When power settles in – New African Magazine

Mahmood Mamdani’s Slow Poison and how authority reshapes leadership, belonging, and memory in Africa.

I have always been interested in what happens to leaders after they take power. Not the moment of arrival, but what follows once authority becomes established. Over time, decisions feel less tentative. The space for reversal narrows. Staying in office begins to shape behaviour in ways that are not always visible to those exercising power.

That interest drew me to Mahmood Mamdani’s Slow Poison. The book asks the reader to slow down and pay attention. Mamdani resists easy conclusions. His concern is not only with events, but with how those events are remembered, simplified, and eventually fixed in place. It is a study of power, but also of memory.

I was particularly interested in his treatment of Idi Amin. Not because the violence of that period is in doubt. It is not. But because Amin has become a figure whose name often closes discussion rather than opens it. Mamdani pauses that reflex. He examines how certain narratives took hold, when they hardened, and what was lost in the process. In doing so, he reminds us that history is often shaped as much by power as by fact.

I attended the Nairobi launch of Slow Poison, intending to listen. The room was full, packed to the rafters. This was not a performative moment. People had come to engage seriously with a demanding book and with difficult questions about power, memory, and belonging in Africa.

After the launch, we had the honour of hosting Professor Mamdani for dinner. What stayed with me was his manner. He was attentive to people. He asked questions that were thoughtful rather than performative. He listened carefully and followed what was said. His humour surfaced quietly. It was a way of engaging that mirrored his writing.

I am not an expert on Uganda. I have spent short periods there for work, enough to notice how confidently the country is often spoken about by those who have not spent much time listening. That distance allowed me to read Slow Poison not as a judgment on Uganda, but as an examination of how power settles and how stories about power become durable.

Mamdani does not deny violence under Amin, nor does he diminish fear. What he questions is how particular claims became immune to scrutiny and why the most extreme portrayals intensified at specific political moments. For many Ugandans, fear was real regardless of statistics. Mamdani does not dispute lived experience. He asks how leaders become symbols once they are no longer useful to powerful allies, and how those symbols simplify complex histories.

That line of inquiry extends beyond Amin. Museveni’s story is more difficult because it began with hope. Mamdani knew him. Supported him. Shared the belief that the National Resistance Movement represented a break from the past. That proximity matters. The critique is not written from opposition. It is written from disappointment.

What Mamdani traces is a gradual change. Early clarity gives way to accommodation. Reform becomes harder to sustain. Remaining in power begins to shape priorities. Mamdani returns to Museveni’s early focus on land and development to underline a simple point. The analysis was not lacking. The choices were constrained. Challenging entrenched interests carried risk. Managing them felt safer. Over time, continuity justified itself.

Migration runs quietly through this story. At the launch, Mamdani reminded the audience that “we are all migrants.” Movement, displacement, and resettlement are not exceptions in African political life. They are foundational. As a daughter of an immigrant, that observation resonated with me not as theory, but as lived reality. Identity is not fixed by origin alone. It is shaped by who is recognised, who is protected, and who is permitted to belong.

During dinner, Mamdani spoke of moving to South Africa, believing apartheid there was exceptional, only to realise that many of the structures he had lived under in Uganda shared similar logics. The difference lay less in the system itself than in how people had been taught to see it. Some forms of exclusion are named. Others are absorbed into normal life.

Mamdani has long argued that political violence often begins when citizens are turned into permanent minorities, present in the nation but excluded from full belonging. In Slow Poison, that logic helps explain how identities harden and how power learns to manage difference rather than resolve it.

Geopolitics sharpens this reading. Alliances are less settled. Influence is more transactional. In such moments, Africa’s numbers matter, and its presence in international forums carries weight. The continent is also being engaged for what it controls. Minerals essential to energy transition, technology, and defence lie beneath its soil. Access depends on political relationships that endure. In that context, predictability is rewarded. Leaders who promise continuity are treated as stable partners, while difficult questions are deferred.

Reading this book returned me to my original question. How leaders change once they are in power. How intentions narrow without announcement. How permanence comes to feel normal. These are questions I also explore in my own work, including Beyond the Ballot, which examines what happens to leadership after elections are won and governing becomes routine.

Slow Poison does not offer instruction or verdict. It asks the reader to look carefully at how power operates, how belonging is defined, and how societies adjust to conditions they once believed they would resist. That discipline of attention matters, particularly now, when longevity is often mistaken for stability and history is too quickly declared settled.

Mahmood Mamdani is a leading African scholar and public intellectual. He is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University and the founding director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research. His work focuses on colonialism, postcolonial governance, citizenship, and political violence. His latest book is Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State.