Idi Amin seizes power in a January 1971 coup, deposing Milton Obote, and rules Uganda for eight years as a Major General who promotes himself to field marshal and, later, self-declared "Conqueror of the British Empire." The film traces his rise through the King's African Rifles, where he served in Somalia, Kenya, and Uganda under British colonial command, into a regime marked by executions carried out in front of television cameras and the 1972 expulsion of 75,000 Asians, a move that gutted the economy. Estimates of the dead under his rule range from 100,000 to 500,000. It follows his shifting alliances, from Israeli backing to support from Libya's Gaddafi and the Soviet bloc, and his year as chairman of the Organisation of African Unity even as Uganda sat on the UN's human rights commission. The 1978 invasion of Tanzania's Kagera province triggers the war that ends his rule, sending him into exile in Libya and then Saudi Arabia, where he died in 2003 without ever facing trial.