, but not Uganda’s. The guns, now in the hands of boys turned soldiers, waited. Somewhere beyond the Nile, a new war breathed.
#ughistory #kampala_tiktokers #liberation #lule #1979 #tanzania #tanzaniatiktok #amin #ugandanstiktok
original sound - UgHistory
15 comments
You may like
In the dim glow of an ITV studio on 9 August 1972, Sir Alec Douglas-Home sat stiffly, his words betraying both his breeding and his bewilderment. The former British Prime Minister, now Foreign Secretary in Edward Heath’s government, had just been asked about Uganda’s mass expulsion of British passport-holding Asians. His reply – “they are good shopkeepers” – was intended as praise but landed with the weight of condescension. To many watching in the former colonies, it sounded like an Etonian relic commenting on a fire he could neither control nor understand. At 69, Douglas-Home was a man from another time: an aristocrat raised on Empire, trying to make sense of a world that had stopped deferring to men like him. Just a week earlier, on 4 August 1972, Idi Amin had made the explosive announcement that all Asians holding British passports would be expelled from Uganda within 90 days. It was a dramatic act, cloaked in what Amin called “economic war,” but also a sharp rejection of colonial entanglements. Amin had simply picked up where Milton Obote left off: the 1968 Immigration Bill drafted under Obote’s government had already signaled unease with the Asian population’s British links. What Amin did was unambiguous and brutal. Britain, which had handed out those passports without a long-term plan, now faced the human fallout. Sir Alec’s response — tidy, patrician, aloof — was the voice of a former Empire caught flat-footed by the assertiveness of the new Africa. Across the continent, nationalist leaders were no longer whispering about sovereignty; they were legislating it. In Dar es Salaam, Julius Nyerere was deepening Ujamaa socialism. Kenneth Kaunda in Lusaka was mapping Zambia’s economic independence. Even Ghana, reeling from the fall of Nkrumah, was experimenting with military-civilian rule. The wind had changed. Where once colonial administrators gave orders, now African presidents gave deadlines. Douglas-Home, who had once led Britain from the House of Lords, could not have been further removed from the urgency on the ground in Kampala, Nairobi, or Lusaka. He had grown up in a Britain where empire was a gentleman’s duty and diplomacy a club conversation. But in 1972, diplomacy had moved to the streets. British Asians were sleeping in camps, their futures uncertain. Amin didn’t wait for Westminster approval, nor did he care for lectures on civil rights from a man whose education had been steeped in Eton’s etiquette, not Entebbe’s reality. The ITV interview, then, was more than a policy update; it was an elegy for the old order. Douglas-Home represented the last breath of an age that thought itself eternal. But the postcolonial world had no time for such elegies. Uganda’s announcement had ruptured more than just diplomatic relations — it forced Britain to confront the fragility of its promises, the hollowness of its global reach, and the quiet obsolescence of men like Sir Alec. The world was being reimagined, and this time, it would not be written in the Queen’s English. #uganda #ITV #ughistory #IdiAmin #1972 #british #britishcolonialism #houseoflords #britishasian
ughistory
75
·6-19After performing this song live and then seeing the beautiful response to it, I decided to go record a studio vocal…. I’m undecided if I should release it on Spotify or not…. Would you want me to?!!!🤍 if you would, I’m thinking maybe end of this week?
itsjojosiwa
569.7K
·1w ago My heart dropped! Has this ever happened to anyone? Let’s just say her cluster lashes were ruined 🫣 #salonskit #thelashstudione #wax #lashtechlife #salonowner #saloncontent #lashbusiness
thelashstudione
955.4K
·1w ago We just knew… #fyp #iwokeupinanewbugatti #couplescomedy #couplescontent #foryoupage #trending @Tiffani Chance
littlewifebiglife
1.4M
·5d ago Yall think im gonna win! 🤯🤯 #viral #backwbeni #beni #post #famous #godisgood #CapCut
backwbeni
2.9M
·7-6Yall I was scared for my life 😭💀 I never realized how scary a kids playground can be #momsoftiktok #toddlersoftiktok #playground #pov
diana_xo47
1.3M
·7-4Like no #mood #friends #paramore #herway #herwaychallenge #presidentdeborahalivilliams #deborahaliwilliams #floptok #flopera
toyyii_
14.3M
·7-4tents looking a bit messy mid packing up #camping #Wales #fforestfields @Fforest Fields for everyone asking the tent is an Outdoor Revolution O-zone 6.0 XTR Vario‼️‼️
megscresswell
3.4M
·5d ago