Idi Amin, who had seized power in a 1971 coup, formally proclaimed himself 'His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.' The self-bestowed honors, including a Victorious Cross he invented himself, became emblematic of a regime that combined brutal repression with grotesque theater.
Idi Amin's rise to absolute power in Uganda had been swift and violent. After toppling President Milton Obote in 1971, he purged the army of rivals, expelled Uganda's Asian minority, and built a security apparatus that murdered an estimated 300,000 people during his eight-year rule. By the mid-1970s he had transformed himself into one of the most theatrically grotesque dictators of the twentieth century, courting international media even as his death squads filled the Nile with bodies.
His self-awarded title, formalized around this time, was a masterpiece of megalomania: he named himself conqueror of the British Empire despite Uganda having gained independence from Britain years earlier, and awarded himself a Victorious Cross modeled on Britain's Victoria Cross, a medal for valor he had never earned in genuine combat.
Amin's buffoonish public image, cultivated partly by his own eccentric public statements, often obscured the scale of his brutality abroad. He was eventually driven from power in 1979 after invading Tanzania and provoking a war he could not win, fleeing first to Libya and then to Saudi Arabia, where he lived in comfortable exile until his death in 2003, never tried for his crimes.