Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State
By Mahmood Mamdani
Belknap, 352 pages, $32.50
Uganda has few claims to fame in the global imagination, and those few have not done any favors for its reputation. For decades, the main thing many people knew about the country was the name of its only international airport: Entebbe. They knew it less as a place than as an incident: the 1976 Israeli hostage rescue operation that took place after the dictator Idi Amin invited a group of terrorists associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to land a hijacked plane there. Amin’s other crimes—most notably, his expulsion of over 50,000 residents of Asian descent from the country, but also his alleged penchant for devouring his enemies—enhanced his reputation as an African Hitler in miniature. For much of the world, Amin became synonymous with the country he ruled for eight years.
The decades since Amin’s 1979 ouster haven’t improved Uganda’s image. Much of the international coverage it has received was due to its status as a global epicenter of the AIDS epidemic and its implementation of draconian anti-homosexuality laws. In 2012, the brutal insurgency of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army in the country’s northern regions became the occasion for an absurd episode of online “clicktivism”: the viral video campaign Kony 2012, which its creator claimed would galvanize the public to bring Kony to justice. (Ugandans were mostly unappreciative of this effort.) Kony also served as the model for General Butt Fucking Naked, the warlord who terrorizes Latter-Day Saint missionaries in the Broadway hit The Book of Mormon. The musical’s depiction of Uganda as a quintessential “shithole country,” ravaged by starvation, AIDS, and mindless violence, reflected the common perception in the West.
If Zohran Mamdani triumphs in this week’s mayoral election in New York City, as is expected, he will be the first person of Ugandan origin and (dual) citizenship to hold a major elected office in the United States. His emergence as a figurehead of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party will create a new set of associations for his birth country in the United States.
If the prevailing criticisms of his candidacy so far are anything to go by, these will have less to do with the specifics of Uganda than with the broader history of Third World anti-colonialism. On one level, this is a repeat of the playbook used (unsuccessfully) against the supposed “Kenyan anti-colonialist” Barack Obama. But to a greater extent than Obama, Mamdani is indelibly linked to this history and has reinforced that link in various ways. Although he has downplayed these themes in his campaign, he has long invoked the rhetoric of anti-colonial struggle, dating back to when he was an undergraduate major in Africana studies.
Mamdani’s critics have also taken note of the fact that his father, Mahmood, is a left-wing academic at Columbia University—a center of the recent Gaza encampments—with a history of radical activism dating back to his early in recently independent Uganda. As it happens, the elder Mamdani’s latest book, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State, has appeared on the eve of his son’s likely ascent to higher office. The book has surprising relevance to the political panorama in which his Zohran seems set to play a major role. Obviously, there is a great deal that separates the experiences of a small nation emerging from British imperial rule from those of a global hegemon in retreat. Nonetheless, the fundamental questions the book explores—about nationhood, identity, citizenship, and self-determination—are the same ones being asked in the United States during the age of Trump. Those asking them are on the MAGA right as well as the “decolonial” left.
For many on the US progressive left, “decolonization” is a cathartic mantra promising an almost metaphysical rupture between oppression and liberation. The elder Mamdani’s book is a cautionary tale about how such dreams came to grief in one country. The “slow poison” to which the title refers is the cocktail of political toxins the author holds responsible for killing the dream of Ugandan nationhood. This prolonged death wasn’t just something he observed from afar. In the 1970s, Mamdani was part of the exile community in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that eventually gave rise to the insurgency that ended Amin’s rule. After that, he took a leading role in shaping the country’s top university, Makerere. He was offered roles in government at several points, but declined.
Mamdani’s two protagonists are Amin, whose rule lasted from 1971 to 1979, and Yoweri Museveni, who has been president from 1986 to the present. Both took up the project of postcolonial nation-building; in the end, both undermined it, following different paths along the way. When he first seized power, Amin was helped by foreign interests, including Britain and Israel, who perceived him as a simple military man and non-ideological pragmatist willing to cut deals. But after falling out with these patrons, he became a major nuisance to them, allying himself with Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and taking up an assertively anti-Western and anti-Israel line. Conversely, Museveni took power after a long career as a guerrilla insurgent in the tradition of Mao and Che. Initially, he sought to ally himself with Cuba and North Korea, but later became Washington’s favorite African leader for his avid implementation of World Bank-mandated reforms.
“Mamdani’s dispassionate assessment of Amin will scandalize many readers.”
Early in Slow Poison, Mamdani asks readers to “shed certain media-driven preconceptions”: first, that “Amin was a Hitlerite presence in Africa”; second, that “Museveni has been an effective antidote to Amin.” The second case is an easier sell: Museveni’s long refusal to relinquish power or allow free elections and his support of anti-gay legislation have dimmed the glowing reputation he once enjoyed in the West. But Mamdani’s dispassionate assessment of Amin will scandalize many readers, especially given that he and his family were among those dispossessed in 1972. A review in The Wall Street Journal seized on this aspect of the book, claiming the author offers an “apologia” for Amin as an “anticolonial hero.” In reality, Mamdani makes clear that Amin’s regime was “born in an orgy of blood,” that the Asian expulsion was a “big, well-organized collective theft,” and that the dictator undermined his rule by redistributing the stolen wealth to cronies who drove Uganda’s economy into the ground.
