Sunday Observer: the return of Idi Amin

APR 01 2001

On 1 April 2001 the Tanzanian newspaper Sunday Observer published a false report that the exiled former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin had been sighted in Tabora. Amin was in fact living in Saudi Arabia, where he died in 2003. The hoax is a notable East African instance of an April Fools' story trading on genuine regional political anxiety.