Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State

 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, recreating a 
version of colonial indirect rule.
 Slow Poison is Mamdani’s firsthand account of 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.