Milton Obote

Apolo Milton Obote was born on 28 December 1925 in the village of Akokoro, in the Apac district of the Lango subregion of northern Uganda, the son of a minor chief of the Oyima clan of the Lango people. He began his schooling at a Protestant missionary school in Lira, continued at Gulu Junior Secondary School and Busoga College, Mwiri, and went on to study at Makerere University College, where his involvement in a student protest cut short his formal studies.

Entering nationalist politics in the 1950s, Obote joined the Uganda National Congress and in 1960 founded the Uganda People's Congress. Allied with the Buganda royalist party Kabaka Yekka, he commanded a parliamentary majority and, on 25 April 1962, became the first prime minister of newly independent Uganda, leading the nation to sovereignty that October.

In 1966 Obote assumed the presidency, but his first term ended in January 1971 when he was overthrown in a military coup led by Idi Amin. From exile in Tanzania he helped organize the forces that, alongside the Tanzanian army, drove Amin from power in 1979. Returned to the presidency in 1980, he was deposed a second time in July 1985 by generals Bazilio and Tito Okello.

Obote spent his final years in exile, remaining active in the Uganda People's Congress until his death from kidney failure in Johannesburg, South Africa, on 10 October 2005. Twice the leader of his nation and twice cast out, he remains bound inseparably to the story of Uganda's independence. May his name endure with dignity among the honored.