The Last Drums of Uganda

Based on a true story.

In 1962, a schoolteacher from Masaka heard five quiet words from an old friend, "the army is recruiting now," and never looked back. He traded his classroom for a military uniform. 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.

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