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Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State
A leading public intellectual gives his authoritative and personal account of the tragic postcolonial fate of Uganda, his homeland.
In 1972, when Mahmood Mamdani came home to Uganda, he found a country transformed by “an orgy of violence.” Two years earlier, with support from the colonial powers of Great Britain and Israel, Idi Amin had forcefully cemented his rule. He soon expelled Uganda’s Indian minority in hopes of fostering a nation for Black Ugandans. The plan backfired. Amin was followed by Yoweri Museveni, who has now ruled for nearly four decades. Whereas Amin tried to create a Black nation out of the majority, Museveni sought to fragment this majority into multiple ethnic minorities, re-creating a version of colonial indirect rule.
Slow Poison is Mamdani’s firsthand report on the tragic unraveling of his country’s struggle for decolonialization. A witness to East Africa’s endlessly intricate power plays, and one of the most insightful political philosophers of his generation, Mamdani casts a learned and wary eye on Amin, internationally depicted as a buffoon; the radical scholar Museveni; and the global heavyweights that exploited and manipulated Uganda before and after its independence.
Each leader made violence central to his project, but Mamdani sees a signal difference between Amin, who retained popular support to the end, and Museveni, who has not. The Asian expulsion made Amin a monster in the eyes of the West. In contrast, Museveni was hailed as standard bearer of the “war on terror” in Africa and was protected from accountability for far greater crimes. In exchange for adopting the package of neoliberal reforms known as the Washington Consensus, he became Africa’s poster child. Amin, who aimed to create a nation of Black millionaires, never became one himself. Meanwhile, Uganda’s surrender to privatization has brought Museveni’s family immense wealth, even as the country remains one of the world’s poorest.
In 1972, when Mahmood Mamdani came home to Uganda, he found a country transformed by “an orgy of violence.” Two years earlier, with support from the colonial powers of Great Britain and Israel, Idi Amin had forcefully cemented his rule. He soon expelled Uganda’s Indian minority in hopes of fostering a nation for Black Ugandans. The plan backfired. Amin was followed by Yoweri Museveni, who has now ruled for nearly four decades. Whereas Amin tried to create a Black nation out of the majority, Museveni sought to fragment this majority into multiple ethnic minorities, re-creating a version of colonial indirect rule.
Slow Poison is Mamdani’s firsthand report on the tragic unraveling of his country’s struggle for decolonialization. A witness to East Africa’s endlessly intricate power plays, and one of the most insightful political philosophers of his generation, Mamdani casts a learned and wary eye on Amin, internationally depicted as a buffoon; the radical scholar Museveni; and the global heavyweights that exploited and manipulated Uganda before and after its independence.
Each leader made violence central to his project, but Mamdani sees a signal difference between Amin, who retained popular support to the end, and Museveni, who has not. The Asian expulsion made Amin a monster in the eyes of the West. In contrast, Museveni was hailed as standard bearer of the “war on terror” in Africa and was protected from accountability for far greater crimes. In exchange for adopting the package of neoliberal reforms known as the Washington Consensus, he became Africa’s poster child. Amin, who aimed to create a nation of Black millionaires, never became one himself. Meanwhile, Uganda’s surrender to privatization has brought Museveni’s family immense wealth, even as the country remains one of the world’s poorest.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published October 14, 2025
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551 people want to read
About the author
Mahmood Mamdani
33 books255 followersMahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University and Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala. He is the author of Citizen and Subject, When Victims Become Killers, and Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.
Mamdani is married to Mira Nair, the acclaimed Indian film director and producer. Mamdani and Nair's only son, Zohran Mamdani, is the mayor-elect of New York City.
Mamdani is married to Mira Nair, the acclaimed Indian film director and producer. Mamdani and Nair's only son, Zohran Mamdani, is the mayor-elect of New York City.
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November 3, 2025
Slow poison, by Mahmood Mamdani, is a superbly interwoven mix of memoir and history, in which the personal and the academic meld into one through an extraordinary writer with an extraordinary life.
It is wonderfully written, and one cannot overstate the quality of the prose, the pacing, and the sequencing of the book. A real treasure, and something that academics must emulate if they are to ever actually matter. While ultimately a narrative history and lacking the sophisticated social-scientific approach of Tapscott’s Arbitrary States or Epstein’s How Insurgency Begins, it is filled with intelligent and prescient insights on Uganda and political society writ large and certainly contributes to humanity’s overall understanding of it.
