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I closed out 2025 with Mahmood Mamdani’s Slow Poison, raised my head long enough to watch the fireworks displays that welcomed 2026 in Nairobi then quickly bowed my head again to quench my intrigue with the rest of Mamdani’s long-brewed study of two presidents and a postcolonial African nation. The study is subtitled, Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni and the Making of the Ugandan State (Jahazi Press, Nairobi, 2025). It is broken down into 14 chapters in three parts.
Before I say more, some confessions:
Prior to reading this Mamdani offering, my knowledge of Uganda’s political history was almost entirely gleaned from the press, an undergraduate course on Politics in Africa, Joel Isabirye’s fine studies of Ugandan popular music and culture, and Uganda’s best-known creative writers – Henry Barlow, Arthur Gakwandi, Timothy Wangusa, Austin Bukenya, Moses Isegawa, Doreen Baigana, Ayeta Wangusa, Susan Kiguli, Jennifer Makumbi, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Jackie Asiimwe.
My encounters with Makerere University where Mamdani worked for many years, came through participation in one conference back in 2005, some interesting NGOs in the late 2000s, and my 2023 evaluation of the Gerda Henkel Foundation’s programme – the Lisa Maskell Fellowships which were fashioned to train 100 PhDs over ten years in three African universities, including Makerere.
I have met Mahmood Mamdani only once. In September 2010, at a conference in Turku, Finland. We were both keynote speakers. Next, we spent an afternoon on a boat ride in Helsinki chatting about dull weather, cultures of scholarship, grant making. And then we parted to take our respective flights to wherever each called home at that point, never to meet again.
As happened that long ago day in Turku when I sat in rapt admiration listening to Mamdani explain why international criminal courts would never suffice to settle political conflicts in Africa, I read his latest treatise, Slow Poison, with a mix of wonder, cautious doubt, and enthusiastic agreement.
Mamdani urges “the reader to shed certain media-driven preconceptions before reading this book” (p.5). Through the first eight chapters, he demonstrates why Idi Amin was more interesting, more complicated, than the reputation of being a “Hitlerite”, “cannibal”, and “voracious killer”. This dim cardboard view of Amin, Mamdani argues, was cultivated largely by the British propaganda machine. Unable to control, for their own gain, this General whom they helped topple President Milton Obote on 25 January 1971, the British did what had served them well as colonial lords: typecast the man, stereotyped him as a mindless tyrant. He was no longer the liberating “jolly giant” they first painted; he was a “sadistic brute” and a buffoon. But, apace Achille Mbembe, Mamdani reminds us of the “many uses of public buffoonery as political performance” (p.1). He argues Amin deliberately encouraged his opponents to underestimate him.
Profitable expulsions
Amin’s famous expulsions of 1972 were clothed in clownish, reckless statements that hid their core significance. Through three expulsions – first of the Israeli, then the British, and finally the Asians – Amin racialized Uganda, turned it into a Black Man’s country to fulfil a decolonizing philosophy. To this extent he based Ugandan identity on race in a way that built a nationalist outlook among the people. They supported the expulsions, agreeing with his vision of a Black African Country. This, Mamdani explains, is the reason why Amin lasted nine years at the helm. Western governments and neighbouring busybodies did not want him, in part because he was drawing alignments with North Africa. Ultimately, Mamdani avers, what made Amin’s ouster possible was division within the military.
Mamdani finds another plus point in Amin’s tenure in the June 1974 establishment of the Mohammed Saied-led Commission of Inquiry into Disappearances of People in Uganda Since the 25th of January 1971. This “ambitious initiative”, Mamdani reasons, should have received more attention and praise as “among the first truth commissions in the world”, one, furthermore, whose “mandate was particularly to unearth the truth of the regime in power” (p.104). Really? I saw Kenya’s President Daniel Moi employ this diversion several times in the 1990s with zero consequences or cures. So, I must ask: after the findings of Amin’s groundbreaking Commission of Inquiry, where did the buck stop if not on the considerable shoulders of the General himself, self-proclaimed President for Life, Field Marshal al-Hadji, Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of all the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas, Last King of Scotland, Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa?
Let me admit; at this point in my reading, my doubts swelled to become a shriek and I asked the unworthy question: Was Mamdani’s motive in writing this book to rehabilitate the public memory of a fellow of shared faith? See, being a Kenyan on Twitter/X will do this to you, throw you into ad hominem reading. Fortunately, decades as a persistent academic steer you right back to what was said, and how, not who said it. And here – on the what and the how – Mamdani clears all my doubts. I cannot argue against the logic of his framing of identity and belonging. If anything, these are arguments I have myself made repeatedly; positions I have advocated for decades about the politicizing of identity and the cultural rather than the legal or geographic nature of belonging.
