Book Review (1/26): Mahmood Mamdani’s Slow Poison
A journey through Uganda’s stunted political development
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Mahmood Mamdani’s latest book, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making and of the Ugandan State, consists of three tightly interwoven strands of inquiry. First, Mamdani uses his biography to explore themes related to the Asian Question in postcolonial East Africa as well as Uganda’s political and economic development. Second, the book offers an interesting meditation on leadership and the dilemmas of postcolonial state-building. Finally, Mamdani contrasts the roles of Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni in midwifing Uganda’s political and economic underdevelopment. This review discusses each of these strands in broader perspective.
I: Idi Amin Dada beyond the headlines (making sense of 1970s Uganda)
I recommend Slow Poison to readers for one simple reason: it asks us to reconsider how we view leadership on the Continent. Instead of the standard shallow moralizing about African leaders that is prevalent in academia and the media, Mamdani asks us to carefully think through how personal background, domestic political and economic incentives, as well as the international environment interact to shape African leaders’ policy choices.
Such analysis is needed for us to make sense of African states’ current predicament and the best way forward. For example, despite their many failings, Africa’s Independence Generation did so much with so little. On average, these men and women were of a much higher calibre than Africa’s invariably complacent contemporary leaders. Their successes and failures provide important lessons for our times.
Mamdani is spot on when he writes that it was “at precisely their moment of triumph [that these leaders] lacked the resources to translate their vision into reality.” They lacked socio-cultural and political hegemony. They lacked control over their economies and the terms of their integration into the global economy. They lacked the human capital needed to run while others walked. And perhaps most importantly, they inherited terribly weak states that stood little chance in the face of neocolonial meddling and the many economic crises of the long decade from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Many are yet to reach Nkrumah’s proverbial political kingdom. Faced with these challenges, satisficing became unavoidable. And many leaders made (mostly understandable) mistakes.
Despite this general understanding, Mamdani’s subject, Idi Amin, is a really hard case to think through.
It’s relatively easy to analytically understand the actions (and mistakes) of leaders like Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Tom Mboya, Jomo Kenyatta, Sekou Toure, Ahmed Ben Bella, Houphouet Boigny, or Kwame Nkrumah. It is much harder to do the same for leaders of Amin’s ilk. Yet Mamdani asks us to go there (and most readers will struggle with this, at first). And, on balance, I think his difficult ask is justified on the merits — even though I agree with Wallace Kantai that the Amin/Museveni contrast is sometimes overdone (more on this below).