In 'Slow Poison', Mamdani settles scores with Museveni

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BOOK REVIEW

By Prof. Arthur Gakwandi

Professor Mahamood Mamdani, a Ugandan of Indian Origin, now a permanent resident of USA, is a well-known scholar who specialises in post-colonial studies. He has written books on Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan and South Africa. But the book that contributed most to his reputation is Good Moslem, Bad Moslem which was published a few years after the 9/11 bombing of the twin towers in New York. The book resonated with a wide section of the American public at a time when many people were searching for answers to the challenges posed by terrorism driven by Islamic extremism.

In his latest book, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni and the Making of the Uganda State, Mamdani has revisited Uganda, the homeland with which he has had a complicated relationship. The early chapters of the book evoke an effusive nostalgia for his childhood in Masaka, Nakivubo and Old Kampala as well as for the intellectual effervescence in which he delighted at the beginning of his academic career at Makerere University during the early 1970s.

But even as he revelled in the company of his childhood friends and playmates, Mamdani recalls moments when questions of his origins popped up. This is because he belonged to the Asian minority group, which in Uganda’s cultural context tended to be viewed as a tribe, notwithstanding the fact that they were not a homogeneous ethnic group and did not belong to any geographical territory that they could refer to as a homeland. His individual circumstance was further complicated by the fact that he was born in India to parents who were born in Tanzania but had emigrated to Uganda. Even as a child, he came to realise that there were loopholes in his identity, and that made him wish he had been born on Ugandan soil to avoid awkward questions about his citizenship.

The next few chapters deal with the disruption of his personal and professional life following Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from the country in 1972. Suddenly, the life that had been full of promises was plunged into disarray as he faced challenges of belonging nowhere. This disruption set him on a long journey lasting several decades and across three continents in search of emotional security and a socially acceptable identity. Some parts of this story are not new because they were already recorded in the author’s earlier book, From Citizen to Refugee, so their inclusion suggests that it is a subject he has not yet managed to put to rest.

Now, in the evening of his life, Mamdani has once more turned attention to Uganda and written a book whose character is not easy to define because it is a somewhat confusing mixture of history, politics and journalism; but mostly it is a string of personal memories. The most significant new subject matter is his long-term relationship with President Museveni. The two first met in Dar es lam during the early 1970s when they were both in exile from Amin’s regime.

At that time, Dar was the centre of the African anti-colonial struggle and home to many liberation movements that included South Africa’s ANC, Mozambique’s FRELIMO, Angola’s MPLA and others. Dar also provided the headquarters of the OAU’s Liberation Committee at a time when decolonisation was the continent’s most pressing agenda. Uganda’s diverse outfits working to overthrow Idi Amin also received covert support from the Tanzanian government, but these could not be categorised as liberation movements because of the OAU’s policy of noninterference in the internal affairs of member states.

Alongside the liberation movements were numerous intellectual and revolutionary discussion groups generally inspired by Julius Nyerere’s UJAAMA, Tanzania’s version of socialism. Many of the discussion groups were centred at the University of Dar es Salaam. Yoweri Museveni and Mahamood Mamdani, along with Augustine Ruzindana and Wafula Ogutu, belonged to one of these groups, which they had named Chang’mbe. Their discussions commonly centred on socialist thinkers, including Karl Marx, Mao Tse-tung, Amil Cabral, Frantz Fanon and others. It is during these discussions that Mamdani noticed Museveni’s deep fascination with the doctrine of protracted armed struggle as the most effective tool of liberation.

Uganda’s various anti-Amin groups failed to come together as a unified force, which led Museveni to establish his own fighting group under the name FRONASA. Soon afterwards, he invited Mamdani for dinner at his home. In the middle of the dinner, Museveni said, “FRONASA needs intellectuals, why don’t you join us?”  That moment is frozen in the book because the author does not record his response or even what went on in his mind when the invitation was presented. This leads the reader to wonder about what other exchanges transpired between the two during the next few years.

But obviously, the interlocution was kept alive because when a decade later Museveni decided to launch a guerrilla war against Obote, he invited Mamdani to go with him to the bush, but the latter gave the excuse that his brown colour would make him a conspicuous target. At some point, Mamdani clarifies that he had stayed clear of military involvement to “struggle above the ground”.  But clearly, he was not opposed to armed struggle because he regularly interacted with the group and even performed clandestine errands on its behalf.

