Francis Nyangweso: Soldier, Boxer, Sports Administrator

Francis Nyangweso, then a colonel, photographed on Wednesday, February 28^th, 1973. Photo credit: Camerapix.

Francis Nyangweso was a talented boxer who was a long-term amateur national and East African Champion. In 1960, he represented Uganda at the Rome Olympics, where he failed to medal. However, he won a bronze medal in the light middleweight division at the Commonwealth Games in Perth in 1962 and a gold at the Hapoel Games in Israel a year earlier.

Trained at Sandhurst Royal Military Academy, Nyangweso rose up the ranks of the Ugandan Army and was appointed the Chairman of the National Council of Sports after Amin seized power in a coup d'etat in January 1971. That year, he was made the acting Brigade Commander of the 1st Infantry Brigade at Masaka before his appointment as Acting Army Commander in 1972.

He later became the Army Chief of Staff and the Minister of Defence. He left the Ugandan Army as a Major General.

After his army career, Nyangweso was involved in sports administration, becoming the president of the Ugandan Olympic Committee and a member of the International Olympic Committee. His hold on the Ugandan Olympic Committee lasted for 29 years after which he was unceremoniously edged out of power. Nyangweso received unwelcome publicity when a BBC investigation revealed that he was one of two African delegates who had been induced to back the 2000 Sydney Games at the expense of Beijing. He was exonerated after an investigation.

He died of complications related to diabetes, an ailment which affected his eyesight.

His life may have had a considerably shorter span.

On October 14th, 1974, Nyangweso was summoned to State House by General Amin who challenged him to a six-round boxing contest. Amin began in aggressive mode and succeeded in cutting Nyangweso who retaliated by knocking Amin off-balance with a right hook. Amin, who was a long-term light heavyweight champion of Uganda, responded with vicious body attacks.

Nyangweso, who had initially thought of the contest as a joke, began to use his footwork, moving and shifting his bodyweight as he angled his shots at Amin. Nyangweso's wife appeared to be gripped with fear as her husband employed his skills to give Amin what witnesses to this extraordinary encounter recall as a thorough beating.

"We thought that was the end of Nyangweso's life, everybody feared for his life," Thomas Kawere, a boxing coach related at Nyangweso's burial.

But instead of earning Nyangweso a death sentence, the contest brought both men closer. Aside from his military appointments, Amin made him the Minister of Culture and Community Development. In fact, he became the de facto President of Uganda for a fortnight in 1975 while Amin was on holiday.

His rise was however halted by the politics of the time. A Christian from the eastern part of Uganda, Nyangweso fell out of favour as Amin increasingly relied on his kinsmen to remain in power. His "fate" was a remarkably soft one as he was handed an ambassadorial post to the Central African Republic.

Nyangweso was, if anything, a survivor.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2020).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England, He is the author of Dick Tiger: The Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal.

September 19th, 1945: The controversial finding of guilt and sentencing to death of William Joyce whose propaganda broadcasts from Nazi Germany earned him the nickname "Lord Haw Haw"

Photo of William Joyce when he was a member of the British Union of Fascists.

William Joyce, a former member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, had been charged under the ancient English law of ‘Giving aid and comfort to the King’s enemies’. He had also assisted Germany "in her war against our country and our King".

The prosecution argued that he committed the relevant offences between September 19th, 1939 and July 2nd, 1940 when he was in possession of a British passport before he became a naturalised German citizen.

A jury of 10 men and 2 women found him guilty at the Old Bailey.

However, many have argued that he was unjustly convicted in a show trial by a vengeful British establishment.

1. Joyce, who was Irish, had been born in the United States.

2. The British passport which he had applied for and used in the 1930s had been acquired fraudulently.

Joyce was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on January 3rd, 1946. 

He was 39 years old.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2024).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

The Hanging of Mossad Agent Eli Cohen

The lifeless body of Eli Cohen dangles at Marjeh Square (Martyrs Square) in the Syrian capital Damascus on Tuesday, May 18^th, 1965.

