When Ugandan scholar and author Prof Mahmood Mamdani took to the stage in the Jain Bhavan Auditorium in Nairobi on the evening of January 23, 2026, he was flustered. He put his hand over his forehead and squinted into the fully packed hall, visibly overwhelmed by the sea of faces staring back at him. He later noted that audiences of that size do not usually show up to listen to intellectuals like him, especially for scholarly discourse on the state. Yet there he was, receiving the kind of excitement usually reserved for Afrobeats stars or high-stakes political rallies.
Prof Mamdani and Jahazi Press, the East African publisher of his latest book, ‘Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State’, had stumbled into a storm of surprise. The Kenyan launch of the book exploded beyond expectations. After a successful run in the sleepy coastal city of Mombasa, the tour moved to Nairobi, where interest surged within hours of the announcement. Initially, the launch was planned for Cheche, a radical pan-Africanist bookshop in the Lavington suburbs (where big Ugandans own expensive homes), with organisers preparing for a maximum of 400 people.
Nearly 800 people registered almost immediately, forcing the organisers to hastily impose a KSh1,000 (UShs 28,000) cap on numbers. It made no difference. People paid anyway, leading to a shift to the 1,000-capacity Jain Bhavan Auditorium. Even that proved insufficient, requiring a second open event on Saturday, January 24.
Ghost of 1960s Kampala
Such demand is unprecedented for a paid book launch and represents a first at this scale for a scholarly work in Nairobi-and likely in Africa. This is all the more striking given that Prof Mamdani has never been a ‘Nairobi person’. He has not written extensively about Kenya. While Slow Poison touches on Kenya, it is not a motivational ‘how-to-get-rich’ book. That it sold out two nights suggests a more profound shift in the regional psyche and a relocation of the East African intellectual heart.
To grasp the weight of this moment, one must recall that in the 1960s, Kampala, not Nairobi, was the undisputed intellectual capital of East Africa. At the centre stood Makerere University, then a beacon of global and African scholarship populated by giants like Ali Mazrui, whose lectures were so packed that students skipped meals to secure a seat. This was the era of the ‘Makerere School’ of thought, where the continent’s most provocative ideas were incubated and the line between the university and the public square barely existed.
The public soul of this movement was TRANSITION magazine, founded in 1961 by the visionary Rajat Neogy. A journal of arts, culture, and society, TRANSITION became the most daring literary and political platform on the continent, publishing everyone from Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe to James Baldwin and Julius Nyerere. It offered irreverent, searching debate that held a mirror to post-independence society. That openness proved too much for the government of Milton Obote.
In 1968, Neogy and regular contributor Abu Mayanja were jailed for sedition after the magazine criticised Obote’s authoritarian constitutional reforms. Neogy’s imprisonment marked the beginning of the end for Kampala’s intellectual golden age. While TRANSITION later moved to Ghana and eventually Harvard, its model of fearless interrogation became the blueprint for many serious African intellectual journals that followed. As Kampala’s light dimmed under years of military rule and illiberal democracy, the flame crept across borders.
New intellectual, tech capital
After Idi Amin seized power in 1971, Dar es Salaam claimed the crown, attracting global scholars such as Walter Rodney. However, over the last 23 years, Kenya, despite periodic episodes of repression, has emerged as the freest political and ideas space in East Africa. Nairobi has also grown more diverse and internationalised. While Slow Poison is openly sold in Kenyan bookshops, several shops in Kampala are afraid to stock it, and those that do often sell it under the counter. As civil liberties shrink in Uganda and Tanzania, local activists increasingly channel their political debates through Kenya.
Environmental campaigners against the Eacop oil pipeline have shifted their advocacy bases to Nairobi after arrests in Kampala. Sources in Nairobi say at least three major regional human rights NGOs formerly headquartered in Kampala have moved their primary operational leadership to Nairobi in the last two months. Likewise, during Tanzania’s October 2025 election crackdown, in which some allege up to 3,000 people were killed, Kenyans took up global campaigning for the muzzled democracy movement in the country after its internet was shut down.
