Slow Poison By Mahmood Mamdani Review Can You Really Rehabilitate Idi Amin?

The anthropologist and father of New Yorks mayor-elect offers a revisionist view of modern Ugandan history Children of Ugandan Indians are having a bit of a moment. Electropop boasts Charlie XCX statecraft, the Patels: Priti the shadow foreign secretary, Kash the FBI boss. And while the ones who go into politics have tended to be conservative, we now have a counterexample in Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who clinched the New York mayoralty at the beginning of this month. The anomaly is best explained by the politics of his father, Mahmood Mamdani. The apple, it seems, did nbspnot nbsproll especially far down the postcolonial hillside. Mahmood, professor of government and anthropology at Columbia University, has long styled himself as the lefts answer to VS Naipaul. Where the Nobel-winning curmudgeon surveyed postcolonial Africa with disdain, revelling in the wreckage of independence, Mamdani presents a more forgiving view: pathos instead of nbsppity, paradox instead of despair. If independence didnt live up to the promise, he argues, it was because the colonised had been dealt a losing hand.