Thursday, June 14, 2007

Idi Amin, the greatest Ugandan?

For some reasons, Europeans are fixated on the concept of which of their number was "the greatest". Britons, Frenchmen and Spaniards all seem to go nuts when some television network asks which of their countrymen was the greatest of all time. Occasionally, the answers are startling. You may remember that I blogged about Portugal's bizarre elevation of dictator António Salazar to the top spot, or Spain's insistence that Francisco Franco was the twenty-third greatest Spaniard of all time. I can only hope they don't ask Russians the same question, because I really don't want to know where they'd rank Leonid Brezhnev.

Uganda is obviously not a European country, but I'm sure that there are some Ugandans who wonder, if only for a moment, who the greatest representative of their fairly young, artificially hobbled together country is. While he doesn't speak for everyone in Uganda, obviously, African Path blogger Dennis Matanda makes the case that no other man in Ugandan history has left his imprint on Uganda quite as much as the late dictator Idi Amin Dada has.

Before you drop dead from surprise, read his case for Amin being the greatest Ugandan right here.

UPDATE: Dennis posts the second part of his argument for Idi Amin Dada!

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