Mahmood Mamdani on Uganda, Amin, Museveni and national belonging

Lead

Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia anthropologist and author of the October 2025 book Slow Poison, revisits his 1972 expulsion from Uganda and the political currents that produced it. He places Idi Amin’s 1971 coup and the 1972 expulsion of roughly 80,000 people of South Asian descent in conversation with Yoweri Museveni’s long rule since 1986. Mamdani argues these episodes illuminate how states construct categories of belonging — Indigenous, settler, citizen — and how those labels determine rights. The interview also touches on contemporary reverberations, including the rise of his son Zohran Mamdani in New York politics.

Key takeaways

• In 1972 Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of about 80,000 people of South Asian origin from Uganda, a move Mamdani frames as racial nationalism that reshaped national identity.
• Mamdani’s book Slow Poison (Oct 2025) links Amin’s brief, violent first year in power to later patterns under Museveni, who took power in 1986 and remains influential.
• Estimates of killings under Amin vary widely; scholarly ranges cited include roughly 12,000 to as many as 500,000 deaths, reflecting contested archival and testimonial records.
• Mamdani contends that Museveni promoted administrative fragmentation by recasting more Ugandans as “settlers,” restricting land and political rights to those deemed Indigenous in increasingly narrow terms.
• The author draws a contrast between Amin’s anti‑Western posture and Museveni’s alignment with neoliberal institutions and U.S. regional security priorities, which affected international portrayals of each leader.
• Mamdani connects his personal history — displacement, diaspora life in London and Dar es Salaam — to a lifelong scholarly focus on who is admitted to the political community and why.
• The interview highlights contemporary parallels in the United States, including debates over birthright citizenship, identity policing and threats of mass deportation.

Background

Mamdani was 26 when Idi Amin set a three‑month deadline in 1972 for Asians to leave Uganda. Tens of thousands departed in a state‑sanctioned purge that severed families and uprooted livelihoods built under British colonial rule. Mamdani’s family dispersed to the UK, the US and Tanzania; he remained until the final day, later settling into intellectual circles in Dar es Salaam that included pan‑African thinkers and activists.

Uganda’s modern political trajectory began with independence from Britain in 1962 and was punctuated by a 1971 coup that brought Amin to power. Amin’s overthrow in 1979 did not end cycles of contestation: Museveni’s rise in 1986 introduced a longer political project that, according to Mamdani, reengineered citizenship through administrative and legal measures. These two eras — Amin’s violent populism and Museveni’s prolonged rule — are central to Mamdani’s reassessment of how states make and unmake communities.

Main event

Slow Poison combines memoir, archival research and political theory to revisit Amin and Museveni as formative figures in Uganda’s postcolonial state. Mamdani situates the 1972 expulsions as both a break with colonial hierarchies and a unifying racial narrative that bound disparate African groups under a shared Black identity. He emphasizes that Amin initially enjoyed significant domestic support even as international reporting emphasized his brutality and sensationalized rumors about him.

Mamdani also traces Israel’s and Britain’s early involvement with Amin: he argues both states cultivated ties that shaped the coup’s aftermath and the new regime’s early actions. Amin’s later posture — aligning with Gaddafi, criticizing western policies, and rejecting earlier patrons — changed how he was seen internationally, Mamdani says. By contrast, Museveni’s later embrace of IMF/World Bank policies and cooperation with U.S. security initiatives produced more favorable Western coverage despite serious domestic abuses.

The book foregrounds Museveni’s practice of subdividing administrative units and defining “indigeneity” in increasingly narrow terms. Mamdani argues this process turned many citizens into second‑class residents or “settlers” barred from land ownership and high office — an administrative method of fragmenting potential political coalitions. For Mamdani, that incremental, legalistic erosion of a common political identity is the “slow poison” afflicting Uganda’s body politic.

Analysis & implications

Mamdani’s core diagnostic separates two political technologies: Amin’s dramatic expropriation and Museveni’s persistent fragmentation. Amin mobilized a populist racial identity through a single, dramatic rupture — the expulsion — while Museveni relied on institutional reclassification to erode equal citizenship over decades. Each strategy produced distinct domestic effects and divergent global narratives about villainy and legitimacy.

The international response to each leader, Mamdani suggests, was shaped by geopolitical alignment. Amin’s antagonism toward former patrons invited Western demonization; Museveni’s alignment with Western security and economic agendas granted him international leeway. The implication is that external legitimacy often hinges less on democratic practice than on geopolitical usefulness.

Domestically, the administrative narrowing of belonging has long‑term consequences for social cohesion and conflict. When land and political rights hinge on district‑based claims to indigeneity, inter‑group competition intensifies and democratic accountability weakens. Mamdani warns that legalistic definitions of who “belongs” are easily weaponized in patronage systems and can harden into systemic exclusion.

For democracies beyond Uganda, the book offers a caution about the fragility of universal citizenship. Policies that privilege origin over residence, or that make political rights contingent on ancestry, create openings for demagogues and exclusionary politics. Mamdani points to contemporary U.S. debates — birthright citizenship, deportation rhetoric and identity testing — as resonant, if not identical, phenomena.

Comparison & data

The table highlights contrasting mechanisms: Amin’s abrupt, visible rupture versus Museveni’s gradual legal and administrative reshaping. Both strategies altered who could claim land, office and political voice. Quantities such as the 80,000 expelled in 1972 and the wide range of mortality estimates for Amin’s rule are central and contested facts: they anchor the narrative even as interpretation varies by source and scholar.

Reactions & quotes

Mamdani frames his intervention as both personal and theoretical: he blends family memoir with institutional critique to question how states define membership.

“With the loss of Uganda, we lost a sense of belonging, and of rootedness.”

Mahmood Mamdani, Slow Poison (memoir)

This line, drawn from Mamdani’s memoir passages, explains the personal stakes behind his scholarly project: expulsion shaped his lifelong focus on political belonging and diaspora identity.

“The challenge is how to reconcile cultural identity with political belonging.”

Mahmood Mamdani (interview)

Here Mamdani summarizes the book’s normative aim: to insist that cultural difference not be a pretext for denying equal political rights. He uses both historical cases and contemporary politics, including his son’s mayoral victory, as proof points.

“Museveni became a Washington poster boy.”

Mahmood Mamdani (interview)

This succinct assessment captures Mamdani’s view that international alignment can mute criticism of authoritarian practices, and that media frames are politically consequential.

Unconfirmed

• The highest estimates of Amin’s death toll (up to 500,000) are contested among historians and rely on differing methodologies and sources.
• Some claims about direct, specific instructions from British or Israeli officials to Amin are debated in archival research and remain partially contested.

Bottom line

Mamdani’s Slow Poison is an intervention that blends memoir and scholarship to reframe two eras of Ugandan statecraft as complementary case studies in how political communities are constructed and eroded. Amin’s dramatic expulsions and Museveni’s bureaucratic fragmentations are different techniques with similar stakes: control over who is counted as fully political.

Beyond Uganda, the book prompts readers in established democracies to reconsider policies that condition rights on origin rather than residence. Mamdani cautions that legal definitions of belonging can be repurposed for exclusion, and he offers federation and common citizenship as institutional responses that prioritize where people live over where they come from.

Sources

• The Guardian (interview and feature, journalism)