More importantly, there is no romanticization of revolutionary violence in the mode of Frantz Fanon to be found in Slow Poison. Instead, the book is informed by a hardheaded recognition that nation-building is often an ugly business, and that Amin’s crimes should be evaluated in that context. Mamdani’s revisionist take on Amin reminded me less of any left-wing dictator worship than of the sort of qualified defense of the Trail of Tears you might expect from a conservative nationalist arguing against demands to remove Andrew Jackson’s likeness from the $20 bill. Many leaders of recently founded states have undertaken actions that seem horrific in retrospect—but often it is just such acts that have proven decisive in determining the fate of nations. What sets Amin apart is less his unique ruthlessness than the fact that his atrocities failed to create the basis for an enduring political order. Had he managed military and economic affairs more prudently and brought something like his vision of Ugandan nationhood to fruition, the consensus view of him would likely be closer to Mamdani’s.
In Amin and Museveni, Mamdani finds contrasting approaches to the construction of collective political identities. Amin sought to be “the father of the Ugandan nation” by uniting disparate ethnolinguistic groups as a single black African nation—which was delimited at great cost to Mamdani’s own multigenerational Asian-descended community. He argues that Museveni, on the other hand, has systematically “dismantled the nation, dividing it into an increasing number of minorities, tribe by tribe.” One of these minority groups is women, who form a slight majority of the Ugandan population but are defined as a “special category” entitled to affirmative action and separate political representation.
Uganda’s history has been marked by a repeated “failure … to forge a durable citizenship by building a common political community.” Museveni, by Mamdani’s account, gave up on this effort altogether, opting instead to “tribalize” the nation. In doing so, he resuscitated the stratagems of indirect rule deployed by the British colonial government, which reinforced local divisions to dampen broad-based democratic demands. This revival is not coincidental. A nation made up of “tribalized districts … unable to come together around a common political project” will always be a dependent one, only able to eke out an existence as part of a formal or informal empire. As Mamdani documents, Museveni has stayed in power so long by positioning Uganda as a client state of the US-led international order: a model of the fiscal discipline demanded by the World Bank and IMF, a favored recipient of humanitarian aid, and a partner in the Global War on Terror.
Museveni’s retreat from forging a common nationality is also evident in the status of the group he is often praised for reintegrating into Uganda: the Asian community. By enabling their return and the restitution of their property, his government allowed many Asian Ugandans to reestablish themselves in the land where they grew up, Mamdani among them (although he teaches at Columbia, he has spent long periods there ever since the 1980s, and he directed the Makerere Institute for Social Research in Kampala from 2010 to 2022). But when Museveni reversed Amin’s expulsion, he made clear that Asians were welcome as “‘investors,’ but not as fellow citizens.” The community’s relative prosperity, combined with its still undefined status, has once again positioned Asian Ugandans as a scapegoat for any future crisis. And with Museveni in his early 80s and the US-led order he has relied on now in freefall, such a crisis may not be far away.
Intentionally or not, Mamdani offers an indirect critique of several dogmas popular among young progressives of the sort who have flocked to his son’s campaign. The first of these is the belief that “indigeneity” is a liberatory anti-colonial concept. As Slow Poison demonstrates, the distinction between indigenous and non-indigenous groups was in fact essential to how the British colonial state governed. Parceling out the population this way was a rational approach for an avowedly non-democratic ruling apparatus that saw only subjects to be administered, not an active citizenry to be cultivated. To the extent that postcolonial states have reinforced such distinctions, argues Mamdani, the effect has been to “disrupt the development of an interest-bound majority.”
“Mamdani offers an indirect critique of several dogmas popular among young progressives.”
Museveni’s regime has become notorious over the past decade or so for its persecution of sexual minorities, but other aspects of how it has governed would seem amenable to many on the Western left. Mamdani highlights Museveni’s official policy of multiculturalism, which treats Ugandans as members of specific ethnic groups first and citizens of the nation second. He also remarks that his government’s institutionalized feminism, which reserves a quota of seats in parliament for women, creates the impression that women “need permanent care and protection”—something the regime is happy to offer. Again, the proliferation of differentiated identities and protected statuses works against any notion of common citizenship. Mamdani’s account of all this bears a strong resemblance to the critiques of progressive neoliberalism offered by Marxists like Adolph Reed, for whom identity politics must be seen as a top-down divide and rule project.
For some time, it seemed that American nationhood and peoplehood could be taken for granted in a way that has never been true for new countries like Uganda. That is no longer the case, as Zohran Mamdani himself was reminded lately when some in the opposing party demanded his denaturalization and deportation. This is unlikely to happen, but if it did, the younger Mamdani’s fate would echo that of his father and other relatives in 1972. Today, in the United States, the fundamental question of who belongs and does not belong to the nation is being posed once again—and the MAGA right is mostly setting the terms of that discussion.
Mahmood Mamdani asks: “Is it possible to unite people without having to create an enemy?” This is the question his son and others trying to build a populist alternative on the left are—or should be—asking. But in order to answer it, they need to realize that setting the boundaries of the nation isn’t the same thing as creating an enemy. On the contrary, it is the only way to constitute a democratic citizenry. If the American left continues to be unwilling to offer a positive vision of nationhood, it will keep losing to those with no scruples about creating enemies.