The bill's designer wisely made Amin appear slimmer than he really was.

I got my hands on a Ugandan ten-shilling note that bears a portrait of Idi Amin. There’s no date marking, but I think it’s from 1973. That was two years after the erstwhile boxer and soldier had seized power of the country while President Obote was abroad. Soon, Amin had declared himself ruler for life.

For a long time, the world either didn’t know or didn’t care to know of the atrocities that Amin was committing inside the African nation. He was considered a clown, a buffoon, but manageable. But before his reign of terror ended, as many as 500,000 Ugandans had been brutally and senselessly murdered for imagined slights.  

Beneath his remarkable hubris and deep-seated paranoia, Amin was also an undiluted sociopath. He reputedly cannibalized his enemies and shared their flesh with crocodiles. Who knows if that’s true, but the body count was very real. There are quite a number of books and films about the dictator who died in 2003 while in exile in Saudi Arabia, but this brief series of clips of Amin bragging, grinning, laughing and lecturing is chilling enough. 

More Miscellaneous Media: 

• Tom Van Arsdale basketball card. (1970)
• “Okie from Muskogee” Sheet Music. (1969)
• Beatles Film Festival Magazine (1978)
• ABA Pictorial (1968-69)
• Tom Seaver’s Baseball Is My Life. (1973)
• Hockey Digest (1973)
• World’s Fair Guide (1964)
• World’s Fair Guide (1939)
• Buffalo Braves Yearbook (1972-73)
• New York Nets Yearbook (1976-77)
• “Tom Dooley” sheet music.