This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to the acclaimed academic and writer Mahmood Mamdani, author of the new book Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State. Professor Mamdani has taught at Columbia University since 1999. He’s the author of many books, including Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. He’s also the father of Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor-elect.
Mahmood Mamdani was born in Uganda and first came to the United States in the 1960s to study. He later returned to Uganda but was expelled in 1972 on the orders of Idi Amin, who had seized power in a 1971 coup. After years in exile, Mamdani eventually returned to Uganda, where Zohran was born.
AMY GOODMAN: In a minute, Professor Mamdani will join us, but first let’s turn to a short clip of his son, Zohran Mamdani, speaking at Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network in June while he was running for mayor.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI: I was born in Kampala, Uganda, in East Africa. I was given my middle name Kwame by my father, who named me after the first prime minister of Ghana.
And decades ago in Uganda, we won our independence from the British, in 1962. We can clap for that. And when we did, the United States government gave the Ugandan government 23 scholarships as a gift for independence. And my father won one of those scholarships.
He came to this country to study to be an engineer at the University of Pittsburgh. And some time into his studies, his face buried in his book, he heard the words reverberate in the corridor around him, “Which side are you on? Which side are you on?” These were words being sung by members of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, recruiting students to get on the bus to go to Montgomery, Alabama.
And my father got on that bus. He marched. He was hosed down. He was thrown in jail. He was given one phone call, and he called the Ugandan ambassador to the United States. He said, “Can you get me out of jail?” The ambassador said, “What are you doing in jail? We sent you there to study.” My father said, “You sent me here as a gift for our freedom. They are fighting for theirs. It’s one and the same.” And so, I was raised with this understanding that freedom and the fight for it is interconnected.
AMY GOODMAN: That was mayor-elect now, Zohran Mamdani, speaking in June about his father, our guest, Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani.
We welcome you back to Democracy Now!, Professor Mamdani. While everyone probably asks you about your son, we thought it would be interesting to start with your son talking about you. And, in fact, what’s unusual about your new book, Slow Poison, is you really talk about your own political awakening and activism, from Uganda to the United States, and going South, identifying with the civil rights movement in Montgomery — this very interesting as we honor the 70th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott. But if you can talk about why you called your book Slow Poison and how your own life fits into this story?
MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Thank you, Amy. Thank you for inviting me.
Slow Poison is about the reversal of the anti-colonial movement. The anti-colonial movement fought to create a nation out of a fragmented country, fragmented by the British, fragmented as a guarantee that no countrywide nationalist movement would arise. The putting together of a countrywide movement was the singular achievement of the anti-colonial movement. Its refragmentation has been the singular objective of Yoweri Museveni in particular. And I speak of slow poison as a gradual, piecemeal, step-by-step cutting up of the country so that you no longer have a single citizenship, but you have meaningful participation only in small principalities.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Professor Mamdani, you mentioned the anti-colonial movement as attempting to establish a unified polity and creating a country out of the fragmentation that followed British colonialism. And, of course, Uganda was not alone in that. If you could speak specifically about the policy of divide and rule, which you’ve written about extensively, and how you’ve seen that play out in postcolonial Uganda, following formal decolonization?
MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, the policy of divide and rule sums up what we today call identity politics. It is about encouraging the narrowest possible identification on the part of each section of the colonized community. And this narrow identification pits them against one another as competitors on the political chess board. So, it’s only the power at the top which decides the nature of the whole community. What is the whole community about? What is its mission? What is its goal? These are not questions answered on the ground below.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Professor Mamdani, if you could — your book, of course, focuses on these two seminal leaders in Uganda’s postcolonial history, Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni. Could you talk about how they approached — you mentioned this earlier — questions of indigeneity — you know, who qualified as a citizen, what kind of citizen in postcolonial Uganda — the question of that and of belonging — who belonged, who did not belong — the two divergent paths that these leaders took? And Museveni, of course, has now been in power for over 40 years.
MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, Idi Amin has a tortured career. Idi Amin is recruited in the British Army as a child soldier. He is trained as a counterinsurgency expert. “Counterinsurgency” is really a polite name for state terrorism. He comes to power with the direct assistance — not only assistance, but organization — carried out by British and Israeli officers and troops in Uganda. Idi Amin, his first state visit is to Israel and then to Britain. And he realizes during that state visit that actually he’s expected to be a grateful stooge. He’s humiliated. He comes back determined to turn things around.