Its faults are three-fold, two of which are very small. First, there are a couple of factual errors that an editor should’ve picked up, particularly around the section he talks about Laurent-Desire Kabila and James Kabarebe. Second, the book occasionally repeats itself, something that again suggests a lack of editing. The only one of note was that I felt the book was missing Obote. He was barely mentioned or only talked of indirectly. He is no less important than Amin or Museveni, surely? If not, then his absence ought to at least be justified. Still, it’s a minor thing.
Mamdani, I hope, will not only be remembered for being the father of the future (at the time of writing-the election is tomorrow) Mayor of New York, for he has not only had a highly prominent academic career, but also a remarkable political life in which he has swung between the highs and lows of East African politics, held his own amidst many of the leading political figures of the region, and turned down the allure of power and wealth to stand for his principles and beliefs. It is here where this review turns to first, after which I’ll look at the non-autobiographical side of the book (which is the bulk of it).
Mamdani’s Life
In another world, Mamdani could have been a senior figure in Ugandan politics, for long-time President Museveni seemingly tried to woo him for decades, first trying to get him (as a leading East African intellectual with strong connections in the academy) to join the Bush War early on, then trying to make him a minister once or twice, and constantly attempting to place him atop this or that committee or inquiry. In each occurrence, Mamdani would either turn it down or accept it and promptly embarrass the government through his honesty.
The author was born in a stereotypical Asian Ugandan petite bourgeoise family and household. He was born in Uganda, and his parents had lived around East Africa for their whole lives, the family stretching from Uganda to the Tanzanian coast. His family were dukawallas, Asian shopkeepers. They had an unexceptional livelihood, though one undeniably better than their customers and the peasantry (and I mean peasantry rather than agricultural workers, Britain had created a pseudo-feudal system where none had existed before). Though Mamdani is a bit rosier on the dukawalla-African relationship than Ugandan authors I have read, he still clearly understands the innate class conflict it imbued, both in the more general sense and in his own family’s life, where peasant and shopkeeper would constantly innovate and scheme to screw the other over, though it was not worse than that for much of Mamdani’s childhood, and one must imagine the landlord-peasant antagonism was more significant. In any case, by 1958 this was changing, and nationalist winds led to a boycott campaign against Asian businesses that drove Mamdani’s family close to ruin. His family were neither the poor Asians--temporary workers, if not indentured servants, brought in by the British for infrastructure projects, who lived side-by-side and rather harmoniously with their African brethren—nor the haute bourgeoise Asians who lived in a parallel world, sans for the exploitation of African labour. Still, his life was sufficiently privileged, and Uganda sufficiently racially segregated, for him to spend much of his life separate from Africans, if more socially than geographically.
He was a smart student, and was one of a tiny number of Ugandans (and, yes, he certainly saw and sees himself as Ugandan, as does his son, Zohran Mamdani) to be awarded a scholarship to study higher education in America. It was there where he had his political awakening, engaging in the civil rights movement and, humorously, being introduced to Marx by none other than the FBI. This would set him on his lifelong path as an independent-minded Marxist academic of political science, a political operator throughout, and at times comfortable with violence as principle, more attracted--especially in his younger years-- to the anti-colonial, proletarian militancy of James Forman and Frantz Fanon than the more accommodating and upper-class civil activism of Martin Luther King.
Soon after returning to Uganda as a low-level academic, he was promptly expelled with the rest of the Asian Ugandans. In line with his identity as an African Asian he went not to Britain, but to Tanzania, where he would become embroiled in the lively exile politics of the Amin period. He would form his own group, the Chango’mbe Group, made of progressive intellectuals more than fighters, but who still were embedded in politics and worked hard to shape the ideological nature of the exile struggle. This was unsuccessful, for Mamdani was ill-suited for and unwilling to engage in the low cunning of others, and he ended up being marginalised come the fall of Amin. Still, it was here where he was first acquainted with Museveni, who also took up a position as an academic in Tanzania and who clearly had a lot of respect and perhaps even admiration for Mamdani. Even in the 70s, Museveni regularly attended Mamdani’s meetings and tried to recruit him to be the intellectual heft behind his rebel group, FRONASA. Mamdani, as he would for decades, would decline to join him.
