SLOW POISON
Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State
Mahmood Mamdani
Harvard University Press (14 October 2025)
Trade paper • ISBN-13: 9780674299870 • US $19.95 • 5 in x 8 in • 380 pgs.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A leading public intellectual gives his authoritative and personal account of the tragic postcolonial fate of Uganda, his homeland.
In 1972, when Mahmood Mamdani came home to Uganda, he found a country transformed by “an orgy of violence.” Two years earlier, with support from the colonial powers of Great Britain and Israel, Idi Amin had forcefully cemented his rule. He soon expelled Uganda’s Indian minority in hopes of fostering a nation for Black Ugandans. The plan backfired. Amin was followed by Yoweri Museveni, who has now ruled for nearly four decades. Whereas Amin tried to create a Black nation out of the majority, Museveni sought to fragment this majority into multiple ethnic minorities, recreating a version of colonial indirect rule.
Slow Poison is Mamdani’s firsthand report on the tragic unraveling of his country’s struggle for decolonialization. A witness to East Africa’s endlessly intricate power plays, and one of the most insightful political philosophers of his generation, Mamdani casts a learned and wary eye on Amin, internationally depicted as a buffoon, the radical scholar Museveni, and the global heavyweights that exploited and manipulated Uganda before and after its independence.
Each leader made violence central to his project, but Mamdani sees a signal difference between Amin, who retained popular support to the end, and Museveni, who has not. The Asian expulsion made Amin a monster in the eyes of the West. In contrast, Museveni was hailed as standard bearer of the “war on terror” in Africa and was protected from accountability for far greater crimes. In exchange for adopting the package of neoliberal reforms known as the Washington Consensus, he became Africa’s poster child. Amin, who aimed to create a nation of Black millionaires, never became one himself. Meanwhile, Uganda’s surrender to privatization has brought Museveni’s family immense wealth, even as the country remains one of the world’s poorest.
PRAISE:
Praise for Neither Settler nor Native:
“[A] provocative, elegantly written new book”
Fara Dabhoiwala, The New York Review of Books
“Linking the histories of the United States, Nazi Germany, and apartheid South Africa, Mahmood Mamdani’s forthcoming book, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities … demonstrates how a broad rethinking of political issues becomes possible when Western ideals and practices are examined from the vantage point of Asia and Africa.”
Pankaj Mishra, The New York Review of Books
“Mahmood Mamdani’s new book, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, is a densely packed study of the modern nation state that proposes a shift away from what one might call narrow identity politics…An important book demands many readings. An initial review – a reading and rereading – can barely scratch. I hope readers will do what I intend: to read it again. An important book raises questions. This book raises many, and not least whether we can really be free of the majority-minority and settler-native dichotomies that vex many states. Mamdani proposes that they can be overcome.”
New Frame
“This book compels the reader to rethink the origin and development of the nation-state and its replication as inseparable from European colonialism, beginning with the establishment of the Spanish state through racialized ethnic cleansing and the 1492 deportations of Jews and Moors. In elegant prose with no wasted words or jargon, this original and brilliant work persuasively argues that the United States created the template for settler-colonialism, providing the model upon which the South African apartheid regime and the Israeli state were patterned, and also used by the Nazi regime that adopted US race theory and catastrophic ethnic cleansing. The book provides not only profound historical analysis but also deeply researched thick descriptions of the current US and Israeli regimes of settler-colonialism and more.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
“Brilliant! Mahmood Mamdani’s Neither Settler nor Native is nothing less than a deeply learned account of the origins of our modern world. Situating the beginnings of the nation-state in the settler-colonial practice of creating permanent minorities, Mamdani illustrates how this damaging political logic continues into our own era, resulting far too often in today’s extraordinary political violence. Through his own elegant contrarianism, Mamdani rejects the current focus on human rights as the means to bring justice and accountability to the victims of this colonial and postcolonial bloodshed. Instead, he calls for a new kind of political imagination, one that will pave the way for a truly decolonized future. Joining the ranks of Hannah Arendt’s Imperialism, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and Edward Said’s Orientalism, Neither Settler nor Native is destined to become a classic text of postcolonial studies and political theory.”
Moustafa Bayoumi
“A powerfully original argument, one that supplements political analysis with a map for our political future.”
Faisal Devji, University of Oxford
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He was Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala from 2010 to 2022. His books include Neither Settler nor Native, Citizen and Subject, When Victims Become Killers, and Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
| Language/Territory | Subagent |
|---|---|
| China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam | Big Apple Agency |
| Dutch | Sebes & Bisseling Literary Agency |
| English outside North America | David Grossman Literary Agency |
| French | Deborah Druba Agency |
| German | Paul & Peter Fritz AG Literatur Agentur |
| Greek | Read n' Right Agency |
| Hebrew | The Deborah Harris Agency |
| Italian | Berla & Griffini Rights Agency |
| Japanese | The English Agency (Japan) Ltd |
| Korean | BC Agency, or Korea Copyright Center |
| Portuguese | RIFF Agency |
| Russia/Baltics/Eastern Europe | Prava I Prevodi |
| Scandinavia | Sebes & Bisseling Literary Agency |
| Spanish in Latin America | MB Agencia Literaria |
| Spanish in Spain | MB Agencia Literaria |
| Turkish | Anatolialit Agency |
For all other languages/territories, please contact Roam Agency.