Children of Ugandan Indians are having a bit of a moment. Electropop boasts Charlie XCX; statecraft, the Patels: Priti the shadow foreign secretary, Kash the FBI boss. And while the ones who go into politics have tended to be conservative, we now have a counterexample in Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who clinched the New York mayoralty at the beginning of this month.
The anomaly is best explained by the politics of his father, Mahmood Mamdani. The apple, it seems, did not roll especially far down the postcolonial hillside. Mahmood, professor of government and anthropology at Columbia University, has long styled himself as the left’s answer to VS Naipaul. Where the Nobel-winning curmudgeon surveyed postcolonial Africa with disdain, revelling in the wreckage of independence, Mamdani presents a more forgiving view: pathos instead of pity, paradox instead of despair. If independence didn’t live up to the promise, he argues, it was because the colonised had been dealt a losing hand.
Mamdani’s own life, as this combined history and memoir suggests, has been a minor epic of exile and return. Raised in Kampala, he grew up in the insulated world of Uganda’s Indian community, living above society rather than in it. His was a landscape of Indian schools, Indian mosques and Indian cricket pitches. Interracial marriage was rare to the point of nonexistent.
A scholarship to Pittsburgh was meant to lead to a career as an engineer, but he was waylaid by political science and a Harvard doctorate followed. When he returned home in 1972 to set himself up as a Ugandan academic, the country’s new dictator, Idi Amin, had other plans: all 80,000 south Asians were to be gone within 90 days. Amin, who as a child had been nursed by an Indian woman, came to despise the community as an empire within. Indians were the visible face of colonialism, running plantations and corner shops while the British themselves remained discreetly out of sight. It’s not surprising the expulsion was popular.
There is, then, a touch of Stockholm syndrome in Mamdani’s attempt here to rehabilitate Amin. He tells us that the expulsions were aimed at the British, not Indians: “he did everything in his power to spare Asian lives”. That was little comfort, of course, to those expelled. One suspects that many Ugandan Indians, Priti Patel among them, turned permanently hostile to state power and identity politics as a result.
At the outset, Mamdani urges us to discard “media-driven preconceptions” – the lurid dispatches of Observer correspondents and the gothic tales of Amin’s supposed cannibalism – and instead see Amin as an anti-colonial moderniser. Amin, in this telling, destroyed landlord power, made black rule “meaningful” and even “outwitted Israel and Britain” – feats that earn him a place in Mamdani’s pantheon of liberation heroes. The corrective is bracing, but Mamdani over-eggs it. Amin was incontrovertibly a military despot under whose rule hundreds of thousands perished. His expulsion of Indians left Uganda short of milk, meat and medics; irony supplied the remedy when expatriates from India were imported to fill the gaps. True, Amin broke with Britain and Israel, who had manoeuvred him into power, though only to ally with Gaddafi and turn the region into a graveyard through military adventurism.
There is, in Slow Poison, a neat inversion of heroes. Mamdani’s second target is the “preconception” that Yoweri Museveni rescued Uganda from Amin’s wreckage. Where Amin, he claims, united Ugandans, Museveni revived tribal politics, carving the country into ever smaller ethnic fiefdoms. Amin was the patriot who spurned western tutelage; Museveni, the technocrat who kowtowed to neoliberalism and the IMF.
But is Mamdani tilting at windmills here? Museveni’s mixed-economy pragmatism may have multiplied Uganda’s output tenfold, but western commentators haven’t exactly turned a blind eye to his anti-gay death warrants, constitutional chicanery, vote-rigging and dynastic succession by stealth.
Slow Poison has its longueurs and meandering paraphrases. Whether you endure or enjoy it will depend largely on your politics. Mamdani hails Amin’s absurd antics – styling himself the King of Scotland; staging a mock fundraiser to save a bankrupt Britain; being borne aloft by white men in a sedan chair – as radical performance art. Perhaps. To me, it is simply tragic that, given the chance to build a nation, Amin chose instead to troll it.
• Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State by Mahmood Mamdani is published by Harvard (£27.95). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