After the overthrow of Idi Amin, Mamdani came back to Uganda and worked on two “above-ground” projects, one:  a newspaper which folded early due to lack of financing, two: a community health service project in Busia, which collapsed due to administrative mismanagement. After that, his struggle shifted to academic research and publishing. Fifty years later, he sees himself as still involved in this struggle above ground, while his former revolutionary colleague has moved far away on a different trajectory.

In the introductory chapter, the author disavows any claim to objectivity or neutrality. He confesses that his deep personal involvement in the events he describes poses a handicap to neutrality and circumscribes his perspective. At the conclusion of the introduction, he states: “The truth we strive for as humans is inevitably coloured by our location and perspective.” This is a useful hint that alerts the reader not to expect a set of neutral observations about Uganda’s recent political history. This is a commendable confession coming from a respected researcher and political analyst. It underlines the author’s deep personal involvement in the story and the difficulty of attaining adequate loft for a wide enough horizon.  

For the reader, it will be interesting to contrast the perspectives of the two once-upon-a-time comrades in the struggle, half a century later, when one of them has been embroiled in the campaign for another presidential term while the other is comfortably settled in an ivy league university in New York where his son has just won a mayoral election.

Although Mamdani’s location is currently in the ivory tower of a top league, his perspective is still influenced by his childhood memories, his herculean task of building a successful professional career while struggling to circumvent the limitations of being a member of a minority group in a complicated geopolitical system.

But through all his wanderings and challenges, he can’t forget that he and Museveni once worked together, inspired by the dream of creating a better world in which race and tribe did not matter and in which small nations could pursue development without having to succumb to the will and manipulations of rich and powerful nations.  

It was in pursuit of this shared vision that Museveni and Mamdani worked together to overthrow Idi Amin with the goal of installing an enlightened nationalist government in Uganda.

However, right from the beginning, there was a gap in their approach to bringing about change: Museveni’s preference for armed struggle, Mamdani’s preference for social activism. But a cautious mutual respect seems to have been maintained on both sides because soon after becoming President Museveni invited Mamdani to take up the newly established position of Inspector of Government to which the latter responded by laying down certain conditions. Museveni’s response through an intermediary was: “Who does he think he is?”

Earlier, when the NRA had captured Western Uganda, Eriya Kategaya, Museveni’s frontman, had approached Mamdani over a plan to open a new university and asked him to serve as its Vice Chancellor, but Mamdani had expressed doubt about the viability of the project. Other offers continued to be floated, but Mamdani always wanted to get involved on his own terms, which never proved possible. Gradually, as the gap widened, it turned into suspicion or even hostility, especially arising from Mamdani’s public lectures.

At one time, Kahinda Otafire, who was then minister of Internal Affairs, tracked Mamdani’s telephone number in the USA and called to warn him that the government was aware of his efforts to undermine it. However, interestingly, sometime later, Mamdani accepted an invitation to chair a commission on local government reforms. His recommendations were never implemented because his ideas about governance did not fit the NRM agenda. That led to further widening of the rift.

Four decades later, Mamdani is so disappointed about the direction of events in Uganda that he has decided to write a whole book comparing Museveni and Idi Amin and laboured to prove that Amin was the better of the two. In so doing, Mamdani must have been fully aware that Museveni has spent most of his political career vilifying or denigrating Idi Amin and trying to erase his legacy of economic mismanagement and human rights abuses.

Therefore, Mamdani has chosen to target his former revolutionary comrade where it hurts most. He could have written a book about Museveni’s 40-year presidency, but framing the project as a comparison with Idi Amin will be seen by many readers as an act of revenge and a declaration of final severance.

In order to elevate Amin above Museveni, the author has dug up a wealth of Amin’s biographical data geared towards explaining how the former military dictator acquired the reputation of a human monster. The biographical data takes up almost two full chapters compared to a few paragraphs about Museveni. The details are geared towards showing that the military dictator was a victim of child abuse by the British colonial government, which conscripted him into the colonial army during his early teens and forced him into various kinds of odious roles.

According to this narrative, Amin was initiated into the culture of violence, of cruelty and oppression as he was being forced to become part of the machinery of brutality and of divide and rule. In the book, the expulsion of the British, Israelis and Asian immigrants is presented as a form of revolt against this oppression and as Amin’s nationalist awakening through which he sought to save Uganda from foreign domination.

