SLOW POISON, Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni and the making of the Ugandan State

338pp., paperback, First SA Edition, Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2025

ISBN: 9781776149834

First published in 2025 by Harvard University Press.

Mahmood Mamdani’s authoritative and personal account of the tragic unraveling of Uganda's struggle for decolonialisation. Writing as both an observer and a participant, he focuses on the Amin and Museveni eras, both critical to the making of modern Uganda, and the global powers that exploited and manipulated Uganda before and after its independence.

"For half a century, Mahmood Mamdani has been one of the world’s most influential and incisive analysts of African and Global South politics. Slow Poison reveals why. Combining history, political critique, and memoir, the book offers a riveting account of the consequences of state-directed violence, ‘tribalization,’ and neoliberal privatization, as well as the various Western entanglements, upending a litany of myths surrounding Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and modern Uganda. Mamdani makes for a compelling witness. Brilliant!" Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern jazz in revolutionary times

"Mahmood Mamdani is one of the most acute and resourceful observers of our world, but Slow Poison is exceptionally lavish in its offer of bracing insight and eye-opening exposition. Rarely has any one book captured the profound ambiguity of decolonization: the scrambled pursuit of national freedom, the tortuous negotiations and compromises behind declarations of sovereignty, and the sheer slipperiness of postcolonial power." Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza

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 and is Chancellor of Kampala International University. His books include Neither Settler nor Native, Citizen and Subject, When Victims Become Killers, and Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.