Idi Amin was a Ugandan dictator, military officer, and politician who ruled as the third president of Uganda, a country in central-eastern Africa, from 1971 to 1979. Idi Amin was a brutal military dictator responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ugandans. He died in 2003 from kidney failure.
Amin was born to a Kakwa father and Lugbara mother. In 1946, he joined the King’s African Rifles (KAR) of the British Colonial Army as a cook. He rose to the rank of lieutenant, taking part in British actions against Somali rebels and then the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya.
A polygamist, Idi Amin married at least six women, three of whom he divorced. He married his first and second wives, Malyamu and Kay, in 1966. In 1967, he married Nora, and then married Nalongo Madina in 1972. On 26 March 1974, he announced on Radio Uganda that he had divorced Malyamu, Nora, and Kay.Malyamu was arrested in Tororo on the Kenyan border in April 1974 and accused of attempting to smuggle a bolt of fabric into Kenya. In 1974, Kay Amin died under mysterious circumstances, with her body found dismembered.Nora fled to Zaire in 1979; her current whereabouts are unknown.
In July 1975 Idi Amin Kyolaba met when she was a 19-year-old go-go dancer in the so-called Revolutionary Suicide Mechanised Regiment Band of the Uganda Army. That led to her nickname, “Suicide Sarah”. The couple married in Kampala in 1975 in a ceremony where Yasser Arafat was the best man
With a famously roving eye, the man who claimed to have fathered some 43 children plucked Sarah from obscurity at the age of 19 while she was a performer for the uniquely titled Revolutionary Suicide Mechanised Regiment Band of the Ugandan Army. Their lavish wedding in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, cost more than £2m and featured Yasser Arafat as best man.
How did she die?
When Kyolaba last owned a small hair business in nearby Tottenham, it had been more than 30 years since she first arrived in Britain. She battled cancer till her death last at the age of 59 at the Royal Free hospital in Hampstead.
Her death brought to a close a whirlwind existence which saw her elevated from modest beginnings in Uganda to become the fifth – and reputedly favourite – wife of the dictator.
