Mahmood Mamdani’s new book, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State, is that rare kind of academic work that still smells of earth, sweat, and just enough of that old college library scent that lingers in university hallways. It has the big ideas you’d expect from Mamdani-about the making and unmaking of states-but this one also comes loaded with “supu” and nyama choma; the kind of storytelling that a bar philosopher in Mpororo can chew over with a calabash of bushera. It’s not dry, it’s not polite, and it’s not afraid to offend.
There are moments in Slow Poison that will make your neck twist, especially when Mamdani draws from an unpublished manuscript by Amin’s son, Jafeer Amin. And there are hot political potatoes. Some of the revelations about the war in northern Uganda are so intense that you’ll want to sit down and grip the chair tightly before reading on. At the heart of the book is a controversial argument: that although both Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni made violence the organising principle of their rule, their motives and methods were worlds apart.
Amin, he says, sought to build a unified Black Ugandan nation-even if that meant expelling Asians and silencing opponents-while Museveni’s politics have done the opposite, fracturing Uganda into tribal fragments that echo the British colonial strategy of divide-and-rule. I’ll stop there before I spoil the meal. I am reliably informed that a Nairobi publisher is about to release an East African edition, which will be more affordable and easier to find in bookstores near you. But the book got me thinking about something else-the man behind the uniform, the fellow behind the presidential desk, the villager before he became His Excellency. What else, I wondered, might Amin, Museveni, and their predecessor Milton Obote share, especially outside the rough business of politics and war? The answers were surprising.
First, all three were religiously fluid. None of them fit neatly inside one box. Amin, born Catholic in Koboko, converted to Islam and became one of its loudest champions, though he was known to drop into a church or shrine without fuss. Obote, raised Anglican, drifted into a kind of spiritual mix that combined Christian and traditional beliefs-the sort of Ugandan syncretism where a man can recite the Lord’s Prayer in the morning and still pour a libation for the ancestors at dusk.
Museveni, on the other hand, has blended Christianity with a thin thread of traditional spirituality, at times referring to himself as “Born-Again” when it suits his political agenda, and at other times speaking like a village sage, quoting ancestral wisdom.
Each of them is also tied to sport or physical discipline. Amin was a boxer and swimmer (as we all famously know); Obote an athlete in his youth at Makerere (I had never heard or read of that before, so I am not sure it is true); Museveni a long-distance walker (an essential ability in a guerrilla leader in the African bush), with the discipline of a cattle-herder who learns early that survival depends on patience and stamina. Then there’s the shared simplicity of their beginnings. Each of them came from pastoral country, grew up as children herding cows or goats, and learned early to live off what nature provided. Some have remarked that this rural grounding partly shaped their self-reliant, brutal (and autocratic) personas.
When it came to fashion, all three had unmistakable signatures. Amin’s love for medals and flamboyant uniforms was legendary, and the Kaunda suit, of course. Obote kept it tidy-Western suits, clean lines, suspenders, a touch of African modesty, and a Kaunda suit. Museveni wore the same Kaunda suits in the early days before settling on his now-iconic look: the bush jacket, the untucked shirt, and the wide-brim hat. Food told the rest of the story. They were/are all conservative eaters with strong local tastes-matooke (plantain), millet bread, goat meat, and ghee-based sauces. Amin was known for hearty meat dishes; Obote for traditional northern staples (and wine or whisky); Museveni for plain, unprocessed foods, famously saying he avoids “city delicacies”.
None of them ever turned into the champagne-and-caviar type. The story all this was supposed to tell us is that they were not bohemian elites-just pragmatic men of simple tastes. Their clothes and food tastes were statements-a careful mix of tradition, authority, and self-myth. And that, in a different way, is how one might read Slow Poison-that Uganda’s rulers have always returned to the soil for legitimacy, drawing from its myths even as they preside over its decay. The actual slow poison isn’t just violence or corruption-it’s the endless cycle of power. Each new generation of leaders claims to reject the past, but they all end up sipping from the same cup.
They were not bohemian elites-just pragmatic men of simple tastes.