And this is where begins his sort of rebirth. The rebirth is about bringing together Uganda as a single country, as a single people. And this notion of a single people is basically as a Black nation. Idi Amin inherits this from his mother, who has been an avid participant in a movement titled Africa for Africans. This notion of Black nation excludes people of Indian descent. And it’s actually a legacy of British colonialism, because British colonialism divided the population into two, into those Indigenous and migrants. And migrants were not supposed to be part of the nation. Migrants had hardly any political rights. But migrants were beneficiaries of colonial rule in a small, petty sense. So, Amin saw migrants as the front pole of British colonialism, and he — starting with people of Asian descent, he began to expel them from the country.
Museveni comes in, and he is — he welcomes back the Asian population, but not as citizens. He welcomes them back as, quote, “investors.” He portrays them as foreign investors who have come into the country, who will be there temporarily, who will not have any political rights to speak of, and — except his notion of the nation is not the Black nation. His notion of the nation is a pasting together of different ethnic groups, now politicized as different tribes. So, it’s a narrow, fragmented, piecemeal nation.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Professor Mamdani, you and your family were among the tens of thousands of Asians who were expelled by Idi Amin. If you could explain what happened during that expulsion and where you went afterwards?
MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, the expulsion was the end result of a process which has been going on for several years. And this process was a back-and-forth between the Brits and not only the Ugandans, but the East Africans as a whole. The Brits were systematically disenfranchising people with British passports born outside Britain, and they passed several laws, the main law being the 1969 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. And East African governments followed on the heel of these and passed legislation making it difficult for those who were non-Uganda citizens to gain trading licenses or any other rights that would be essential for those living in the country, the right to work, the right to trade, etc.
Now, my family was part of this group. And I came back in 1972, and I came back to teach at the university. I was a teaching assistant at the university. And when the expulsion came, I was one of those who was expelled. I had previously been stripped of my Uganda citizenship. It’s a long story, which is there in the book. And I had — I had to go to Britain. And I went to a refugee camp in London, in the heart of London, in a youth hostel in Kensington Church Street. And from there, I came to Dar es Salaam. After about six months, I got a job offer at the University of Dar es Salaam, and I came there.
AMY GOODMAN: And then talk about, Professor Mamdani, coming here. Earlier this week, a great peace activist, Cora Weiss, died at the age of 91. She was head of the Hague Appeal for Peace, fought against the Vietnam War, but she was also involved with the U.S.-African organization that brought hundreds of young East African students to the United States, among them Barack Obama’s father, and I believe you were among those hundreds of students who came to this country. Can you talk about now what Zohran, your son, was describing about your time in the United States and your affinity for SNCC, for the civil rights movement, and why you felt the need to speak out here, even as the Ugandan ambassador said, “What are you getting involved with internal politics of another country?”
MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, I was the product of a highly racialized society. We lived in quarters which were designed by the colonial government for lower-middle-class Asians. We played in grounds which were also designated for Asian kids. We prayed in mosques where, though Muslims, the mosques were limited for Asian Muslims. We went to schools which were for Asian Muslims. When we were sick, we went to a hospital, an Asian hospital, government-run hospital for Asians. So, I was brought up in a very racialized environment.
And I would ask myself later, “How does a kid brought up in this environment, undoubtedly tinged with the racial consciousness of that period — how does this kid turn into an antiracist militant?” And I traced that journey both in the U.S. and, after that, in Tanzania. SNCC was part of that journey. The antiwar movement was also a part of that journey. In Tanzania, the participation in Marxist study groups, the study, intense study, of the anti-colonial movement over the 20th century, was also a part of that journey. So, this is what I trace in the book.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mahmood, Professor Mamdani, if you could talk about what you think the broader lessons are of the experience of Uganda for other post-colonial states? I mean, to what extent do you think it’s an analogous experience, not just for states in Africa, but also elsewhere?
MAHMOOD MAMDANI: Well, at one level, this is a book on decolonization. But it’s not a book on the theorists of decolonization, whether this is Fanon, Nkrumah, Ngũgĩ. It’s a book about decolonization in practice. It’s a book about two leaders who come to power. Amin, at some point, gains an anti-colonial consciousness. Museveni comes to power with — deeply steeped in an anti-colonial consciousness. But they come to power finding that the resources at their disposal are not equal to their ambitions, and they have to cut their cloth to suit their size. So, this is decolonization in practice. This is decolonization by leaders who have to not only make compromises as they move along, but also who change themselves as they make these compromises. In the case of Museveni, they become compromised individuals. In the case of Amin, they are determined not to do anything in order to retain power. These are two different persons in that sense. And I pursue this comparison and this analogy through the book.
