Title: Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni and the Making of the Ugandan State
Author: Mahmood Mamdani
Professor Mahmood Mamdani’s book “Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni and the Making of the Ugandan State” is a well-written volume whose chief redeeming value is how it addresses the ostensibly irredeemable.
From the 1970s to present day, Uganda has been in ascent and descent; much like the rise and fall of Amin. Mamdani argues that such vagaries lend themselves to the effects brought about by a slow poison.
In science, the gradual effects of such poison begin by introducing a toxic substance into the body in small, incremental doses over an extended period. The poison accumulates faster than the body can clear it, and thus has cumulative damage on the body.
In Uganda’s context, Mamdani defines “slow poison” as an inchmeal fragmentation of the Ugandan polity resulting in the slow death of a single, unifying national citizenship. The book chronicles how the presidential tenures of two Ugandan leaders, Amin and Museveni, have contributed to misrule becoming the rule.
However, the author takes a sympathetic view to how Amin sought to Ugandanize the economy after evicting Uganda’s South Asian population in 1972. While Museveni, the professor argues, has deliberately dissolved what once seemed like an indivisible whole in favour of what the late Tom Mboya would call negative tribalism.
Renowned Kenyan statesman and Pan-Africanist Tom Mboya eulogized the concept of “positive tribalism” in his 1963 book, Freedom and After, as an essential building block to shared cultural heritage. Conversely, he argued that “negative tribalism” bred balkanization or atomization of a given polity.
In order to place intellectual armor on his arguments, Mamdani indirectly asks readers to push past Mboya’s fancy distinctions and directly disabuse themselves of Amin’s international caricature as a merry Andrew. He explores how Amin’s policies sought to aggressively reverse British colonial hierarchies and racialize the country to forge a “Black nation,” something that endeared him to many melanin-blessed Ugandans.
Mamdani argues that while Amin’s centripetal rule united the black Ugandan majority through race, Museveni’s seemingly interminable rule reversed this by fracturing the majority into multiple ethnic minorities—essentially mirroring colonial “divide-and-rule” tactics.
By this token, Museveni cemented his power by offering patronage and ethnic fiefdoms, isolating those who took a different view and thereby leaving a number of Ugandans feeling disinherited. Museveni, Mamdani adds, adopted a neoliberal economic model that has further fractured Ugandan society through wealth disparity.
Uganda at Amin’s time is different from Uganda under Museveni, however. Chiefly, the populations of Uganda at those different times is vastly disparate. Under Museveni, Uganda’s population is above 46 million souls, while under Amin there were slightly more than 12 million people in Uganda.
In highly diverse countries such as Uganda, population size engenders a delicate balancing act around ethnic, regional, or religious representation. In spite of their boons, delimitation processes (redrawing electoral districts) are seen as a major bugbear to fair representation as populations grow.
Amin’s administration did not have an officially adumbrated number of tribes under him, but today the Third Schedule of the Ugandan Constitution lists 65 indigenous tribes and communities. So Museveni is operating in a hugely different context to Amin’s.
Furthermore, with respect to Uganda’s South Asian community having gone through the ringer with Amin, Museveni does not have to reinvent that wheel in search of a composed majority. He does not have to contend with the racial challenges Amin faced over whether Uganda is black enough.
The racial exclusivism of Amin’s time demanded a robust racial solution which, for better or worse, led to the deportation of said Asians. The great question in Museveni’s time is ethnic identity. So comparing these two eras is not on, as Mamdani would say.
To be sure, there’s a growing school of thought against comparing leaders across different eras because such comparison ignores unique historical contexts. Scholars who oppose cross-era leadership comparisons generally argue that doing so strips away vital context, falls into the trap of presentism (judging the past by modern standards), and creates false equivalences.
