In 1996, Mamdani published his breakthrough work Citizen and Subject. He had previously published a series of studies on Uganda, including a short account of the Amin period entitled Imperialism and Fascism (1984) and the semi-personal From Citizen to Refugee: Ugandan Asians Come to Britain (1973). In 1972, Mamdani was expelled as a member of Uganda’s Indian and Pakistani population (approximately sixty to eighty thousand people) following an edict issued by Amin that intended to restore economic power and status to black Ugandans. Informed by this experience, both books lay the groundwork for Slow Poison, though the impact of the so-called Asian expulsion is equally felt in his intermediate work.

Reflecting the intellectual reference points of his generation, Citizen and Subject integrated Marxist class analysis with a Fanonian Manichaeanism to argue that the problems of postcolonial Africa resulted from the endurance of colonial practices of rule. More specifically, the pattern of “despotism” (Mamdani’s preferred term) that emerged in different countries after independence marked a continuation of colonial state centralization in various ways, from Amin’s Uganda to Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire. (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo). Frequent to this centralization of power was an opposing veneer of decentralization — the empowerment of local ethnic authorities and customary law in such a way that foreign colonial rule did not appear so foreign. Known as “indirect rule,” though Mamdani calls it “decentralized despotism,” this common policy likewise made postcolonial authoritarianism seem tolerable.

Yet under these conditions of political camouflage, the rights of the governed remained codified. During the colonial period, a binary existed between those relegated as ethnic subjects under customary law and those defined as citizens under colonial civil or imperial law. This distinction was, unsurprisingly, racialized. This legal difference, however, also lasted into the postindependence period, reconfigured into categories of natives and non-natives. Indigenous African “natives” (previously colonial subjects) were newly empowered, and “non-natives” like white settlers suddenly disempowered, at least politically.

This adversarial framework in Citizen and Subject, which recalled Fanon’s topos of colonizer and the colonized in The Wretched of the Earth, animated Mamdani’s subsequent work. His study of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, When Victims Become Killers (2001), argued that the mass violence centered on a Hutu majority perceiving the relatively privileged Tutsi minority as non-native settlers — the effect of an ethnic hierarchy established by Belgian rule. Other works like Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004), Mamdani’s response to 9/11, and Saviors and Survivors (2009), his examination of violence in Darfur, employed comparable dualisms and their dialectics for addressing situations of conflict in the global present.

Indeed, a critique of Mamdani’s work is that it can oversimplify political conditions into reductive oppositions. Other scholars have suggested that he overdetermines colonialism’s long-term impact to the point of absolving the immoral and corrupt behavior of present-day leaders and parties. Centralized state power under colonial rule seemingly becomes an alibi for postcolonial authoritarianism. In this regard, Slow Poison serves as a response to his critics.

Yet the compelling theory of state power across his books is that authoritarianism, whether colonial or postcolonial, African or European, past or present, depends on a politics of legibility. People and communities who do not fit into ideas of the colony or the nation are prone to being politically marginalized or eliminated entirely, whether Jews in Nazi Germany or Palestinians in Israel. Both these latter are addressed in what is arguably his magnum opus, Neither Settler Nor Native (2020). For Mamdani, such violence and such attempts at “cleansing” political communities have been integral to political modernity, with tolerance only an afterthought.

Slow Poison is both a summation and revision of Mamdani’s past positions, while offering a new kind of narrative approach. One key innovation is the author’s biographical method, not only regarding Amin and current President Yoweri Museveni (in power since 1986), but also himself. Unusually, Slow Poison amounts to something like a triple biography. It thus presents a patchwork history of the personal and the political, which is at once genealogical and socially minded. Several of the personal sections first appeared in the London Review of Books, which partly explains its fragmented and often digressive nature.

Slow Poison, however, also offers a tacit argument about how the individual fits into the backdrop of history, namely, their inseparability from the political fortunes of their homeland, whether actual or adopted. This contention is equally found in Edward Said’s Out of Place (1999) and Stuart Hall’s Familiar Stranger (2017). These intellectuals were born during times of profound transition, when their respective countries experienced ruptures of both death and rebirth. Said, Hall, and Mamdani were fated to grapple with their countries’ most important questions over the connections between past and present, and whether a sense of historical justice might ever be achieved.

Born a colonial subject in Mumbai in 1946, Mamdani moved to East Africa with his family when he was a child, first to Tanzania and then to Uganda. His birth in India was contingent (his parents originated from Tanzania), with his identity firmly aligned with Africa early on. This is not to say it was easy or readily accepted. Indian immigrants, known locally as Bayindi, occupied an intermediate position between British settlers and officials and the African majority. In some cases, there was conviviality, as with Indian colonial soldiers who barracked with African colonial troops. Yet many Bayindi were merchants and shopkeepers who sought to maintain their class position and a sense of racial distance. Resorting to his favored schema, Mamdani describes the situation as a world of “good Asians” and “bad Asians.”

