MILTON OBOTE was Uganda’s first leader after his country gained its independence from Britain in 1962, first as Prime Minister, and later, when he had seized power from his own president, as executive head of state. As such he ruled his country with increasingly autocratic powers until 1971 when he was overthrown by his own army commander, Lieutenant-General Idi Amin.

For the next nine years he was compelled to sit on the sidelines in exile in Tanzania as the guest of its President, Julius Nyerere, while the whimsically cruel rule of Amin heaped calamities on his country. But Obote was enabled to return to Uganda and resume the reins of power in 1980 after troops from Tanzania entered the country and overthrew Amin.

During his first period in power, Obote’s hardline socialist policies had made him unpopular in Britain, and in other Western countries, while at the same time they brought no apparent benefits to the various peoples of Uganda, whom he increasingly alienated with laws which reduced the autonomy of the four kingdoms of the federation. In spite of establishing a personal security force, the General Service Unit, his grip on power was always uncertain, and on one occasion he had to rely on Amin to keep the army from revolting.

Obote was no more secure in his second period of stewardship of Uganda. Domestic development programmes based on overseas aid were insufficient in the short term to reverse the economic damage wrought by Amin. Political resistance from all quarters forced him to continual repressive measures that looked — and very largely were — brutal. His regime was always on the defensive, and when he fell for the second time in 1985, it was again at the hands of the very army on which he had relied to keep him in power.

Apollo Milton Obote was born in the Lango district of north-east Uganda in 1924, one of nine children of a peasant farmer. He was educated at a Protestant mission school and at secondary schools at Gulu and Jinja before going on to Makerere University College. He did not prosper at Makerere and failed to complete his course in English, economics and politics.

He failed to get grants to pursue further studies abroad, and went instead to Kenya to seek less academic employment. During this time he came in contact with the political and trade union activities of Jomo Kenyatta and Tom Mboya, and when he returned to Uganda he set up a branch of the Uganda National Congress (UNC) in his home district of Lango. From this firm domestic base he entered national politics first as a nominated and finally as an elected member of the Legislative Council.

As Uganda approached independence Obote’s growing political ambitions and his widening experience led him to change and adapt his policies and personal affiliations so that at the crucial moment he would be the man with the necessary support to form a government. The key lay in his relations with the Baganda, the people of the kingdom of Buganda, whose numbers, wealth, intelligence and past pre-eminence made them wary of being absorbed into a state which might be dominated by their traditional enemies in the north and west of Uganda.

That Obote was able to engineer an alliance between his own radical and mainly northern-based Uganda People’s Congress (UPC, founded in 1960) and the conservative, Kabaka of Buganda, Sir Edward Mutesa, was a considerable achievement, and one that ensured that together they won the crucial pre-independence elections in 1962. With Obote as Prime Minister and the Kabaka as President in a federal state, this alliance of convenience survived for four years until, in 1966, Obote felt strong enough to suspend the constitution, arrest a number of Baganda ministers and appoint one of his trusted army officers from the north, Idi Amin, as commander-in-chief.

A few months later Obote proclaimed a new constitution with himself as an executive president, and with the powers of the four kingdoms in the federation much reduced. He later used a real or imagined plot against his life to order Amin to storm the Kabaka’s palace and force him into exile in London.

In the next few years Obote made further changes in the country’s political and economic structure as it moved, under his increasingly close and despotic direction, towards one-party socialism of the type being enacted by Nyerere in Tanzania. These moves came to an abrupt end in 1971 when, during his absence at the Commonwealth conference in Singapore, Amin staged a military coup and assumed power.

Although Amin was able to attract support from individuals and groups upset by Obote’s policies and personal excesses, he acted mainly to safeguard his own position and the interests both of his fellow tribesmen in the north and of Muslims throughout Uganda.

Obote was given refuge in Tanzania by his friend Nyerere but he also paid several visits to the Sudan to encourage the activities of those of his supporters who had moved there. When permission for them to operate there was withdrawn by the Sudanese Government, they went to Tanzania where Nyerere allowed them to regroup and train, and to make a series of raids across the border into the south of Uganda. They were also allowed to accompany the Tanzanian army when Nyerere decided to invade Uganda and destroy Idi Amin and his regime.

With Amin’s overthrow in 1979, Obote was able to return to Uganda. Eventually, after a number of provisional administrations, the first headed by Yusuf Lule, a former vice-chancellor of Makarere University, he resumed the presidency when his UPC won elections contested by three other parties. Although Commonwealth observers gave a guarded blessing to the results, some inside and outside Uganda found it difficult not to relate the results to the presence in the country of 45,000 Tanzanian troops and Nyerere’s support for Obote. The defeated parties complained of gross electoral malpractices by UPC supporters.