In his new book, the highly respected academic and writer, Ugandan Mahmood Mamdani, revisits the era dominated by Uganda’s dictator, Idi Amin and looks at his legacy as it plays out today under President Yoweri Museveni. Review, in two parts, by our East Africa correspondent. Part one is available here . Part 2: The Amin and Museveni regimes When the National Resistance Movement (NRM) headed by Museveni, took over the reins of government on January 26, 1986, the country was in dire financial straits. Museveni’s government swallowed a bitter pill and adopted the International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment programme and devaluation.
“In 1986, Museveni had big aspirations – ‘national liberation’ and ‘Pan-Africanism’ – but not the resources to realise them. The Americans put the noose around him and seemed bent on tightening it. As the terrain of battle changed, from the military to the economic, Museveni, too, found himself, as had Amin, on unfamiliar turf. …Leading a population tired of war and yearning for peace, Museveni would turn the promise of “national liberation” into a wholesale national capitulation,” Mamdani notes.
He adds: “At the heart of this capitulation was privatisation of state assets, from financial institutions to industries. Privatisation would provide many opportunities for crass accumulation by the leader’s family and its coterie of followers. Amin had called for a nation of ‘Black millionaires’ but without seeking to become one himself. In contrast, Museveni and his family proudly led the new mafuta mingi (very fat). Others followed, accumulating wealth by means fair and foul…”
“Idi Amin Dada and Yoweri Museveni were both responsible for shaping the post-independence Ugandan state. Both were forced to craft futures from cloth not of their own making,” Mamdani argues.
“Theirs is a story that addresses several predicaments,” he adds. “The first is the meaning of independence. Both Amin and Museveni believed they were continuing the struggle for independence. But their understanding of independence changed as they tasted its fruits.
“For Amin, the challenge of independence was to make Black rule meaningful by nurturing Black millionaires in place of wealthy Asians. Museveni used a different language to convey the same meaning. Uganda had to develop a “Black middle class” to safeguard its independence and develop the country.
According to Mamdani, “This is also a story of leaders who realised at precisely their moment of triumph that they lacked the resources to translate their vision into reality. …Faced with a choice between continuing the struggle or abandoning their vision, Amin and Museveni made opposing choices – Amin fighting to the finish and Museveni yielding, first accommodating and then capitulating to circumstances.
“It took Amin less than a year to realise that he lacked the means to exercise independence. Most African states gave Amin no more than six months to survive. And Museveni faced more of a financial than a military impasse in 1986. The national treasury had hardly any money, and he lacked the requisite human resources to manage the state.”
“Where Amin racialised the nation, Museveni tribalised it. And where Amin promised dignity for the Black nation, Museveni promised life, by which he meant peace. Amin saw the cohesiveness of the nation as a source of strength; Museveni saw cohesiveness as a potential threat. In politicising ethnicity, Museveni fragmented the nation. Museveni dismantled the nation, dividing it into an increasing number of minorities, tribe by tribe,” he adds.
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 the 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 privatisation has brought Museveni’s family immense wealth, even as the country remains one of the world’s poorest.
According to Mamdani, “The main difference between Amin and Museveni lay in their politics. Amin created the Ugandan nation, though he racialised it. Museveni dismantled the nation Amin built, but without deracialising it. He invited Asians to return, but as ‘investors’ and not ‘citizens’.
“Amin brought peace to the nation after an interlude of infighting. Museveni ushered in a period of stability, but followed it with a period of disorder in large parts of the country – not only the North but also the South. Amin was opposed to tribalisation. Museveni embraced tribalisation as both an instrument of rule and as a consequence of indirect rule, another tactical ploy to prolong his stay in power.”
“The Museveni era has corroded the morals of an entire generation, and there is unlikely to be an easy solution to the problem. An all-pervasive corruption and cynicism cloud the country like a fog. It will take no less than a generation for the country to come out of it, to nurture a political culture that can provide an effective antidote,” Mamdani observes. Mamdani as a witness and participant “One of the twenty-three beneficiaries of scholarships America gifted to Uganda at independence in 1962, I was also among the Asians expelled in 1972. I took my first academic job at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1973, became part of exile politics until the overthrow of Amin in 1979, and finally returned to Uganda in 1980.
“Turning down FRONASA’s (Front for National Salvation’s) offer to go to the bush that same year, I chose to pursue politics above ground with comrades who had come back from Tanzania after the fall of Amin, working alongside the Museveni-led National Resistance Movement (NRM) when it came to power in 1986, but without joining it, only to part ways soon after,” he writes.
He adds: “Rather than risk a second and a third expulsion, I chose to leave and take on academic jobs in South Africa and the United States. I returned home every summer, finally, to work as director of Makerere Institute of Social Research for twelve years (2010-2022). The lesson I had learned was to continue to work above ground to preserve life and pass on its lessons to the next generation.” Mamdani’s birth and home According to Mamdani, his ada’s (grandfather’s) family came from the Indian village of Hadiyana in Kathiawada, Gujarat. about twenty miles off Jamnagar Road.
He appears to have moved to Zanzibar in 1910, joining the export trade in rubber. “ My father, Yusuf Karmali, was born in Dar es Salaam and my mother, Kulsum Panju, in Kigoma on the Lake Tanganyika/Congo border,” writes Mamdani. “My two uncles married two sisters from Mombasa. But my parents, who had been childhood neighbours, became the talk of the community since theirs was said to be a ‘love marriage ‘, a rare occurrence in those days.”
Adding: “None of the men was educated beyond secondary school, and no women, including my mother, went beyond Primary 4. The men could speak English with varying degrees of fluency, but the women spoke only Gujarati and Kiswahili, as well as a smattering of Hindustani they picked up from Bollywood films…”
“My father, whom we called ‘Daddy’ in Western fashion, had ambitions to go to college in Mumbai. Ada thought he should get married before going to a big city, and so he did. This is how I came to be born in Mumbai, in the Wadia Nursing Home, opposite Chaupati. We lived in a modest tenement in a lower-class Muslim neighbourhood called Kurla, in two rooms – one occupied by my parents, and the other by my mamujaan, or maternal uncle, who shared his bed with me. I was born in 1946, one of India’s midnight children. It was a time of great turmoil.”
Mamdani’s parents left Mumbai for Dar es Salaam in 1947. Then, in search of better times, they moved to Masaka, Uganda, in 1950 and from there to Kampala in 1952.
“I grew up in a racialised neighbourhood in Kampala, played in race-exclusive fields, and prayed in racialised mosques. My father had a literary sensibility, but it seldom translated into a political one.
“My mother had a passion for justice, but it was channelled within narrow horizons, fighting for women’s rights within our small religious community. How does the offspring of a middle-class Asian family break from their race-tinted and narrow horizons? My political awakening began in the United States and matured in Dar es Salaam,” he writes. About the author Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, USA. He was Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala from 2010 to 2022. Mamdani’s books include America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror (2004 When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda (2001 Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (1996), which was awarded the Herskovitz Prize of the African Studies Association. The post Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State by Mahmood Mamdani. Part 2. appeared first on New African Magazine .