Once Museveni returned to power, Mamdani would become more opposition than ally, though, curiously, Museveni would never stop trying to win him over and never sought Mamdani’s demise, unlike Amin and even Obote. Mamdani would become a leading figure in Ugandan academia, through which he would meet yet more leading figures of Central African history, not least the ill-fated Laurent-Desire Kabila (future President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and James Kabarebe, the capable future head of the Rwandan Armed Forces, alongside a litany of senior Ugandan political figures. For Mamdani, the university was not to be an ivory tower, alienated from society and producing over-specialised, disciplinarily isolated articles read by nobody and published in for-profit journals. The intellectual was the political, and to be a scholar was to engage in struggle. Throughout his life in Uganda, he would try to build organisations to improve the lot of Ugandans, both through mutual aid and basic education and through outright radical activism. This was seldom successful, though on occasion he did show a sense for unilateralism and confrontation.
Today, I gather, he lives in America, though he taught in Uganda until 2019. What will his personal legacy be? It’s hard to tell, for while he was instrumental in creating an independent Ugandan intellectual scene, and he helped create an epistemologically progressive and sound set of institutions (unlike the miserable state of the Anglophone social sciences), does it really matter? Many of his students either forgot his lessons or took terrible ones from them. Uganda remains no better politically than before, and has he really left any mark on it? Perhaps it is too early to tell, at least until Museveni dies and his dimwit son tries to take over. It would be a shame, though, if his life mattered more for America (in producing Zohran Mamdani) than in Africa, where his home and heart lay. I guess that great old scene from Game of Thrones remains prescient—they say knowledge is power, but really the world is more basic than that. Power is power.
On Uganda
Most of the book doesn’t involve him as a central character. The story is, above all, about two men: Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni. The book is a sort of comparative study of the two leaders (Obote, sadly, is relegated to a background character), as well as a revisionist critique of the mainstream interpretations of both. In the latter sense it is perhaps not unique (Ugandan scholarship has long treated Amin with more nuance than the west has, and Museveni’s shine has long worn off), but it does so with more wit, knowledge, and intellect than most, and it is thoroughly convincing. In the former the book finds its main theoretical contribution to Ugandan history and politics, and by contrasting the two one finds the sorry tale of how post-colonial struggle shapes politicians, the state, and society; so, too, does one find the potentialities therein, even if they have evidently not been exercised in Uganda or, indeed, in most of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Amin and Museveni represent the two opposite reactions to the post-colonial legacy, and the two ways in which postcolonial leaders have tried to build authority and maintain power. Both had taken power with a clear vision of what Uganda and Africa should look like. When faced with the concrete obstacles of achieving this, they took opposing paths. Amin fought to the end; Museveni conceded immediately. Though Amin was no revolutionary, he believed in an Africa for Africans, a decolonisation that would ride over the sub-national colonial divisions by creating a single Black African identity. Museveni spoke of social revolution for 20 years, then leaned into and furthered the fictitious division of Uganda into a kaleidoscope of alien communities. Amin saw a cohesive nation as the source of his strength, while Museveni saw it as a threat. One created the nation and the other shattered it.
What they shared was a fundamentally racialised view of society inherited from the colonising power. When Amin expelled the Asians to create an ‘Africa for Africans’, he did not redistribute or socialise the wealth imbued therein. Uganda was not to be made for all Africans. The loot was instead haphazardly privatised to a narrow band of officer-capitalists who had no clue how to run an economy and promptly crashed it. Museveni once spoke the language of social revolution and surely understood it intellectually, but he never believed it. He took power through a transformative and inclusive ‘broad front’ in which belonging was based on residence rather than heritage and governance was built from the bottom-up through the Resistance Councils. To quote Mamdani: “Museveni never realised the theoretical or strategic significance of what he had achieved in Luwero. Like most things he did, good or bad, he confused strategy as tactics and tactics as strategy. For him, Luwero had been no more than a stepping stone to power. He remained uninterested in drawing lessons from [its experience], never recognising the lasting value of what the NRA had achieved there, crystallised by the mode of organisation they had pioneered in Luwero.”
Throughout the story, Mamdani hints at alternative paradigms and cleavages around which politics could have and perhaps should have been organised. There was never a need to pit Asian against African, even if it brought Amin popularity. There were not one but two exploitative classes in independent Uganda: the Asian and Baganda bourgeoisie. There was one single working-class, both African and Asian, which lived as one. Even where progress was done, as through Amin’s land reform against the Mailo landlords, Museveni undid it. Both problematised the concept of post-colonial citizenship, but neither had a just or humane solution, and neither could look beyond the lens of race and ethnicity. Perhaps Museveni was right, and he did, after all, need an intellectual class in the NRM. I somehow doubt he would have listened. What matters is that another Uganda, Africa, and world was and still is possible, and there were (and are) key junctures in history where these better potentialities could have been exercised. They were not.