In emphasizing the double-edged value of expulsions, Mamdani explains that not every Asian who was expelled from Uganda regarded Amin as a persecutor who destroyed their lives. He cites instances of the kindness of strangers – customs officers, neighbours, policemen – even in that frantic heat of forced eviction. The stories of cruelty and violent dispossession may have dominated the press and oral histories for decades, but the pain of the moment was not without moments of relief. And in some cases, years of gratitude.
“Several years after the expulsion, I remember visiting a friend in his family’s council flat (public housing apartment) in East London… We came to the prayer room, the smallest of all rooms. Among the portraits of gods and goddesses was a photo of Amin. “Why?” I asked. “Where would we be without him? responded Mahesh’s mother. We had become penniless in Uganda, with no jobs and no right to travel. Amin opened the door to Britain, to work, to council housing, public education, health care, and transport” (p.94).
Mamdani tables biographical data of this kind – his own, his family’s, and that of the community of neighbours in Kampala – to show that not every Asian in colonial and post-independence Uganda was a wealthy merchant in the manner suggested in Hafsa Zayyan’s historical novel We Are All Birds of Uganda (2021). Some Asians were living on nebulous shrinking incomes, challenged by expectations and the (in)dignities of Kampala’s low-income settlements. How then did the singular narrative of suffering, of the brutality of the expulsion, persist in popular memory for so long before being shaken by the likes of Neema Shah in her novel Kololo Hill (2021)? Mamdani explains:
“Few of us in the first generation of those expelled wrote of our experiences. We were not chroniclers and we were not given to reflecting critically on our experiences. It is the children of refugees – the second generation – whose hand-me-down stories have gradually homogenized into victim narratives” (p.93).
There is a poignant reminder in the book that loss cannot always be quantified in material terms.
“Every place we lived in after the expulsion, we lived as if we were guests, our houses or rooms stamped with the feeling of being transients in our own homes. Years after we married, Mira remarked on how our family homes, whether in Wembley or Dar or back in Kampala, always seemed like guesthouses and we, their occupants, seemed ready to leave at a moment’s notice. With the loss of Uganda, we lost a sense of belonging, and of rootedness. This was our greatest loss” (p.95).
Personal memory as history
Slow Poison reaffirms my long-held views on the value of private remembrance as social history. Indeed, whether they be oral (in songs or podcasts), written (in blogs, diaries, biographies) or staged (in photographs, documentaries, or the short vertical videos of Tik Tok), popular memories provide prized counters to the official state-inscribed histories we find in museums, policy documents, children’s textbooks. They also supplement the national histories penned and debated by academics. Through the personal memory and anecdotal biographies of other Ugandan Asians, Mamdani gave me a fuller grasp of why Britain turned on Amin. Amin forced Britain to carry the consequences of its colonial policy of importing indentured labourers into colonies, forced them to bear the full weight of their historic responsibility – that history which they created.
By inserting personal memory in academic research, Slow Poison disrupts another abiding denial in Western practice. It validates insider-outsider research as a position that should garner far more credence and respect than it has from the West’s knowledge-industrial complex. This complex has always diminished local thought, fronting “expertise” that defines Africa and Africans for purposes of enabling geopolitics of domination and want.
In Slow Poison, the hypocrisy of Museveni is magnified precisely by Mamdani’s stories of his earliest engagements with Museveni in the 1970s and early 1980s when they were intellectual workers in Dar es Salaam. Rather than read character and situation as Mamdani does, a Western scholar would have limited themselves to the gospel of tribe and its stereotypes.
To puncture the long-peddled reputation of Museveni as redeemer, the saviour of the battered post-Amin nation that is silently praised in the chorus “At least now we can sleep”, Mamdani outlines how Museveni has fractured Uganda. For a man who enjoyed the benefits of a truly East African belonging – working in Tanzania, living in Kenya, tracing family in Rwanda – Museveni has betrayed the very hybridity he enjoyed. He did this through the 1995 constitution which ties citizenship to tribe, defined as Uganda’s Indigenous Communities as at the 1st of February 1926. Creating a district virtually for every tribe has entrenched the othering politics of insiders and outsiders. Aren’t these the same control tactics the colonizer used? The invitation of Asians to return to Uganda but only as investors is another instance of Museveni’s toxic othering. Fragmenting national identity, tying belonging to lineage and location, is the “slow poison” Mamdani names in the title.
Aside from poisoning the national ethos, Mamdani states, Museveni has enslaved the people. He caved in to the Bretton Woods institutions and their Structural Adjustment Programmes which began with the defunding of Makerere, making it a marketplace for degrees rather than for ideas. I saw the impact of this defunding firsthand in my evaluation of the PhD Fellowships. It made me ask myself whether Amin’s volatile season did less systemic damage to the production of knowledge than Museveni’s choices have. And yes, in discussing the rebuilding of Makerere, Mamdani takes the opportunity to restate his side of the story in the 2016 Stella Nyanzi debacle.