These personal sections of Slow Poison are full of evocative detail. Mamdani recalls the relative poverty of his childhood in Kampala, where his father initially worked as a clerk and later co-owned a local auction house. Items like Coca-Cola and a slice of cake on Sundays were luxuries. Segregation was the norm, with Mamdani’s family living in an “Asian only” residential area known as Madras Gardens.

An accomplished student, Mamdani received a scholarship at the University of Pittsburgh that proved to be his exit visa to a wider world. His enrollment coincided with the US civil rights movement, and he became involved with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), traveling by bus to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965 where he was arrested and later released — an experience that politicized him. A separate bus trip across the United States introduced him to the rest of the country, including stops in Chicago, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. There is a charming moment in New Mexico when Mamdani, a Muslim, asked the bus driver to stop so he could pray at midday. After the driver announced a poll, the rest of the passengers voted unanimously that he could do this, so, the bus stopped, and the passengers formed a circle around Mamdani as he prayed.

Initially intent on engineering, at Pittsburgh Mamdani shifted to political theory, eventually making his way to Tufts University and then Harvard, where his supervisor was eminent international relations scholar Karl Deutsch. His return to Uganda in August 1972 to pursue his doctoral fieldwork occurred the same month as the Asian expulsion. Mamdani portrays the situation as one of nervous desperation but also eerie festivity — Asian Ugandans were drastically limited in the amount of money they could take with them (£50 per person), so any remaining wealth was spent on lavish meals and departing events.

His plans thwarted, Mamdani turned to the University of Dar es Salaam, where he entered a vibrant milieu of postcolonial scholars. At the time, Walter Rodney, Ali Mazrui, and Issa Shivji vigorously debated the proper target of political attention, be it the remnants of colonialism and the external neocolonialist threat, or the internal problems of exclusionary politics that postcolonial nationalism was gradually posing. As Mamdani notes, there was excitement because decolonization was finally reaching curricula and students. Decolonization had become an intellectual project, not simply a diplomatic or political one.

These anecdotal encounters interspersed across Slow Poison provide a textured sense of Mamdani’s life but also academic life in Africa at the time. He describes how a final-year seminar he taught in 1984 on “Marxism and the Third World” at Makerere University produced three students who went on to become military commanders in Rwanda and Uganda; nearly half joined the National Resistance Army, the rebel guerilla force that brought Museveni to power in 1986. Teaching the philosophy of armed struggle had tangible effects.

There are also side stories of starting academic journals and literary magazines, like Rajat Neogy’s Transition, as well as idle moments hanging out in hotel lobbies or faculty clubs with figures like Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek and the then-little-known Congolese militant Joseph Kabila, later the DR Congo’s president. Such passing scenes underscore the impact of academic life, in addition to the small circles and everyday struggles involved in establishing an autonomous intellectual sanctuary. Though not its primary focus, Slow Poison depicts how commitment to the hard work of pedagogy and program building, not just ideas and civil disobedience, is one vital way to resist authoritarianism.

Mamdani first met Museveni at the University of Dar es Salaam during the 1970s. He recounts how Museveni invited him to dinner at home with his wife and children, realizing in retrospect that it may have been an attempt to recruit Mamdani to his Front for National Salvation (FRONASA), a rebel group founded with the aim of overthrowing Amin. Indeed, the intimacies of state power portrayed in Slow Poison frequently reach the interpersonal realm, explaining in part why Mamdani resorts to memoir to confront the main political questions driving this book.

Amin and Museveni rest at the center of Slow Poison, though, as already implied, Mamdani steers away from a conventional reading of these two leaders. Amin has received far more attention — two recent books include A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda (2025) by Derek R. Peterson and Insecurities of Expulsion (2025) by Anneeth Kaur Hundle — and Mamdani’s innovation is to address both men at once.

While Amin has long symbolized the archetypal capricious postcolonial despot, prone to imprisoning his opponents and favoring violence, Mamdani argues that Museveni is the worse of the two. This assessment is primarily owed to two factors: first, understanding how non-Ugandans (and especially Westerners) have viewed and assisted both leaders; and second, grasping how each sought to reimagine Uganda.

Born in a colonial police barracks in 1928, Amin started his military career as a child soldier in the King’s African Rifles, working in the kitchen of a naval ship at age eleven. He made his way up through the ranks and joined British counterinsurgency operations against Kenya’s Mau Mau rebels. By the time of Uganda’s independence in 1962, Amin had been appointed chief of staff for the country’s armed forces. Despite his later anti-colonial bona fides, Amin was a product of the British military through and through.

Amin’s rise to the presidency in 1971 was the result of a coup supported by both Britain and Israel. Through new archival evidence, Mamdani argues that Israel played a stronger role than previously assumed. The Israeli connection to Uganda may appear strange — the fact that the British once imagined Uganda as a possible homeland for Jews prior to the Balfour Declaration does not make it less so — but Uganda conformed to a David Ben-Gurion–era policy known as “the periphery doctrine” whereby Israel sought to establish relations with Arab-bordering countries. Israeli military and other advisers subsequently went to Uganda, in addition to selling weapons, and Amin himself received paratrooper training in Israel.

