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Bob Astles reveals inner deals of Uganda leaders
World War II veteran Robert Astles, better known as Bob Astles. STOCK PHOTO
What you need to know:
- Amid accusation of masterminding one of the failed attempts on Amin’s life, Astles was hauled into Makindye military prison where he witnessed first hand unstrained killing at the facility.
- Astles’s memoir, which this newspaper starts serialising today, provides for a gripping read that only an eagle-eyed insider could record.
Kampala. The circumstances of his arrival did not script a future influential role for him in Uganda’s polity.
Yet World War II veteran Robert Astles, better known as Bob Astles, turned to string a dramatic life and career that catapulted him to orbit in the highest echelons of government.
From forging a pre-independence relation with Buganda kingdom through Princess Irene Ndagire, a royal connection some observers said never matured, Astles retailed his military and piloting skills to fly higher and higher.
He set up an aviation business --- Uganda Aviation Services Ltd, which was the first of its kind locally to employ Africans --- before rising to a fixer who would have the ear of both presidents Milton Obote and Idi Amin.
In his memoir titled ‘Forty Tribes: A life in Uganda’, Bob Astles, who died in London in December 2012, reminisces his experiences in a Uganda whose natural beauty evidently charmed him.
His experience
He had staged a boat on Lake Victoria for fun ride and, as he often did, power to a private island where he offered secretly recruited children basic military drills in his accounts as potential future royal fighters for the Kabaka.
In an article this newspaper published on November 8, 2015, Barbara Kimenye, who said Astles took her out on a date once in Entebbe, underlines the war veteran’s abiding love for children in spite of his more generally eccentric behavior.
Astles, described by fellow British citizens as a “white rat” for his treacherous behaviour, notes in his memoir chest-thumbs that his links with Buganda Kingdom enabled him to play a part in the future events that led to the Kabaka’s return as a hero in 1955 after his two-year of unhappy exile in England.
He was also in Masembe Kabali’s house to witness the formation of Kabaka Yekka, the pro-Kabaka party that allied with Obote’s Uganda Peoples Congress to win and run the first government for an independent Uganda.
Astles had picked a political currency and traded it and his loyalty to serve both Obote and Amin, turning into an unrepentant adviser to the later whose tyrannical rule left a blood trail and suffering for nearly each family in the country.
Amid accusation of masterminding one of the failed attempts on Amin’s life, Astles was hauled into Makindye military prison where he witnessed first hand unstrained killing at the facility. Astles’s memoir, which this newspaper starts serialising today, provides for a gripping read that only an eagle-eyed insider could record.
