A Revealing Book by Mamdani’s Father

I never buy a book without intending to read it, but since I buy books much faster than I read them, unread titles accumulate in my house. It can take many years, or even decades, before I get round to reading (some of) them.

Rooting around in these many unread books recently, I came across a slim volume that I must have bought in Nairobi, Kenya, between 1983 and 1986, when I was living in East Africa. Its price is listed in Kenyan shillings, and the sticker indicates that I bought it from the University of Nairobi bookshop.

The book, Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda, about Idi Amin’s rule in Uganda (1971–1979), and its author is Mahmood Mamdani, father of the current mayor of New York. This gives the book an interest over and above that of its subject, which is already great.

The acknowledgments alone are interesting. They begin: “This study has run through a double course. It began as a Frontier-Internship-in-Mission.” The Frontier-Internship-in-Mission was a kind of Presbyterian Peace Corps, founded by Margaret Flory, in which young college graduates were attached to Presbyterian missions in far-flung countries.

Mamdani’s study was “funded from Geneva, but sponsored by a Nairobi-based ecumenical committee.” He continues: “It is to the credit of the local committee that it re-defined the ‘frontier’ and gave it a popular content. The new frontier became an anti-imperialist struggle on the educational front.”

The second source of sponsorship was the Urban-Rural Mission of the World Council of Churches, though the World Student Christian Federation also “gave assistance when the going got particularly rough.” It was the Urban-Rural Mission of the World Council of Churches that sponsored—and presumably paid for—the book’s 1983 publication.

In the introduction, Mamdani sets out his stall:

The author of this book makes no claim to false neutrality. Why false? Because no writer on social issues can be non-partisan. . . . An observer of society is part of what he or she investigates. He is either a peasant, a worker, a student, a trader, an industrialist, a soldier, you name it . . . In our society, all these groups divide into two camps: the oppressors and the oppressed. Every social investigation either exposes or obscures that system of oppression. Every writer belongs to one of these great camps by the stand he takes: for or against oppression.

This crudely Manichaean dichotomy can be boiled down to the following: if you disagree with me, you are on the side of the oppressor; and if you are on the side of the oppressor, you are, ex officio, or objectively (in the Stalinist sense of objectivity) an oppressor yourself.

The introduction has other peculiarities. Mamdani excoriates all previous writing about the Amin regime for its “sensationalism,” which he accuses of “detailing the dictator’s exploits in violence and sex.” He compares these authors to “mindless computers” interested only in “add[ing] up the numbers of such deaths, tortures, assaults, robberies, wives, concubines, and rapes indiscriminately, because they have market value.” He tells us that these accounts cannot simply be laughed off, though not because they contain a truth, but rather because they hide “the ideological content.”

Here one has to pinch oneself: Can he really mean what he says? It is estimated that roughly 300,000 people, or 3 percent of the Ugandan population, were murdered during Amin’s eight-year rule. No reference to such mass killing appears in Mamdani’s book—not a word—as though such mass murder was but what Jean-Marie Le Pen once called the Holocaust, namely an historical detail.

This is not the only manifestation of the author’s disdain for people, as compared with the People, which is for him that sacred thing, an abstract category. Exiled from Uganda after the Amin coup in 1971, Mamdani became a lecturer in political economy in Dar es Salaam between 1973 and 1979. Though he mentions Julius Nyerere’s famous (or infamous) Arusha Declaration and claims to be on the side of the oppressed, Mamdani somehow contrives not to mention that this declaration led to the forced expulsion into collectivized villages of 80 to 90 percent of Tanzania’s rural population, carried out largely while he was in the country, omitting such mention presumably because it was carried out in the name of principles of which he approved. What, after all, are the lives and wishes of 12 million people compared with a principle of political economy?

Mamdani characterizes Amin’s regime as fascist, though this term is about as useful and expressive as a well-known linguistic intensifier that relates to sexual intercourse. In one remarkable passage, Mamdani says:

When Amin promised to scrap “Obote’s one-party system Immediately,” little did people suspect that the replacement would be a no-party system. The main intention of the fascist dictatorship was to coerce and cajole the people into leaving politics as an activity.

But fascism without a party is like an omelette without eggs. Here is an example of real thought stymied by resort to a previously existing abstract category, whose negative connotations are sufficiently strong to establish the good intentions of those who employ it.

Perhaps the most interesting, and surprising, passage in the book is this:

The Fascists now attempted to create a more secure social base through a programme of Islamization . . . As the antagonism between fascism and the people surfaced, the regime looked for other allies. It put the power of the state behind institutionalized Islam, turning it into a semi-official religion, while alienating other religions. . . . Rank and file Muslims were temporarily misled and isolated from the rest of the people.

Though his prose sometimes reads something like a translation from an editorial in Pravda—“The victory of fascism ensues from armed clashes between rival factions in the anti-people camp,” or “In a neo-colony, fascism is the dictatorship of the most chauvinistic agents of imperialism”—Mamdani is highly critical of the Soviet Union’s partial and wavering support of Amin. This support misled “progressive movements,” such as the PLO, into supporting the Amin regime because such movements “continued to believe that the Russia of Khrushchev and Brezhnev was a continuation of the Russia of Lenin and Stalin.” If only Stalin were still alive, all would have been well.

One might have hoped that a man who was twice exiled from his country by two regimes, Amin’s and then that of Milton Obote’s second presidency, each responsible for the deaths of between 100,000 and 500,000 people; and who had been present in another country while many millions were removed by force from where they were living (the main perpetrator of which disaster the Catholic Church wants to canonize) would have developed a less Manichaean view of life, but Mamdani had failed to do so by 1983, at least, when he was 37.

A son does not necessarily take on the thoughts of his father or his cast of mind. Every adult, after all, is responsible for his own thoughts. But people born of parents with strong political views tend to adopt them themselves, or react against them by developing diametrically opposed ones, or by avoiding politics altogether.

Of these three reactions, it is clear which is the most likely in the case of the mayor of New York.