Elizabeth of Toro

Biography

Elizabeth Bagaaya was born in 1936, a daughter of the royal house of Toro in western Uganda. Educated in Uganda and then at Sherborne in England, where she was the only Black pupil, she went on to Cambridge and in 1965 was called to the Bar at Gray's Inn, becoming the first woman from East Africa to qualify as a barrister. Then her life took a turn almost no one's does: encouraged into modelling, she appeared in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and became one of the first Black women to reach the top of international fashion.

The Turning Point

In 1974 Idi Amin, Uganda's unpredictable and violent dictator, appointed her foreign minister. She was an asset he paraded before the world, until she rejected his personal advances. That November he abruptly dismissed her and smeared her publicly with a fabricated story about an encounter at a Paris airport. She was placed under house arrest in a regime that routinely murdered its own officials, including a previous foreign minister. Early in 1975 she escaped across the border into Kenya and into years of exile, having survived a dictator's coercion with her life.

Historical Context

Elizabeth's career spanned three worlds that rarely met: traditional African monarchy, the London fashion establishment, and Cold War diplomacy. She rose during Uganda's descent from independence in 1962 into the terror of Amin's rule in the 1970s, when arbitrary arrest and killing were instruments of government. As a Western-educated royal woman who would not be owned, she was both useful to Amin and, the moment she refused him, a target.

Major Achievements

• First woman from East Africa to be called to the English Bar and Uganda's first female barrister
• One of the first Black women to appear in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar
• Served as Uganda's foreign minister in 1974 and later as ambassador to the United States, Germany and the Vatican
• Told her story in the memoir Elizabeth of Toro: The Odyssey of an African Princess (1989)

Her Impact Today

After Amin fell, Elizabeth returned to public life and served as one of Africa's most prominent women diplomats. Her life reads like several remarkable lives stacked together, but the thread running through it is dignity under pressure, the refusal to let a powerful man rewrite who she was.

Sources: Wikipedia (Princess Elizabeth of Tooro), Nation Africa, Encyclopedia.com, African Women in Law.