Milton Obote

Apolo Milton Obote was born in Akokoro, in the Lango district of northern Uganda, on the twenty-eighth of December 1925, the son of a local chief. He took his secondary education at Busoga College and undergraduate study at Makerere University in Kampala (he was expelled in 1952 for student-political activity). He worked in Kenya through the late 1950s.

He returned to Uganda in 1956, entered politics through the Uganda National Congress, and co-founded the Uganda People's Congress (UPC) in 1960. Uganda became independent on the ninth of October 1962; Obote became the new state's first Prime Minister.

His twenty-three years in and around Ugandan executive power were dominated by the recurring conflict between the central state and the Buganda kingdom (the largest of Uganda's four traditional kingdoms, whose royal capital is at Kampala). The 1966 constitutional crisis — in which Obote unilaterally abolished the federal structure that had given Buganda autonomy and stripped the Kabaka Edward Mutesa II of his presidency — was the founding political rupture of post-independence Uganda. Obote's army commander Idi Amin attacked the Kabaka's palace at Lubiri on the twenty-fourth of May 1966; Mutesa fled to London where he died in 1969.

Obote was deposed by Idi Amin's coup of the twenty-fifth of January 1971 — while Obote was at a Commonwealth conference in Singapore. The Amin regime that followed killed approximately three hundred thousand Ugandans across the next eight years. The Tanzanian invasion of 1979 — under Mwalimu Julius Nyerere (also placed in this archive) — overthrew Amin and returned Obote to the presidency in December 1980.

His second presidency was overthrown by Tito Okello in July 1985; Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army displaced Okello in January 1986.

Obote died in exile in Johannesburg on the tenth of October 2005, age seventy-nine.

He is honored here as the political center of Ugandan independence and its long aftermath.