About the inscription pinned onto Eli Cohen's execution shroud:

'Colonel Dalli then attached to the white sackcloth shroud a large placard, the invariable last act of a Syrian execution. On it was written, in Arabic script, the sentence of the Military Court. It read:

Eliahu Ben-Shaul Cohen was sentenced to death in the name of the Arab people of Syria, having been found guilty of penetrating into a military sector and communicating secret information to the enemy".'

- "The Final Night”, pp 5-6 Chapter 1 of The Spy From Israel by Ben Dan, published by Vallentine, Mitchell & Co. Ltd, 1969.

Forty-year-old Cohen had posed as a returnee Syrian businessman from Argentina named "Kamel Amin Thaabet". He managed to penetrate the highest echelons of the Syrian political and military establishment, including becoming the Chief Adviser to the Syrian Minister of Defence.

He was caught by Soviet-made tracking equipment which enabled Syrian counterintelligence to locate the source of coded transmissions to Israeli intelligence.

He was tried by a special military tribunal and condemned to death on May 8^th, 1965. Pleas for clemency from world leaders were ignored by the Syrian military government who proceeded to hang him at Marjeh Square (Martyrs Square) in Damascus

Efforts by Cohen's family to have his remains repatriated to Israel have so far been unsuccessful.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2024).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Operation Northwoods: A Planned False Flag Operation Designed To Provide The United States With An Excuse To Invade Cuba

Operation Northwoods involved U.S. intelligence staging False Flag incidents involving the hijacking of planes, the blowing up of ships and the shooting to death of innocent civilians on the American mainland which would be falsely attributed to Cubans operating on behalf of the Castro government.

The public outrage would then provide a justification for invading Cuba and overthrowing Fidel Castro.

Operation Northwoods was approved in 1962 by General Lyman Lemnitzer when he was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but was rejected by the Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara under the instruction of President John F. Kennedy.

It is not known who designed the Northwoods project, but many are almost certain that the architect was Air Force Brigadier-General (later Major General) Edward Lansdale. Lansdale, a specialist in unorthodox warfare, had been working at that time on Operation Mongoose, an overarching plan to assassinate Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader.

Images.

1. Document.

Operation Northwoods was signed off by General Lyman Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

2. Top right.

Lyman Lemnitzer, the Four Star General who approved of Operation Northwoods.

3. Bottom right.

Major General Edward Lansdale shortly before his retirement from the United States Air Force.

(c) Adeyinka Makinde (2023).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Rare Photograph of Timothy Onwuatuegwu, Sandhurst-educated Army Officer of Nigeria and later of Biafra

Timothy Onwuatuegwu in photograph taken some time after his appointment as second in command of the Biafran Western Front in October 1968. Photo credit: David Robison.

Sandhurst-educated Timothy Onwuatuegwu (d.1970) was a key participant in the bloody army coup of January 15th, 1966, and became a prominent commander on the Biafran side during the Nigerian Civil War.

As head of the 'S Division', he was viewed as one of the most effective field commanders of the Biafran Army.

A Nigerian Army major at the time of the coup of January 1966 and later a lieutenant colonel in the Biafran army, Onwuatuegwu's presumed death is still something of a mystery.

These are the following narratives:

. Onwuatuegwu was killed in an ambush conducted on the Cameroon border by Nigerian army soldiers of Northern origin as payback for the murder of the Sardauna of Sokoto as well as senior Northern military officers.

.  Onwuatuegwu was killed by Yoruba officers of the Nigerian army who lured him to a hotel in Owerri at the end of the war, this as revenge for the murders respectively of Brigadier Samuel Ademulegun and his wife, as well as that of Colonel Ralph Shodeinde.

. Onwuatuegwu was killed by Brigadier Hassan Katsina in Kirikiri Prison, Lagos. Katsina is supposed to have flown from Kaduna to put a bullet in Onwuatuegwu's forehead. A slightly different narrative puts the location of his execution as Enugu prison.

Onwuatuegwu was supposedly shot with two other captured Biafran army officers and had been betrayed by certain civilians from Nnewi, the home town of the Head of State of the secessionist state of Biafra.

In his memoir The Fall of Biafra, Ben Gbulie claimed that Onwuatuegwu's betrayers were part of a wider "Osu conspiracy" of sabotage which “caused" Biafra's eventual defeat. The Osu are the “untouchable” caste of Igbo society.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2024).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.