Mamdani’s scorn is undoubtedly focused at Museveni over Amin, despite his personal loss at the latter’s hands. He is rightly critical of the discordant coverage of the two in the west. Amin as a Hitlerite, barbarous savage; Museveni as a statesman, a partner in the War on Terror, and an architect of an economic miracle. Perhaps he is understating how much Museveni is criticised in the western press these days, but the point remains largely true. For the great violence exercised by Amin’s regime—that has been much exaggerated and inflated over time—it pales in comparison to Museveni’s. The desecration of the Acholi in the north vastly outweighed the periodic massacres of Acholi and Lango soldiers in the early Amin period.
To stay in power without any real social base for 40 years is surely a political achievement. Not many have managed it, especially without the legitimating factors associated with monarchy. Mamdani gives little praise for Museveni’s political cunning, but it surely exists, and ‘mistaking the tactical for the strategic’ doesn’t mean he cannot execute good tactics. That said, it appears true that, for each manoeuvre taken, Museveni has paid a price—he has ruined his legacy in a way even worse than Obote had, he is less popular than ever and will leave nothing behind but his hated son. What was it all for? One can tell that with Amin, however terrible his execution was. With Museveni? He has wasted his life’s work, not to mention that of millions of Ugandans.
It is wonderfully written, and one cannot overstate the quality of the prose, the pacing, and the sequencing of the book. A real treasure, and something that academics must emulate if they are to ever actually matter. While ultimately a narrative history and lacking the sophisticated social-scientific approach of Tapscott’s Arbitrary States or Epstein’s How Insurgency Begins, it is filled with intelligent and prescient insights on Uganda and political society writ large and certainly contributes to humanity’s overall understanding of it.
Its faults are three-fold, two of which are very small. First, there are a couple of factual errors that an editor should’ve picked up, particularly around the section he talks about Laurent-Desire Kabila and James Kabarebe. Second, the book occasionally repeats itself, something that again suggests a lack of editing. The only one of note was that I felt the book was missing Obote. He was barely mentioned or only talked of indirectly. He is no less important than Amin or Museveni, surely? If not, then his absence ought to at least be justified. Still, it’s a minor thing.
Mamdani, I hope, will not only be remembered for being the father of the future (at the time of writing-the election is tomorrow) Mayor of New York, for he has not only had a highly prominent academic career, but also a remarkable political life in which he has swung between the highs and lows of East African politics, held his own amidst many of the leading political figures of the region, and turned down the allure of power and wealth to stand for his principles and beliefs. It is here where this review turns to first, after which I’ll look at the non-autobiographical side of the book (which is the bulk of it).
Mamdani’s Life
In another world, Mamdani could have been a senior figure in Ugandan politics, for long-time President Museveni seemingly tried to woo him for decades, first trying to get him (as a leading East African intellectual with strong connections in the academy) to join the Bush War early on, then trying to make him a minister once or twice, and constantly attempting to place him atop this or that committee or inquiry. In each occurrence, Mamdani would either turn it down or accept it and promptly embarrass the government through his honesty.
The author was born in a stereotypical Asian Ugandan petite bourgeoise family and household. He was born in Uganda, and his parents had lived around East Africa for their whole lives, the family stretching from Uganda to the Tanzanian coast. His family were dukawallas, Asian shopkeepers. They had an unexceptional livelihood, though one undeniably better than their customers and the peasantry (and I mean peasantry rather than agricultural workers, Britain had created a pseudo-feudal system where none had existed before). Though Mamdani is a bit rosier on the dukawalla-African relationship than Ugandan authors I have read, he still clearly understands the innate class conflict it imbued, both in the more general sense and in his own family’s life, where peasant and shopkeeper would constantly innovate and scheme to screw the other over, though it was not worse than that for much of Mamdani’s childhood, and one must imagine the landlord-peasant antagonism was more significant. In any case, by 1958 this was changing, and nationalist winds led to a boycott campaign against Asian businesses that drove Mamdani’s family close to ruin. His family were neither the poor Asians--temporary workers, if not indentured servants, brought in by the British for infrastructure projects, who lived side-by-side and rather harmoniously with their African brethren—nor the haute bourgeoise Asians who lived in a parallel world, sans for the exploitation of African labour. Still, his life was sufficiently privileged, and Uganda sufficiently racially segregated, for him to spend much of his life separate from Africans, if more socially than geographically.
