Former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin passed away on August 16th, 2003 in a Saudi Arabia hospital. Andrew Donaldson reports on the rise and fall of one of Africa's most notorious leaders, a man who combined brute force with cruel farce

In March 1978, His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadj Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular, granted a rare and extraordinary television interview in which he revealed his plans to liberate southern Africa.

"Did you not," the BBC asked the man who appointed himself the last king of Scotland, "tell the British government that you wanted to buy Harrier jet fighters to attack South Africa?"

"Yes," came the reply, "because you know that the enemy of all Africa is South Africa and Rhodesia. I wanted to buy them to go and attack South Africa. It is true that I asked for them, and even for a destroyer and an aircraft carrier, so that I could move to South Africa. This is sincere. I asked the defence secretary in my meeting with him."

Pressed on the capabilities of the Ugandan Air Force, "Big Daddy" continued: "I can't tell you any secrets because you might pass them on to South Africa, which I am actually aiming to destroy . This is my aim. I am very serious about this. I am even looking to buy strategic fighter bombers which will be in a position to reinforce the freedom fighters in the southern part of Africa. I think some other countries might join me. We have to liberate Rhodesia and South Africa."

British viewers roared with laughter. But, true to his word, Amin was "very serious about this". Military preparations for the attack included Amin christening an island facing his villa on Lake Victoria "Cape Town" and having it constantly bombed by his air force. Fatally, he also ordered his troops to invade Tanzania as part of a "toughening up" exercise.

The invaders were repelled, and Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere - a diminutive man whom Amin, Ugandan heavyweight champion from 1951 to 1960, had once challenged to a boxing match - took the fight to Kampala.

In April 1979, Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi sent an aircraft to save Amin from being lynched by Tanzania troops and Ugandan rebels. His eight-year reign of terror, in which more than 300 000 political opponents were murdered, was over.

Gaddafi had earlier convinced Amin to break off diplomatic relations with Israel and support Arab terrorist organisations, in exchange for economic aid. Amin began his exile at one of Gaddafi's villas on the Tripoli coast, before being shipped off to Saudi Arabia - where, until the 80-year-old former illiterate British Army lance corporal lapsed into a coma last Friday, he has remained largely in obscurity in Jeddah.

Italian journalist Riccardo Orizio visited Amin in 1997. He asked if he felt any remorse.

"No," Amin replied. "Only nostalgia."

Orizio asked for what.

"For when I was a non-commissioned officer fighting against the Mau Mau in Kenya and everyone respected me. I was as strong as a bull. I was a good soldier in the British Army. I was born in a very, very poor family. And I enlisted to escape hunger. But my officers were Scottish and they loved me. The Scots are good, you know."

For a while, the world thought the same of Amin - just as they had thought of his predecessor, Milton Obote and, indeed, Uganda itself.

The country came into being as a result of imperial farce. In 1889, following a treaty between Italy and Ethiopia's Emperor Menelik, which granted Italy claim to a vast swathe of territory along the Blue Nile, Britain was suddenly gripped with an irrational fear: what if someone dammed up the Nile and stopped the water?

As Sir Evelyn Baring, Britain's consul in Cairo at the time, wrote to his prime minister: "Were a civilised European power established in the Nile Valley . . . they could so reduce the water supply as to ruin the country. Whatever power holds the Upper Nile Valley must, by mere force of its geographical situation, dominate Egypt."

So Britain colonised four separate kingdoms in the Lake Victoria region to safeguard the source of the Nile. Once the Nile was safe, the Suez Canal was safe too - and so was passage to India, the crown jewel of Britain's empire.

As a colony, Uganda was a prized possession. The explorers of the 19th Century praised the country and its people. Lord Frederick Lugard said the Baganda had achieved "many advances in the scale of humanity which we are wont to accept as indications of civilisation". John Hanning Speke wrote: "Wherever I strolled I saw nothing but richness." Sir Henry Morton Stanley dubbed it "the pearl of Africa".

