In the annals of African political history, few narratives are as harrowing as Uganda's post-colonial journey - from the brutal excesses of Idi Amin to the enduring grip of Yoweri Museveni's long reign. Yet, as the world grapples with the subtle erosions of democracy in our own time, Mahmood Mamdani's latest book, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, arrives like a clarion call.
Published in October 2024 - coinciding with escalating global debates on authoritarian drift — this work by the eminent Ugandan scholar dissects the insidious mechanics of power consolidation.
Mamdani, often hailed as one of the sharpest minds in postcolonial studies, argues that tyranny doesn't always arrive with tanks and mass graves; it can seep in gradually, like a slow-acting poison, reshaping institutions and societies under the guise of stability and progress.
Mamdani's central thesis is a profound indictment of how authoritarianism evolves not solely through cataclysmic ruptures but via a creeping normalization of control. Drawing on Uganda's dual dictatorships as a lens, he contrasts the overt savagery of Idi Amin's regime (1971–1979) - a period marked by coups, purges, and an estimated 300,000 deaths - with the more veiled, protracted authoritarianism of Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled since 1986.
Amin, in Mamdani's framing, embodies the "obvious catastrophe": a military strongman whose whims unleashed chaos, expelling Asians, nationalizing industries, and plunging the country into economic ruin. Museveni, however, represents a subtler peril - a "long-acting toxin" that erodes political freedoms and social fabrics over decades, yielding a state that is fragile, inequitable, and ultimately as destructive.
This distinction is no mere historical footnote; it's a warning for contemporary politics. Museveni's Uganda, Mamdani contends, exemplifies "thin" authoritarianism: a regime that maintains a veneer of electoral legitimacy while systematically subverting institutions. Repression here isn't sporadic violence but a steady drumbeat - opposition leaders harassed under anti-terrorism laws, media outlets muzzled through regulatory "reforms," and elections manipulated via gerrymandering and voter suppression.
Corruption festers not as aberration but as policy, with patronage networks siphoning public resources into private empires. What begins as "efficient" governance - roads built, militias tamed - morphs into the hollowing out of accountability.
Social ties fray as ethnic favoritism (favoring Museveni's western Ugandan base) deepens divisions, turning citizens into wary subjects rather than empowered stakeholders. The result? A state that limps along, propped by foreign aid and internal coercion, but one that Mamdani likens to a "weak poison": invisible until the body fails.
At its core, Mamdani's analysis pivots on the complicity of societies themselves. If publics avert their gaze from legal erosions - tolerating the substitution of "effectiveness" for justice, or cheering "development" that masks elite capture - then even a "peaceful" autocracy becomes indistinguishable from outright tyranny. He invokes Hannah Arendt's banality of evil, but grounds it in African soil: the slow legalization of repression under the banner of order.
Museveni's no-fly-zone around elections, or the 2021 constitutional tweaks extending his term limits, aren't shocks but symptoms of this gradual capture. Mamdani urges a reckoning: true decolonization demands rebuilding mechanisms of responsibility - from independent judiciaries to vibrant civil societies - that resist such incremental decay.
Mahmood Mamdani himself is a towering figure whose life mirrors the intellectual rigor of his prose. Born in 1946 in Bombay (now Mumbai) to Indian Muslim parents, he grew up in Uganda under British colonial rule, witnessing the birth pangs of independence. Exiled during Amin's regime, he returned to Kampala in the 1980s, only to navigate Museveni's early years.
Today, as Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University and former Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research, Mamdani has authored over a dozen books that dissect power's underbelly - from Citizen and Subject (1996), which exposed the bifurcated legacy of colonial indirect rule, to When Victims Become Killers (2001), a forensic look at Rwanda's genocide. His oeuvre spans anthropology, political theory, and history, blending Marxist insights with postcolonial critique.
Articles in outlets like the London Review of Books further cement his role as the "brain" behind unpacking how global structures - from apartheid to U.S. settlerism - replicate in the Global South.
With Neither Settler nor Native, he extends this genealogy, tracing authoritarian "minorities" (permanently marginalized groups) back to 1492's colonial origins, urging a politics beyond nation-state binaries.
What elevates this book, however, is its familial echo. Mahmood's son, Zohran Mamdani — a New York State Assembly member and democratic socialist - channels similar obsessions into praxis. While the father theorizes how power distorts justice, the son fights to reform it on the ground: advocating for tenant rights, Palestinian solidarity, and anti-corruption measures in a city rife with oligarchic excess.
It's a poignant tandem - one pens manifestos against institutional rot, the other wields them in legislative battles. As Mahmood might say, theirs is a dialogue across theory and trenches, reminding us that understanding authoritarianism is futile without the will to dismantle it.
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In an era of "illiberal democracies" from Hungary to India, Mamdani's *Neither Settler nor Native* is not just timely - it's urgent. It compels us to peer beyond the spectacle of strongmen and interrogate the quiet consolidations that breed them. Uganda's story, after all, is every fragile polity's cautionary tale: ignore the slow poison, and the state you build today may be the cage you inherit tomorrow. For scholars, activists, and anyone weary of democratic backsliding, this book is essential reading - a blueprint for vigilance in an age of creeping shadows.
