A Revisionist Look at Uganda's Darkest Chapter
Mahmood Mamdani, the distinguished Columbia University professor and father of New York's mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, has sparked controversy with his latest work, Slow Poison. The book presents a startling reinterpretation of Idi Amin's brutal regime in Uganda, challenging decades of established historical narrative.
The Personal and Political Intersect
Mamdani's perspective is deeply personal. As a member of Uganda's Indian community, he experienced Amin's 1972 expulsion order firsthand. The dictator gave 80,000 south Asians just 90 days to leave the country, despite having been nursed by an Indian woman in his own childhood. Amin viewed the community as an 'empire within' - the visible face of colonialism while the British remained discreetly out of sight.
The professor's life story reads like a minor epic of exile and return. Raised in the insulated world of Kampala's Indian community, he studied in Pittsburgh before earning a Harvard doctorate. His return to Uganda as an academic coincided with Amin's rise to power and the subsequent expulsion that would shape his worldview.
Challenging Conventional Wisdom
Mamdani urges readers to discard what he calls 'media-driven preconceptions' about Amin, including lurid tales of cannibalism and the dictator's absurd antics. Instead, he presents Amin as an anti-colonial moderniser who destroyed landlord power and made black rule meaningful.
According to Mamdani, the expulsions were aimed at the British rather than Indians, and Amin 'did everything in his power to spare Asian lives'. This perspective offers little comfort to those actually expelled, many of whom - including UK Home Secretary Priti Patel - developed permanent hostility toward state power as a result.
The book performs a neat inversion of heroes. While Amin earns a place in Mamdani's pantheon of liberation heroes for breaking with Britain and Israel, current leader Yoweri Museveni is criticised for reviving tribal politics and kowtowing to neoliberalism. Mamdani claims that where Amin united Ugandans, Museveni carved the country into ethnic fiefdoms.
The Uncomfortable Truths
Mamdani's revisionism faces significant factual obstacles. Amin was incontrovertibly a military despot under whose rule hundreds of thousands perished. His expulsion of Indians created severe shortages of milk, meat and medical professionals, ironically requiring the later importation of expatriates from India to fill the gaps.
While breaking with Britain and Israel, Amin allied with Muammar Gaddafi and turned the region into a graveyard through military adventurism. His theatrical gestures - styling himself King of Scotland, staging mock fundraisers for bankrupt Britain - are presented by Mamdani as radical performance art, though others see them as tragic evidence of a leader who chose to troll his nation rather than build it.
Mamdani's corrective to conventional history is bracing, but many will find his rehabilitation of Amin goes too far. The book's success in challenging preconceptions must be weighed against the undeniable suffering inflicted during Amin's regime. Slow Poison ultimately serves as a provocative contribution to ongoing debates about postcolonial Africa's complex legacy.
