Abstract
In this chapter, I contend with a difcult period of East African history that is analogous in many ways to the fraught transition between apartheid and multiracial democracy under Mandela. Between 1961 and 1963, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya became independent from the United Kingdom; in 1964, a Marxist revolution in Zanzibar led to unifcation with the mainland and the formation of Tanzania. Uhuru —“freedom” in the Swahili language, and a watchword of anti-colonial struggles across the region— inaugurated a decade of rapid social and political change, much of which would shortly be frustrated, if not outright betrayed, by the increasing brutality of the Milton Obote and Idi Amin regimes in Uganda (1966– 1979) 3 and the authoritarian hardening of oneparty rule under Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi in Kenya (1969– 1982). 4 As even this skeletal account makes clear, the end of British colonialism in East Africa occasioned morbidity of various kinds on a massive scale.