Africa had high hopes for Uganda when she was granted independence on October 9 1962. But Obote, the first prime minister, soon established himself as a corrupt tyrant, jailing and murdering political opponents wherever he found them. At his side throughout this turbulence was Idi Amin - the son of a lowly cook who had joined the King's African Rifles at 20.

The loyalty was short-lived . Amin seized power in January 1971, when Obote was attending an Organisation of African Unity meeting in Addis Ababa.

Initially, he was seen as a saviour of the country. In a lengthy "cometh the hour, cometh the man" tribute in April 1971, Drum magazine wrote of him: "Born of a poor family with little formal education, Idi Amin has never sought power during his long military career. But because of his natural qualities of leadership, his commanding appearance and his ability to deal with problems, he has often had power thrust upon him.

"And so it was that Major General Amin found himself as Uganda's new leader after the January coup. After the takeover, the people of Uganda and East Africa and, in fact, the rest of the world saw a remarkable exhibition of restraint and statesmanship, as he made his first announcements as Uganda's head of state."

That didn't last long. In July that year, he massacred thousands of dissenting soldiers from rival ethnic groups - the first in a string of atrocities that would establish him as one of the most brutal dictators Africa had ever seen .

In August 1972 he began to expel Asians from Uganda. God, he said, had directed him to do this, although the rumour at the time was far more prosaic: he had been angered by the refusal of one of the country's most prominent families, the Madhvanis, to hand over their prettiest daughter as his fifth wife.

Over the years, Ugandans would disappear in their thousands, their mutilated bodies washing up on the shores of Lake Victoria. Fishermen, it is said, would find wristwatches still ticking in the guts of the Nile perch they caught.

Amin would boast of being a "reluctant" cannibal - human flesh, he said, was too salty. He once ordered that the decapitation of political prisoners be broadcast live on television, specifying that the victims "must wear white to make it easy to see the blood".

After his overthrow, one of Amin's guards, Abraham Sule, told Drum this story: "[Amin] put his bayonet in the pot containing human blood and licked the stuff as it ran down the bayonet. This happened at the state research headquarters . . . Amin told us: 'When you lick the blood of your victim, you will not see nightmares.' He then did it."

For the most part, many others didn't see the nightmares either. The world played Amin for a buffoon, a crazed oaf, rather than an inhuman butcher.

As head of state, he sent telegrams to Queen Elizabeth II addressing her as "Liz" and inviting her to visit his country "if she wanted to meet a real man".

When he met the monarch, for the first time, she asked him about the purpose of his visit to Britain. He replied: "I just needed to do some shopping. In Uganda, Your Majesty, it is difficult to find size 14 shoes."

He had a special knack for publicly humiliating others. On July 19 1975, he had himself photographed sitting in a sedan chair borne by four skinny English businessmen - a bizarre parody of colonial images.

He sacked his new foreign minister, Princess Elizabeth Bagaya, the first Ugandan woman to obtain a law degree - with this announcement on television: "Our foreign minister has brought disgrace upon our nation by making love with a white man in a toilet at the Paris airport. She is dismissed."

In one of his speeches, on Radio Kampala, he said: "Henry Kissinger is apparently not a very intelligent man. He never comes to Kampala to consult me about international affairs."

Appointing himself "King of Scotland", he decreed that the Ugandan presidential guard should don kilts and play bagpipes to signal support for Scottish separatism.

This, perhaps, is his enduring legacy - one that is most damaging to Africa: a fool whose behaviour has tainted much of the continent's post-independence aspirations. Even this week, when it was reported that Amin was near death, he provoked yet another farce in Kampala.

President Yoweri Museveni said that if Amin returned from exile, he would arrest him. As he put it: "If Amin comes back breathing or conscious I will arrest him because he committed crimes here."

But he added that Amin's family were free to bring his body back,after he died in Saudi Arabia, to bury him in Uganda. "We shall not give him state honours. He will be buried like an ordinary Ugandan."

The Ugandan government, it later emerged, flew Amin's family to be at his bedside at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Jeddah. He was, according to Muslim custom, buried in Saudia Arabia on the same day he died.