He was a smart student, and was one of a tiny number of Ugandans (and, yes, he certainly saw and sees himself as Ugandan, as does his son, Zohran Mamdani) to be awarded a scholarship to study higher education in America. It was there where he had his political awakening, engaging in the civil rights movement and, humorously, being introduced to Marx by none other than the FBI. This would set him on his lifelong path as an independent-minded Marxist academic of political science, a political operator throughout, and at times comfortable with violence as principle, more attracted--especially in his younger years-- to the anti-colonial, proletarian militancy of James Forman and Frantz Fanon than the more accommodating and upper-class civil activism of Martin Luther King.
Soon after returning to Uganda as a low-level academic, he was promptly expelled with the rest of the Asian Ugandans. In line with his identity as an African Asian he went not to Britain, but to Tanzania, where he would become embroiled in the lively exile politics of the Amin period. He would form his own group, the Chango’mbe Group, made of progressive intellectuals more than fighters, but who still were embedded in politics and worked hard to shape the ideological nature of the exile struggle. This was unsuccessful, for Mamdani was ill-suited for and unwilling to engage in the low cunning of others, and he ended up being marginalised come the fall of Amin. Still, it was here where he was first acquainted with Museveni, who also took up a position as an academic in Tanzania and who clearly had a lot of respect and perhaps even admiration for Mamdani. Even in the 70s, Museveni regularly attended Mamdani’s meetings and tried to recruit him to be the intellectual heft behind his rebel group, FRONASA. Mamdani, as he would for decades, would decline to join him.
Once Museveni returned to power, Mamdani would become more opposition than ally, though, curiously, Museveni would never stop trying to win him over and never sought Mamdani’s demise, unlike Amin and even Obote. Mamdani would become a leading figure in Ugandan academia, through which he would meet yet more leading figures of Central African history, not least the ill-fated Laurent-Desire Kabila (future President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and James Kabarebe, the capable future head of the Rwandan Armed Forces, alongside a litany of senior Ugandan political figures. For Mamdani, the university was not to be an ivory tower, alienated from society and producing over-specialised, disciplinarily isolated articles read by nobody and published in for-profit journals. The intellectual was the political, and to be a scholar was to engage in struggle. Throughout his life in Uganda, he would try to build organisations to improve the lot of Ugandans, both through mutual aid and basic education and through outright radical activism. This was seldom successful, though on occasion he did show a sense for unilateralism and confrontation.
Today, I gather, he lives in America, though he taught in Uganda until 2019. What will his personal legacy be? It’s hard to tell, for while he was instrumental in creating an independent Ugandan intellectual scene, and he helped create an epistemologically progressive and sound set of institutions (unlike the miserable state of the Anglophone social sciences), does it really matter? Many of his students either forgot his lessons or took terrible ones from them. Uganda remains no better politically than before, and has he really left any mark on it? Perhaps it is too early to tell, at least until Museveni dies and his dimwit son tries to take over. It would be a shame, though, if his life mattered more for America (in producing Zohran Mamdani) than in Africa, where his home and heart lay. I guess that great old scene from Game of Thrones remains prescient—they say knowledge is power, but really the world is more basic than that. Power is power.
On Uganda
Most of the book doesn’t involve him as a central character. The story is, above all, about two men: Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni. The book is a sort of comparative study of the two leaders (Obote, sadly, is relegated to a background character), as well as a revisionist critique of the mainstream interpretations of both. In the latter sense it is perhaps not unique (Ugandan scholarship has long treated Amin with more nuance than the west has, and Museveni’s shine has long worn off), but it does so with more wit, knowledge, and intellect than most, and it is thoroughly convincing. In the former the book finds its main theoretical contribution to Ugandan history and politics, and by contrasting the two one finds the sorry tale of how post-colonial struggle shapes politicians, the state, and society; so, too, does one find the potentialities therein, even if they have evidently not been exercised in Uganda or, indeed, in most of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Amin and Museveni represent the two opposite reactions to the post-colonial legacy, and the two ways in which postcolonial leaders have tried to build authority and maintain power. Both had taken power with a clear vision of what Uganda and Africa should look like. When faced with the concrete obstacles of achieving this, they took opposing paths. Amin fought to the end; Museveni conceded immediately. Though Amin was no revolutionary, he believed in an Africa for Africans, a decolonisation that would ride over the sub-national colonial divisions by creating a single Black African identity. Museveni spoke of social revolution for 20 years, then leaned into and furthered the fictitious division of Uganda into a kaleidoscope of alien communities. Amin saw a cohesive nation as the source of his strength, while Museveni saw it as a threat. One created the nation and the other shattered it.