Mamdani tallies the long durée and practice of Museveni’s damage to Uganda. He has crashed the soul of Uganda(ns) in the virally contagious way he implemented privatization for personal gain, abetting a robust “ghost culture” that drains the economy. His politics without conscience, brutalising opposition, overrunning presidential term limits, makes democracy a transaction game with no other gain except his own longevity at the helm.
(C)omissions, covers, and conclusions
I had hoped Mamdani would dig deep(er) into three pressing moments in Uganda’s decolonizing years:
The source of funding for Rajat Neogy’s Transition magazine which propelled political and literary thought in the 1960s which Mamdani discusses in Chapter 5: This question matters because that funding dilemma continues to haunt African literary journals to this day.
The 1976 disappearance of Kenyan Makerere University student Esther Chesire: What was known within Makerere where, Mamdani says, quoting Ali Mazrui’s testimony to the US House of Representatives, there was no massacre of students as had been reported by a British journalist, David Martin, in The Observer in August 1976?
Mamdani explains that after the fall of Amin, the famous photographer Mo Dhillon met with the Vice Chancellor of Makerere who told him that “only one Makerere University student had been killed during the life of the [Amin] regime and that had happened off campus” (113). Who was she? Was this Esther Chesire whose family is still waiting for definitive answers?
So, after his ouster, should Amin have faced justice? For what, precisely (criminal negligence, at the very least)? What kind of justice would have sufficed, the slow-to-simmer one served by the moral arc of the universe?
Sometimes the work of the scholar is not to flesh out the meat for the reader; it is to point them in the right direction to complete the hunt on their own. In his life as a Ugandan intellectual and global academic, Mamdani has watched many former colleagues join the ranks of government ¾Dani Nabudere, Edward Rugumayo, Wanume Kibedi, among others). But aside from serving in one commission, Mamdani has shunned invitations to join the ranks of those in power. He does not say it in black and white but, Mamdani leaves me in no doubt that there is a certain type of academic who gravitates towards political power and those who wield it. What takes them there might be ideology. What keeps them there is not.
When I next meet Mamdani, I will ask him about the unnamed woman who dominates the front cover of the Jahazi Press edition of this book. I will also ask him about one of his conclusions:
“New constitutions do not produce new political cultures, which are more likely to take a generation to change.” (p. 279).
What does this mean in the context of Uganda’s 1995 constitution and its definitions of identity? That constitution is 31 years old now. How has it shifted or otherwise failed to shift the way Ugandans think of themselves? Do constitutions, like technology, only work to help a people do that which they were already doing more aggressively, if not more efficiently? Away politicians and their wicked designs, how do everyday Ugandans perform identity? What constitutes Ugandans’ sense of self today if not the prescriptions outlined in the 1995 constitution?
Considering the breadth of history, this is a compact book. I called it a long-brewed study only because, in the acknowledgements, Mamdani says he wrote it over 12 years (2010–2022). He writes with sombre reverence where it is required, with hilarious comedy where one might not expect it, and with studious references to a variety of sources. The most intriguing of these, for me, was Amin’s 2010 biography written by his son, Jaffar Amin, and Margaret Akulia. Until I read that Amin biography for myself, I will say nothing of its reference to the children Amin fathered in Kenya whom Mamdani mentions. Their names are too commonplace to profit speculation.
For those like me who read from preface all the way to conclusion, this book has a lot of repetition, which can be tiring. But it is that very repetition that makes it possible for one to read any of the chapters as a stand-alone text without missing out on context and core thesis.
In Slow Poison, Mahmood Mamdani shows us the sheer power of narrative and those who tell the(ir) story loudest, longest, if not best. He documents many lessons in organizing from the margins, within the eye of the storm, on the debris of institutional collapse. He reminded me just how much I did not know about the Amin years despite seeing firsthand the thunderous greeting Idi Amin received at Jamhuri Park in February 1972 when he stole the show from every president present at the OAU’s All-Africa Trade Fair, including Jomo Kenyatta, and despite, thereafter, following the news religiously.
Mamdani demonstrates that before the Internet, when information was linear, propaganda was so easy to channel. His methodology shows us that in this Internet era of all-too-many media, the academic’s work needs to be robust enough to track down all manner of sources and incisive enough to do the slow work of triangulation and theory-bound analyses to dispel dubious opinions and advance unpopular positions.
I do not know enough about Uganda to rule on whether Slow Poison is an award-winning book. But I think I know enough current affairs to submit that the November 2025 timing for the release of this doubtlessly brave fireworks-emitting book is pointedly clever, strategic even.
As part of the Cheche Books “Conversation with Authors” series, Slow Poison will be launched at the Jain Bhavan Auditorium in Loresho, Nairobi, at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, 23rd of January 2026. Mamdani will be speaking at the same venue the following day at 3 p.m. The entry fee for both events is Kenya Shillings 1,000/=.
