Idi Amin Kenya to fight against Somali rebels in the Shifta War. In 1952, his brigade was deployed against the Mau Mau rebels in Kenya. He was promoted to corporal the same year, then to sergeant in 1953. In 1959, Amin was made "Afande" (warrant officer), the highest rank possible for a black African in the colonial British Army of that time. Amin returned to Uganda the same year and, in 1961, he was promoted to lieutenant, becoming one of the first two Ugandans to become commissioned officers. He was assigned to quell the cattle rustling between Uganda's Karamojong and Kenya's Turkana
Idi Amin London. This prominent defection helped Henry Kyemba, Amin's health minister and a former official of the first Obote regime, to defect in 1977 and resettle in the UK. Kyemba wrote and published "A State of Blood", the first insider exposé of Amin's rule. Initially, Amin was supported by Western powers such as Israel, West Germany and, in particular, Great Britain. During the late 1960s, Obote's move to the left, which included his Common Man's Charter and the nationalisation of 80 British companies, had made the West worried that he would pose a threat to Western capitalist interests in Africa and