In discussing Uganda’s history of political violence, Mamdani has employed his pet theory of the colonialist’s weaponisation of ethnic differences, often referred to as the doctrine of divide and rule. He begins with his controversial assertion that tribes were invented by colonialists.  To do this, he tries to establish a distinction between tribes and ethnic communities, but his distinction sounds abstract and metaphysical, something that can only be understood by PhD students of philosophy and political science.

As part of this general theory, he asserts that tribes did not exist in Uganda and that what existed were ethic communities whose identities were flexible and who occupied geographical spaces that had no fixed boundaries. He posits that Idi Amin worked to reverse this colonial tribalization of the country by abolishing Mailo land and tribal homelands, thus putting ownership of all the land in the hands of the state. For this reason, Madani refers to Idi Amin as the Father of the Nation, an old, discredited cliché that several of the first generation of African Heads of State were wont to confer upon themselves. Bestowing this title on Idi Amin will almost certainly offend many Ugandans who will interpret it as a form of condensation handed down from an Ivy League pedestal.

Mamdani blames Museveni for reversing Amin’s nationalisation of land and the restoration of kingdoms as a return to the colonial policy of divide and rule, which he adopted to perpetuate his stay in power.

The NRM government’s sale of state-owned companies is also presented as a capitulation before foreign interests represented by the IMF and the World Bank. Uganda’s participation in peacekeeping missions in neighbouring countries is portrayed as an invasion of neighboring countries on behalf of imperialist powers. Museveni’s turning away from socialist policies to neo-liberal policies is seen as a betrayal of his original goals of bringing about a fundamental change.  “I have come to think of Museveni as a weatherman, adept at reading the direction of the wind and taking advantage of it (p234).

In writing the book, Mamdani has employed his standard tools of using archival material, publications and personal interviews, although there is not much evidence of structured interviews. Often, the author uses anecdotes from casual encounters, which are then used to back controversial assertions to fit the comparison framework. Phrases such as “some people say” are employed liberally. For example, when General Sejusa decided to resign from the Army, the government refused to accept his resignation. He then took the government to court, and his right to resign was upheld by the High Court.

However, the government appealed to the Supreme Court, and the decision of the high court was reversed, “many people say on Museveni’s orders”. General Tumukunde is also said to have been forced out of politics, although by whom and how is not made clear. In situations where innuendoes and aspersions cannot be plausibly sustained, or evidence adduced, the media and the intellectual class are blamed for a conspiracy of silence.

Since Museveni’s takeover of power, Uganda has changed a lot. Mamdani could have evaluated these changes within a different framework, but the one he has chosen has forced him to go out of his way to elevate Amin’s while disparaging Museveni. This has set him apart from leading Ugandan historians who have portrayed Idi Amin’s rule as a dark chapter in Uganda’s history. The often-cited evidence underpinning the commonly held view is that during Amin’s regime, Uganda’s economy shrank by 40% while the economy recovered by 100% within two years after Museveni became President. Such facts are treated as a mere smokescreen concealing the “slow poison” embedded in the surrendering of political and economic power to foreign control.

The most controversial claim made in the book is that “Idi Amin’s singular success was to retain broad support among the ordinary Baganda throughout his rule (p 283). By contrast, Mamdani asserts that Museveni’s singular failure has been his inability to cultivate support among the Baganda despite having overthrown Obote. Given that Idi Amin abolished Parliament and all other forms of political representation and ruled by decree, it is hard to find evidence to support this claim, which has never been made by any Ugandan historian or political leader.

Not even by any of Museveni’s fiercest opponents. All media accounts of the overthrow of Idi Amin reported wild celebrations both in Buganda and other parts of the country, especially southern Uganda. The Tanzanian forces, which were welcomed as liberators, only lost popularity when they overstayed and began to be perceived as an occupying force. The attempt to reverse this perception will lead many knowledgeable readers to view the book as a retribution project dressed in the respectable garb of academic discourse.

The only positive change acknowledged in the book about Museveni’s presidency is that many people say, “at least we can now sleep in our beds”.  But, according to Mamdani, that’s because such people have not fully grasped the slow poison that lurks beneath unpatriotic economic and administrative policies.  

The book is a story of two men who once shared revolutionary ideas during their youth and who, through the years, tried to find ways of bridging their differences but finally failed. The publication is the final nail in the coffin of an alliance that failed to bear fruit.

Publisher: Belknap Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.