Israel and Britain consequently perceived Amin as a partner, at a time when Cold War rivalries were crisscrossing Africa. Apartheid South Africa, a friend of London and Tel Aviv, also needed African allies, with Amin seen receptive to making Uganda such a candidate. These imagined long-term plans did not transpire. As Mamdani writes, “Amin carried out three expulsions: first the Israelis, then Ugandan Asians, and then the British.” The second has been the most recognized, but the other two remain important for what Mamdani sees as the magnitude of Amin’s ambitions: to radically reimagine the Ugandan state by Africanizing it and dispensing with its foreign benefactors. Slow Poison displays a cautious admiration for Amin for these reasons.

The same cannot be said of Museveni. A long-standing antagonist of Amin as noted before, Museveni eventually came to power in 1986 following the toppling of Milton Obote, who coincidentally had been overthrown by Amin in 1971. Unlike Amin, Museveni has courted international investment throughout his presidency, whether from the World Bank, NGOs, or private entities, making Uganda a favored partner in the eyes of the West. As Mamdani describes, Museveni has sought clients rather than citizens and retains no popular base, unlike Amin. Accompanying this embrace of Western neoliberalism has been the creation of dozens of ethnic districts — in effect, a retribalization of Uganda — that has glossed over the centralization of Museveni’s power.

In summary, Mamdani comes out as more strongly critical of Museveni for reestablishing foreign dependency and restoring a colonial method of governance through a refashioned indirect rule, dispensing with Amin’s radical reimagining of Uganda. For all his flaws and notoriety, Mamdani concedes a qualified respect for Amin’s vision of a Uganda fully Africanized and, thus, fully decolonized — a sense of historical justice actively pursued if at great cost.

This concluding stance leaves Mamdani open to the criticism that he is privileging abstract policy goals over lived experience. The unavoidable issue of state violence persists: for both men, terror has been a political tool against opponents. Museveni has benefited from the resources provided through the US war on terror, committing atrocities against the Acholi people and Acholi-based Lord’s Resistance Army, which has risen up against his regime. Yet Amin’s history of violence against ordinary Ugandans is also widely documented and should not be mitigated through comparison.

Slow Poison ultimately attempts a delicate rebalancing of perspective. Amin’s regime has been commonly mythologized with images of the grotesque, to the point that leaders like Museveni are perceived as benign in contrast. Mamdani is critical of Western donors and diplomats, among other non-Ugandans, for this durable misperception, for looking the other way. Beyond this correction, Mamdani’s proposed solution for Uganda is to move beyond an atavistic politics of ethnicity and indigeneity to a definition of citizenship that dispenses with such identities and is instead based on a principle of (in his expression) “common residence.” It’s a startlingly simple prospect that nonetheless remains elusive as a mainstream idea in postcolonial Africa.

As a coda, it’s perhaps worth addressing a question this review has thus far avoided: Does Slow Poison tell us anything relevant about the politics of Zohran Mamdani or Trumpian autocracy? The NYC mayor’s election and the publication of this book are pure coincidence, though some readers will have this question in the back of their minds. Here we can offer a provisional set of answers.

When Zohran Mamdani called Donald Trump a fascist to his face in the Oval Office last November, it came across as predictable, even benign, a term that has lost its power through overuse; Trump himself was nonplussed, even encouraging. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s actions have told another story, however, through its escalating arrests and expulsions, primarily of non-white people — a narrative of exclusion that aligns with the senior Mamdani’s work.

Mahmood Mamdani’s scholarship has centered on a politics of classifying populations: both colonial and postcolonial authoritarianism have depended on such legibility, and to this end leaders and states have often resorted to violence. For the senior Mamdani, political modernity itself has been fundamentally informed by these elements of clarification and then elimination.

By the same stroke, Slow Poison implicitly makes the counterargument that diversity is the antagonist of autocrats, and that pluralism is the enemy of fascism. Amin’s reinvention of Uganda required a purification of the population itself. Museveni’s Uganda has publicly managed its ethnic diversity while targeting alleged adversaries, including LGBTQ+ individuals, who do not conform to his vision. Faced with such measures, promoting the principle of pluralism is itself a means of resistance.

This tactic also applies to ICE’s current activities and Trump administration policies. Though identity politics in the United States has come under criticism among the Left, indeed for valid reasons, ethnic and racial diversity remains a social fact and a significant means of organizing against unjustified power, whether in NYC, Minneapolis, or elsewhere.

The “slow poison” of the book’s title refers, in part, to the lasting impact of colonialism through its structural and categorical legacies. It also refers to the more recent trauma of state-sponsored violence in Uganda and the erosion of norms through institutionalized corruption. In these ways, this metaphor of contamination applies also to the United States, as an older postcolony also today still struggling with the effects of its past.

Slow Poison underscores that such politics are always unfinished. Yet amid such uncertainty, Mamdani validates the continued importance of the historical witness, and their moral obligation to report on power as they see it.