"African heroes should be put first"And that would be "Big Daddy" Idi Amin Dada - hands down!
A veritable Colossus of mythical proportions, a giant among men. Look on his works, ye Mighty, and despair:
- Military might: Along with a few Arab-speaking allies, he took on the mighty armed forces of Israel, and whipped them so badly at The Battle of Entebbe that the IDF had to withdraw their entire force from Uganda and go home.
- Champion of the Middle Class: Prior to his enlightened reign, the Ugandan government extracted huge sums of $$ from the middle class via income / sales / property taxes.
But (and note how this ties in with the "African-Indian" theme), after Big Daddy's hand of friendship reached out to Indian expats in Uganda to enlist their resources in a brilliant new economic plan, the government, starting the next year, collected next to nothing from them in taxes!
- Friend of the Earth: Prior to Idi, the agriculture in Uganda was so huge that they exported food to many neighbors. But this came at a terrible cost in terms of global warming, through the outsized carbon footprint spewed out by diesel-burning tractors / farm machinery, vehicles on traffic-clogged roads, and in the exhalations of surplus human beings (who scientists have recently discovered are spewing out Mother-Earth-harming CO2 toxic waste gases on a 24x7 basis!)
But after a year or two of Amin's "economic restructuring" - emissions from vehicles and farm equipment dropped to near zero, and human CO2 emissions nationwide were nearly cut in half!
- Many more triumphs .... EG: Creative fertilization techniques on arable fields, via large volumes of hemoglobin. Combatting mass starvation by quickly realizing it was caused by a tenfold increase in the "Population :: Food Ratio" due to disappearing food supplies, and working overtime to bring that ratio back down to normal. And much more.
Sorry there, Cecil Rhodes, Uncle Bob Mugabe, Ozymandias, and the rest. But you have met your match.