Isaac Maliyamungu: What ‘Moved’ him to torture and kill ‘fellow’ Ugandans the way he did?

On St. Janani Luwum‘s day, I set out to read something more about him. Of course, I came across the literature that he was killed by Amin, either himself (Time Magazine, 1977) or by his right-hand man, Isaac Maliyamungu (Timbiti, 2015). Of all things, it is this Isaac Maliyamungu who caught my attention! I spent the rest of the day studying him!

Isaac Maliyamungu was a DRC-born guy who later came to Uganda for jobs and secured a gatekeeper job at Nyanza textile industries in Jinja. He is said to have been a nephew or cousin to Amin, both from the Kakwa ethnic group. Later, in 1967, he enrolled in Uganda’s Army, probably called in and helped by Idi Amin Dada Oume, who was by then a deputy commander of Uganda Army.

He worked his way up the ranks, and later played a big role in Amin’s coup of 1971 when he captured and took control of Entebbe airport with an army tank. From then, he became a favorite Amin’s right-hand man and carried out the most important secret missions of the dictator, including the extrajudicial killings of thousands! But this guy wasn’t just an officer executing his boss’ command; HE WAS A BLOODTHIRST VAMPIRE!

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Maliyamungu killed people the horrible way, most times using a method called dismemberment (forcefully tearing someone apart, either by hands, mouth, legs, or whatever could be pulled apart). He also used hanging, burning, bullet shots, drowning, strangling, and all sorts of ways! His killings were in public and others in private. Many sources list people he murdered by burning, hanging or dismemberment in public places, for example, markets, bars, schools, or government building corridors or barracks. And none dared question him, not even his fellow army officers or government officials. He was untouchable!

He was the most feared person of Amin’s regime, even more than Amin himself. In reference to his thirst for murder, writes Kyemba Henry who was a Minister of Health in Amin’s regime, Amin thought of Maliyamungu as madman (Kyemba, 1977)! But he (Amin) wouldn’t mind as long as all this madness was about killing those who were disloyal to Amin or threatened his regime!

In Gambia, a certain infamous soldier of the group, Junglers, former President Yahya Jammeh’s firing squad (or president’s guard unit) named Musa Jammeh nicknamed himself ‘Maliyamungu‘ in celebration of his own ‘might’ that resembled that of Uganda’s Maliyamungu. Anyway, this Gambian mighty one alongside most of his fellow ‘crusaders’ of former president Yahya Jammeh died a mysterious death in 2007. Apparently, they also die!

And yet, surprisingly, all the above isn’t what captured my attention most! What captured my attention most is this:

Isaac Maliyamungu might have been mad or just a foreign mercenary!

A new research paper, a 280-page thesis, asserts that, considering the acts of violence and cruelty Maliyamungu managed to perform on Ugandans, and bearing in mind the special and cruel ways he would execute such acts, he was either indeed mentally sick or it was simply because he wasn’t a Ugandan in the first place, making it easy to kill and torture Ugandans (Lowman, Thomas, & James, 2020). Indeed, in other various writings, Amin is said to have had ‘foreign mercenaries’ who carried out most of his dirty works!

As a person of psychology, I surely know that it is possible to do any acts of violence in response to anger, pain, and some sort of revenge-induced ‘psychoses’. But what motivates or enables a person to torture an innocent woman or man, a fellow Ugandan and, sometimes, in the same age bracket and color to death, a horrible death? Isn’t examination of the mental or birth origin statuses of such culprits an interesting angle to the investigations?

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Anyway, back to Isaac Maliyamungu, when Amin’s regime fell in 1979, he and his family fled back to CONGO. Later in 1980s during the insurgency or bush war against Obote’s government, he returned to head a pro-Amin group in West Nile. The group, due to poor management, indiscipline, and poor ideology lost out the war and faded into oblivion, leaving out the Museveni’s group that later captured power in 1986. Isaac later escaped to Sudan, where he died of poisoning in 1984.

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