Sarah Kyolaba Tatu Namutebi Amin, also known by her stage name "Suicide Sarah", was a Ugandan dancer who was dictator Idi Amin's fifth and last-surviving wife. She met Amin when she was a 19-year-old go-go dancer and they married in 1975. The couple had three children but Kyolaba left Amin after he went into exile in 1979. She moved to England where she ran a restaurant and later a hair salon. She died from cancer in 2015.
Kyolaba met Idi Amin when she was a 19-year-old go-go dancer in the so-called Revolutionary Suicide Mechanised Regiment Band of the Uganda Army. That led to her nickname, "Suicide Sarah". The couple married in Kampala in 1975 in a ceremony where Yasser Arafat was the best man. The wedding banquet was reported to have cost the equivalent of £2 million. Kyolaba was said to have been Amin's "favourite" wife. Kyolaba had been in a relationship with a man in Masaka when she met Amin, and on 25 December 1974 gave birth to his child. Amin had the child's birth announced on television as his own, and the real father soon disappeared. When Amin was forced to leave Uganda in 1979, Kyolaba went with him to exile, first in Libya and then to Saudi Arabia, where they eventually settled in Jeddah. Kyolaba separated from Amin in 1982. She travelled to Germany with Faisal Wangita, one of her four children, where she claimed asylum and worked as a lingerie model. She later moved to London.
Life in London
From 1997 until at least 1998, Kyolaba ran Krishna's Restaurant in Upton Road, West Ham, London, which served dishes such as stewed goat, muchomo and ekigere. However, it was closed down for a time in November 1997 after environmental health inspectors found cockroaches and mice in the kitchen. Kyolaba avoided jail by pleading guilty. At Snaresbrook Crown Court, she received a two-year conditional discharge and had to pay £1,000 towards prosecution costs. After Amin's death in Jeddah in 2003, Kyolaba called him a "true African hero" and a "wonderful father", adding, "He was just a normal person, not a monster. He was a jolly person, very entertaining and kind".
