UGANDA: Threnody for the Rebels

The signal was to be a Tennessee Ernie Ford recording of Onward, Christian Soldiers played first thing Sunday morning over Radio Uganda On hearing the hymn, conspirators outside Kampala would know that Uganda's erratic, xenophobic President general Idi ("Big Daddy") Amin Dada was dead and would move to consolidate the coup d'état in the countryside. Last week, right on schedule, a "special request" was phoned in to the station and the hymn went out over the air vvaves. But instead of signaling the demise of Amin's brutal dictatorship, it turned into a...

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