Bloodshed for Power by Mohsin Hassan provides a poignant, intensely researched accounting of political murder, state terror and the human cost of unchecked ambition. Unfolding through personal tragedy, the narrative confronts one of the darkest chapters of East African political history, offering both a meticulous investigation into the murder of the author’s father—Mohamed Hassan, Uganda’s former Head of CID—and a broader reflection on institutionalised violence during the tragic collapse of a nation.
The Shadow of Idi Amin
To grasp the gravity of Hassan’s account, one must understand the backdrop of the dictator who destroyed much of Uganda’s post-independence promise.
General Idi Amin Dada seized control of the country in a 1971 military coup while President Milton Obote was attending a Commonwealth conference in Singapore. What initially began with populist promises of swift stability quickly deteriorated into an infamous reign of terror. Amin dismantled democratic institutions, subverted the judiciary and turned state security organs into instruments for eliminating people regarded as threats—or who held inconvenient truths—about his regime.
Over the course of eight chaotic years, hundreds of thousands of Ugandans are estimated to have lost their lives through extrajudicial killings, targeted eliminations and ethnic and political persecution.
Mohamed Hassan became a target for Amin precisely because of his commitment to his work as a police investigator. As Head of CID, Hassan led high-profile murder investigations in which evidence implicated Amin prior to his presidency—most notably the January 1970 assassination of Brigadier Pierino Okoya and his wife.
Brigadier Okoya had openly challenged Amin, even mocking him as a coward for panicking and going AWOL following an earlier attempted assassination of President Milton Obote.
When Okoya and his wife were subsequently gunned down at their home, Hassan’s investigation uncovered evidence pointing towards Amin’s involvement. Hassan’s account argues that, once Amin seized power, those who knew too much about such investigations became obvious targets as the new regime sought to neutralise potential witnesses and erase inconvenient evidence.
Amin’s brutal dictatorship destabilised Uganda and the wider region until he was finally ousted by Tanzanian forces and Ugandan exiles in 1979. He lived out his remaining years in exile, dying in Saudi Arabia in 2003 without ever facing legal accountability for the atrocities associated with his regime.
Memory Against Revisionism
It is against this historical canvas that Mohsin Hassan’s work becomes so important.
One of the greatest strengths of the book is its preservation of historical memory. It is a useful addition to the literature on an era that is fast fading from living memory, creating space for revisionists to make increasingly sanitised claims about what happened.
And perhaps that is one of the greatest values of personal accounts such as Hassan’s.
These accounts are, by their very nature, woefully inadequate in capturing the full horror of the Amin era. No single family tragedy, however devastating, can communicate the suffering experienced across an entire country. For every Mohamed Hassan whose story has been reconstructed, there were countless others whose deaths were never properly investigated, whose bodies were never recovered, whose families never received answers and whose stories may never be written down.
Yet that does not diminish the importance of these individual accounts. If anything, it makes them more urgent.
History written only in statistics can become abstract. We hear of hundreds of thousands dead and, paradoxically, struggle to comprehend the scale. But when that history is reduced to one father, one family, one disappearance, one investigation and one trail of unanswered questions, the horror becomes human again.
Hassan's story therefore serves as more than a biography of one victim. It reminds us that behind every statistic from that period stood a person with a name, a family, ambitions and people waiting for them to come home.
As key witnesses age, documentation disappears and memories fade, books like Bloodshed for Power become important bulwarks against historical amnesia. By painstakingly documenting the circumstances surrounding one political killing, Hassan helps ensure that at least part of the record survives rather than being surrendered to nostalgia, revisionism or political convenience.
Gripping Yet Devastating Narrative
While heartbreaking, the book makes for scintillating reading.
Hassan manages to balance the deep emotional weight of personal tragedy with the fast-paced momentum of an investigative thriller. The emotional core of the story lies in the grief and unanswered questions left in the wake of an assassination, yet the author maintains a gripping, highly readable narrative rhythm that keeps the reader engaged through every step of the investigation.
That is no easy achievement. Books dealing with atrocity can sometimes become overwhelmed by their subject matter. Hassan instead lets the investigation carry the narrative, allowing the reader to discover the story almost alongside him.
Methodological Elegance
In this respect, Bloodshed for Power falls into the same broad tradition as The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget in the way personal history is reconstructed through the testimony of others.
Rather than relying solely on family memory, Hassan pieces together police records, eyewitness statements, archival evidence and local accounts to reconstruct the events leading to his father's demise.
This investigative rigour elevates a personal quest for closure into something approaching historical documentation. More than that, Bloodshed for Power is, at its heart, a work of investigative journalism. Hassan follows leads, tests recollections against other accounts, assembles fragments of evidence and reconstructs events from sources scattered across time and geography. He does not merely tell us what he believes happened to his father; he sets out to establish how and why it happened.
There is something particularly poignant about that.
Mohamed Hassan spent his professional life as an investigator, following evidence wherever it led, including when that evidence touched powerful men. Decades later, his son has effectively undertaken an investigation of his own—this time into the fate of the investigator himself.
One imagines that there could be few more fitting tributes.
The patience, persistence and respect for evidence evident in this book may very well have made his father proud.
The mosaic of third-party perspectives also does more than validate the author's conclusions. It gives us glimpses into the atmosphere of fear, silence and complicity within which political violence operated. People knew things but could not necessarily say them. Institutions existed but had been hollowed out. Officials understood the dangers around them but often had few places to turn.
That is how terror ultimately works: not simply by killing people, but by teaching everybody else to remain silent.
The Imperative of Facing the Past
The core philosophical argument running through Bloodshed for Power is therefore the necessity of truth-telling.
It would undoubtedly be easier to sweep this dark era under the rug. Nations, like families, sometimes prefer uncomfortable silence to painful confrontation with their past.
But there is value in airing our dirty linen if only so that we can resolve: never again.
The temptation to "move on" without truth, reconciliation or accountability can be powerful, particularly in societies desperate for political stability. But buried trauma does not necessarily disappear. Unresolved history can continue shaping institutions, political culture and collective memory decades after the events themselves.
Airing these painful truths is therefore not an act of malice or revenge. It is part of understanding how institutions failed, how power became unaccountable and how ordinary people became victims of political struggles over which they had little control.
Only by understanding those failures can subsequent generations hope not to reproduce them.
Final Reflection
Ultimately, Hassan’s work is a sobering reminder of human fallibility and political repetition.
As the saying goes, the thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.
Bloodshed for Power challenges that cynical conclusion by insisting on memory.
Personal histories such as Hassan's will never fully capture the scale of what Uganda endured during those years. They are fragments of a much larger tragedy. But perhaps it is precisely through accumulating these fragments—one murdered official, one disappeared student, one grieving widow, one frightened witness, one family searching for answers—that a country begins to reconstruct the true dimensions of its past.
The great danger comes when those stories stop being told.
Because once the witnesses are gone and the personal accounts disappear, statistics become easier to dispute, atrocities easier to minimise and dictatorships easier to romanticise.
That is why books such as Bloodshed for Power matter.
They remind us that history did not happen to numbers.
It happened to people.
And in Mohsin Hassan’s case, there is one final symmetry that is difficult to miss: the son has used the tools of investigation, evidence and persistence to finish a story that violence tried to leave unfinished.
For a man who devoted his own career to uncovering the truth, Mohamed Hassan may very well have regarded that as the finest tribute of all.
