If you're thinking that "The Last King Of Scotland" is some kind of fantasy-sequel to "Braveheart," well, guess again. The "king" of the film's title is 1970s Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada, who was a former barracks boy with the King's Highlanders, and liked to boast that his defiance of Uganda's British colonizers would have the Scots pleading with him to be their king.
It didn't quite turn out that way. While Amin came to power lionized as a fiercely nationalist and independent African leader, he left office with the reputation of just another brutal despot; some figures claim as many as 300,000 deaths under Amin's reign of terror, and while the true figures may never be known, there's no doubt he was a monster.
An urban legend in Kampala says that before his rise to power, Amin visited a witch doctor and said he wanted to become Uganda's president. He was told that to do so, he would have to eat the heart of the one he loved most. Perhaps this was meant as a metaphor, but a few weeks later, Amin's eldest son disappeared.