UGANDAN WILD LIFE

Live, survive, thrive—she covered the entire spectrum.


Above is a lovely image of a person we guarantee you’ll find very interesting. Her name is often given as Elizabeth Bagaaya, or Elizabeth Bagaya, but she’s also known as Princess Elizabeth of Toro, and she’s a Ugandan lawyer, diplomat, politician, and model—not in that order. Let’s see if we can get her incredibly wild life story straight. First of all, Bagaaya was a princess because her mother was married to the King of Toro, an ancient kingdom that spanned not only Uganda, but parts of present-day Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zaire. Next she was a brilliant student, the first black woman to win admission to the English Bar Association, and, in 1965, Uganda’s first female lawyer. In 1967 the Ugandan government under Milton Obote abolished the monarchy and Bagaaya lost her title and became merely a person from a powerful family.

In 1971 Idi Amin overthrew Obote and installed himself as dictator. Taking notice of Bagaaya, who in addition to her legal background had been modeling for a few years, he appointed her Minister of Foreign Affairs. He had an ulterior motive. He wanted her to become one of his wives. Her answer—a hard no.

Amin was displeased by her reticence, and placed her under house arrest. He allegedly had her hair forcibly shaved, and generally made her existence hell, all of which prompted her to escape to Nigeria.

Just as an aside—Amin killed up to 300,000 people, maybe even more, but to get a sense of how dangerous he was in his personal life, consider the fact that his second wife, Kay, died under unknown circumstances and her body turned up dismembered, and his fifth wife, Sarah, had a previous boyfriend who vanished and is thought to have been beheaded. Amin wanted Bagaaya, but she was in no way safe because of that.

Anyway, moving on, some of Bagaaya’s doings overlap, but the bulk of her modeling came after fleeing from Amin, and when she undertook that profession she gave it her all, becoming the first black woman to have a spread in Vogue, and the first to appear on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar. As it was a chic thing for models to do at the time, she posed nude, with the results you see. She also acted, appearing in the films Things Fall Apart and Sheena—yeah, the one with Tanya Roberts.

In 1979 she returned to Uganda because Amin was gone, and the country was having elections. She helped former president Obote win, later served as Uganda’s ambassador to Germany and the Vatican, and was Uganda’s High Commissioner to Nigeria. There’s more, but why go on? What we’ve described, ladies and gentlemen, is called a life, one that is ongoing, as Princess Elizabeth remains an important figure, aunt of the current King of Toro, and an outsize and complex personality.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1954—First Church of Scientology Established

The first Scientology church, based on the writings of science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, is established in Los Angeles, California. Since then, the city has become home to the largest concentration of Scientologists in the world, and its ranks include high-profile adherents such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta.

1933—Blaine Act Passes

The Blaine Act, a congressional bill sponsored by Wisconsin senator John J. Blaine, is passed by the U.S. Senate and officially repeals the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution, aka the Volstead Act, aka Prohibition. The repeal is formally adopted as the 21st Amendment to the Constitution on December 5, 1933.

1947—Voice of America Begins Broadcasting into U.S.S.R.

The state radio channel known as Voice of America and controlled by the U.S. State Department, begins broadcasting into the Soviet Union in Russian with the intent of countering Soviet radio programming directed against American leaders and policies. The Soviet Union responds by initiating electronic jamming of VOA broadcasts.

1937—Carothers Patents Nylon

Wallace H. Carothers, an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont Corporation, receives a patent for a silk substitute fabric called nylon. Carothers was a depressive who for years carried a cyanide capsule on a watch chain in case he wanted to commit suicide, but his genius helped produce other polymers such as neoprene and polyester. He eventually did take cyanide—not in pill form, but dissolved in lemon juice—resulting in his death in late 1937.

1933—Franklin Roosevelt Survives Assassination Attempt

In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.

Unknown artist produces lurid cover for Indian true crime magazine Nutan Kahaniyan.
Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.

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