... was born in Birmingham in 1913. He moved to Uganda in 1963, and was teaching at Makerere University in Kampala when Idi Amin seized power in 1971. He was arrested in April 1975, on charges of espionage and sedition, for the words he wrote about Amin. Tried before a military tribunal, he was condemned to death by firing squad. The Queen interceded on his behalf, and Foreign Secretary James Callaghan flew to Kampala to bring him home.
Hills played himself in the 1981 Kenyan film Rise and Fall of Idi Amin, which won five awards at the Las Vegas International Film Festival – including Best Actor for Joseph Olita in the role of Idi Amin. The film was "snubbed" by the Oscars; this, according to Wikipedia, "has been considered one of the worst acting snubs in the history of the Academy Awards." Wikipedia quotes Olita: "You see these wazungu [(white men)] are so selfish. They just wanted to make one of their own a star. (Forest) Whitaker's performance and role in The Last King of Scotland is nowhere close to what I did and [am] still able to do".
In 1976 Hills returned to Africa, and in 1982 he was teaching in Nairobi. In 1985 he returned to Poland, where he had lived and worked in the 1930s, but was summarily expelled as a result of a piece in the Daily Telegraph's Peterborough column, which said he was travelling through Poland in order to write a "less than complimentary book about the Communist regime".
He died in 2004, aged 90.
© Haydn Thompson 2019