In the opening pages of Slow Poison, a new account of authoritarianism in postcolonial Uganda, author Mahmood Mamdani evokes a nineteenth-century world of exploration and violence in Africa, centering on a long-forgotten Conradian figure. Eduard Schnitzer, a German Jewish physician, had come under the employ of the Anglo-Ottoman incursion in what is today South Sudan, where he converted to Islam and took the name Emin Pasha. He went on to establish a private mercenary army whose several thousand members became known as the Nubi.

Scholars have suggested that his rogue actions may have inspired Kurtz, the pivotal figure of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) who, as an ivory trader in the upper reaches of the Congo River, “went native,” with the character of Charles Marlow sent to rescue him. In like fashion, the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (1887–89), led by British-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley, was organized to retrieve its namesake, which eventually it did.

What interests Mamdani, however, is not the story of Emin Pasha’s conversion and eventual return. Rather, he is concerned with how this European doctor inadvertently created the Nubi (not to be confused with Nubians), a martial group and identity that has endured to the present. Uganda’s infamous third president, Idi Amin — a central figure in Slow Poison and an emblematic case of postcolonial authoritarianism, popularized in Hollywood melodrama like The Last King of Scotland — was a Nubi.