The Last Drums of Uganda: The Right Man from the Wrong Tribe - Paperback

by Hillan Nzioka (Author)

Based on a true story.

In 1962, a schoolteacher from Masaka, in southern Uganda, heard five quiet words from an old friend, "the army is recruiting now," and never looked back. He traded chalk for a gun. Under Idi Amin, he rose to major, commanding a mechanised unit outside Kampala. Then the purges turned on officers of his own tribe, and the men who had stood beside him began to disappear, one by one.

On an ordinary Friday in December 1976, in a damp lakeside registry at Luzira, he stumbled upon a classified hit list he was never meant to see, and found his own name on it, still unmarked. He fled that night, through the bush, past barracks and roadblocks, toward a border that offered no promise of safety on the other side.

Behind him, a country that wanted him dead. Ahead of him, two hundred and twenty kilometres and a future without a name.

What it cost him is a story he told only once.