Apolo Milton Obote (born 1925) was a Ugandan political leader who guided his country to independence in 1962. He worked to create a centralized government to replace the divided state left by the British, but his ruthless rule in the 1980s was marked by torture and repression and the killing of more than 100,000 civilians.

Milton Obote was born at Akokoro village in Lango territory in the northern part of the British Uganda Protectorate in 1925. He was the son of a poor local chief in the Lango tribe. He began his education in 1940 at the Lira Protestant Missionary School, continued it at Gulu Junior Secondary School and Busoga College, Mwiri, and finished it at Makerere College (1948-1950). Because the Buganda tribespeople who lived in southern Uganda dominated the economy, Obote went to Kenya to find work. He worked there first for an engineering firm and then for several industrial concerns. While...