The digital pressure was so effective that President Samia Suluhu Hassan accused Kenyans of stirring trouble and meddling in Tanzania’s internal affairs. Nairobi’s rising intellectual dominance is mirrored in proxy indicators that map a country’s new age imagination. Take the green transition. Kenya now sits in the driver’s seat for electric mobility in the East African Community, with more than 10,000 registered electric vehicles and over 200 public charging stations.
Rwanda is the regional challenger; Kigali has implemented some of the continent’s most aggressive e-mobility policies, including a ban on registering new internal-combustion motorcycles for public transport. Rwanda has over 7,000 EVs and a dense charging network for its size. By contrast, despite promotion of the locally made Kiira EV, fewer than 200 fully electric cars ply Uganda’s roads today. The country has fewer than 20 public charging points, most of them in Kampala.
The transit hub paradox
The movement of people underscores Nairobi’s pull. Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) remains the region’s undisputed giant, handling more than 8,500 monthly flight movements-nearly triple Entebbe’s 2,800. This persists even as JKIA is criticised as ageing and inefficient compared to renovated terminals in Dar es Salaam, for example. Kenya plans a new JKIA, but even with leaking roofs, the airport remains the regional gateway. The diplomatic and expatriate class tolerates Nairobi’s chaos because of what lies beyond the terminal, which provides the audiences for jazz shows, symphonies, and scholarly literature.
Publishing may be the clearest measure of intellectual capital. Kenya releases an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 new titles annually, many in fiction and creative non-fiction. Uganda publishes fewer than 500, most of them educational textbooks rather than trade books. Using the Caine Prize for African Writing as a rough barometer, the gap is as wide as Lake Nalubaale (Victoria). Kenya has won it five times. Uganda has one win, through Monica Arac de Nyeko in 2007. This dominance rests on an ecosystem of around 50 bookshops and a reading public willing to pay for ideas.
This is the socket into which Prof Mamdani’s book plugged. His career has been devoted to understanding power. ‘Citizen and Subject’ (1996) analysed colonial ‘decentralised despotism’. ‘When Victims Become Killers’ (2001) examined the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi. ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim’ (2004) challenged Western narratives on political Islam. More recently, the unsettling ‘Neither Settler nor Native’ (2020) reimagined the post-colonial state worldwide. Nearly 20 books across five decades have cemented his standing as a thinker whose reach crosses borders.
Slow Poison is his most accessible work yet, a ‘man-on-the-street’ effort to reconcile the legacies of Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni-a potentially risky endeavour in Kampala. Still, one debated openly with academic rigour in Nairobi. That willingness to interrogate the present through history may partly explain why a 1,000-strong crowd filled Jain Bhavan two nights in a row. Another bit is to be found in the fact that Nairobi’s cultural infrastructure is now way ahead of its neighbours’. The city has over 400 cafés compared with Kampala’s 150.
In theatre, Nairobi’s eight active venues stage up to 15 plays a month, while Kampala’s four stage about half that many. Musically, Nairobi hosts more than 30 jazz shows monthly and supports three symphony orchestras. Kampala, though rich in talent, has one symphony and roughly a dozen jazz events. This ecosystem supports a large international community. Data indicates that Kenya hosts close to 80,000 expatriate and diplomatic households, nearly four to seven times Uganda’s estimated 12,000 to 18,000.
That demographic sustains 90 international schools in Kenya, compared with about 30 in Uganda. These are the numbers of a regional hegemon, one that supplies the oxygen for ideas suffocating elsewhere. The Nairobi launch of Slow Poison was, therefore, more than about Prof Mamdani only, but his encounter with a city. It marked a Nairobi that is becoming a sanctuary for the African mind, much as Kampala was in the age of Neogy and Mazrui.
Kampala still offers cultural goods like fresh food, and a crazy party scene. Still, it has lost its edge as a place where power is publicly interrogated. For now, that vibrant space exists across the border in Nairobi and other cities like Kisumu. The slow poison of political stagnation in one capital has become one of the fuels for an intellectual surge in another.