This book is about the slow poison of corruption, the politicization of ethnicity and race, and authoritarian rule, and how these factors destroyed the Ugandan polity. The book is partly a political history of Uganda under the rule of Idi Amin (1971–79) and Yoweri Museveni (1986–), and partly a fascinating memoir of a Ugandan who identified as Asian African and of his experiences of key moments in Uganda’s postindependence history.
Most of Mamdani’s account of key milestones in Uganda’s history has been recounted by other scholars, most notably by Phares Mutibwa and Derek Peterson on Amin, and Joe Oloka-Onyango, Joshua Rubongoya, Adam Branch, Moses Khisa, and myself on Museveni. Mamdani’s book differs from these other accounts in his comparison of Amin and Museveni. His personal reflections on being a person of Asian descent living in Uganda are among the most valuable and intriguing parts of the book.
He claims that Amin and Museveni’s takeovers of Uganda are the two most consequential markers in Uganda’s recent history. While they shared the goal of promoting decolonization, they differed in their approach: Amin, he says, sought to promote “Africa for Africans,” while Museveni capitulated to international financial institutions and neoliberalism, engaging in the privatization of state assets, from financial institutions to industries. He depicts Amin as an anticolonial modernizer who tried to Africanize the economy.
Mamdani argues that while Amin targeted and expelled the Asian community, Museveni found them useful and invited them back as investors, but not as citizens. He discusses the challenges the Asian community faced in obtaining citizenship in Uganda, but also how Britain restricted immigration for many Asians, leaving them stateless when Idi Amin expelled them.
In Mamdani’s account, both Amin and Museveni adopted violence and corruption as strategies to coerce and build support, with disastrous consequences for Ugandans. Both leaders made violence a centerpiece of their rule, and both used the armed forces to attack their enemies. Their economic strategies differed. The property Amin appropriated from the Asians was divided among army officers who had limited capacity to run enterprises. Museveni’s free market strategies and compliance with structural adjustment in the 1990s, in contrast, led to the growth of a wealthy minority at the expense of an impoverished majority. He openly justified official corruption as long as the wealth remained within the country’s borders. Both presidents wrestled with how to create a coalition large enough to maintain power, a struggle that necessarily involved building an alliance with Buganda, given its historic political and economic importance. Neither Amin nor Museveni succeeded in this endeavor.
A central argument in the book is that Amin racialized the nation, while Museveni tribalized it and enshrined this approach in the 1995 Constitution and in his creation of new districts. Instead, I would argue that Museveni used the creation of districts to expand patronage and control. At times, demands for new districts came from local elites who believed they would gain better access to the “national cake” of political offices and resources. Some regions, like Bunyoro, experienced contestation over who the original inhabitants were, but this was never a question of citizenship. Mamdani is correct to point out that the Museveni administration has politicized ethnicity, but this was carried out much more directly through political and military appointments than through the expansion of districts.
Mamdani usefully deflates media caricatures of Amin as a monster and seeks to contextualize how Amin ridiculed foreign adversaries. Although he admits to “an orgy of blood” within Amin’s army in the early years of his rule, he downplays the loss of life and the brutality of life under Amin. It would have been important to highlight a key feature of both regimes: the role of extra-legal entities under both Amin and Museveni—institutions that were inherited from the colonial government—that were renamed and used to terrorize the population through extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, and torture. This led to enormous insecurity under all of Uganda’s postindependence regimes, including Milton Obote’s two governments.
One comparison that would have been worth making was that one of the biggest travesties of Amin’s rule was his destruction of institutions, which Museveni sought to rebuild, albeit in a distorted way, given his heavy reliance on donor funds and massive corruption. The problem began with the institutions that the British colonialists bequeathed, which were created to serve the colonial administration, not the Ugandan people. The newly independent government had little capacity or political will to transform institutions to serve Africans. Amin’s administration, despite its rhetoric about “Africa for Africans,” dealt a heavy blow to the civil service, educational institutions, and the judiciary in particular, often through disappearances and the many professionals who fled the country to Kenya and beyond.
Mamdani describes how Amin appointed the world’s first truth commission in the postwar period and suggests that Museveni never did. It is worth noting, however, that Museveni established the Commission of Inquiry into Violations of Human Rights (1986–94), which investigated abuses committed between 1962 and 1986 under Obote’s first and second regimes and Idi Amin’s rule. Chaired by Ugandan Supreme Court justice Arthur Oder, the commission later contributed to the creation of the Uganda Human Rights Commission, which continues to monitor human rights today, though it remains politically constrained.
The book contains an exceptionally large number of factual errors, spelling errors, and incorrect translations from Swahili that detract from an otherwise compelling narrative. In spite of these oversights, Mamdani’s account of Uganda under Amin and Museveni is a particularly interesting read, not only because he witnessed history in the making firsthand, but also because he was very much part of the story himself as an academic, political activist, and Asian African Ugandan.