What they shared was a fundamentally racialised view of society inherited from the colonising power. When Amin expelled the Asians to create an ‘Africa for Africans’, he did not redistribute or socialise the wealth imbued therein. Uganda was not to be made for all Africans. The loot was instead haphazardly privatised to a narrow band of officer-capitalists who had no clue how to run an economy and promptly crashed it. Museveni once spoke the language of social revolution and surely understood it intellectually, but he never believed it. He took power through a transformative and inclusive ‘broad front’ in which belonging was based on residence rather than heritage and governance was built from the bottom-up through the Resistance Councils. To quote Mamdani: “Museveni never realised the theoretical or strategic significance of what he had achieved in Luwero. Like most things he did, good or bad, he confused strategy as tactics and tactics as strategy. For him, Luwero had been no more than a stepping stone to power. He remained uninterested in drawing lessons from [its experience], never recognising the lasting value of what the NRA had achieved there, crystallised by the mode of organisation they had pioneered in Luwero.”
Throughout the story, Mamdani hints at alternative paradigms and cleavages around which politics could have and perhaps should have been organised. There was never a need to pit Asian against African, even if it brought Amin popularity. There were not one but two exploitative classes in independent Uganda: the Asian and Baganda bourgeoisie. There was one single working-class, both African and Asian, which lived as one. Even where progress was done, as through Amin’s land reform against the Mailo landlords, Museveni undid it. Both problematised the concept of post-colonial citizenship, but neither had a just or humane solution, and neither could look beyond the lens of race and ethnicity. Perhaps Museveni was right, and he did, after all, need an intellectual class in the NRM. I somehow doubt he would have listened. What matters is that another Uganda, Africa, and world was and still is possible, and there were (and are) key junctures in history where these better potentialities could have been exercised. They were not.
Mamdani’s scorn is undoubtedly focused at Museveni over Amin, despite his personal loss at the latter’s hands. He is rightly critical of the discordant coverage of the two in the west. Amin as a Hitlerite, barbarous savage; Museveni as a statesman, a partner in the War on Terror, and an architect of an economic miracle. Perhaps he is understating how much Museveni is criticised in the western press these days, but the point remains largely true. For the great violence exercised by Amin’s regime—that has been much exaggerated and inflated over time—it pales in comparison to Museveni’s. The desecration of the Acholi in the north vastly outweighed the periodic massacres of Acholi and Lango soldiers in the early Amin period.
To stay in power without any real social base for 40 years is surely a political achievement. Not many have managed it, especially without the legitimating factors associated with monarchy. Mamdani gives little praise for Museveni’s political cunning, but it surely exists, and ‘mistaking the tactical for the strategic’ doesn’t mean he cannot execute good tactics. That said, it appears true that, for each manoeuvre taken, Museveni has paid a price—he has ruined his legacy in a way even worse than Obote had, he is less popular than ever and will leave nothing behind but his hated son. What was it all for? One can tell that with Amin, however terrible his execution was. With Museveni? He has wasted his life’s work, not to mention that of millions of Ugandans.
November 7, 2025
If you are interested in Ugandan history especailly under Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni, this is a book you must. You understand the process of state formation and governance under these two. Mahmood Mamdani uses a personal and reflective voice to expand on the issues that defined Uganda during this era. He helps you see the actors, the causes, and the factors that defined these times. This book will be crucial for the development of Ugandan identity if Ugandans ever get to that point.
January 1, 2026
Part a history of Uganda, and part biography, Mamdani's book focusses on Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni. It charts their rise to power, and how they used violence to maintain it. It specifically looks at how they used race and tribalism to entrench their power, and the legacies of this in the contemporary Ugandan state. It also discusses Mamdani's own life, and the expulsion of Asians from Uganda in the 1970s under Amin.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews