Interview with Mahmood Mamdani
Open Anthropology links to a 2005 interview of Mahmood Mamdani by Pete McCarthy. Mamdani is Professor of Government at Columbia University and I know him best as the author of When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (2001). This, along with Gérard Prunier’s The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (1995) is, for my money, the classic work on the political mechanics and historical drivers of 1994’s genocide.
The McCarthy interview is a good introduction to Mamdani’s views on the history, politics and culture of the Great Lakes region. It breaks no new ground but would be useful to anyone wanting an insider’s view (Mamdani is Ugandan) of the real dynamics of central African conflict.
One passage sent shivers down my spine. Mamdani relates the visit by Idi Amin to Makerere University in Kampala:
The early 70s was a time of romance with armed struggle and national liberation. I was at Makerere University in Kampala and the students at Makerere demonstrated during the Asian expulsion of 1972. And the student take was that they would support Amin if he expropriated all wealthy people – not just wealthy people of one particular origin or race or colour or classification. Amin, of course, was not impressed with this at all.
I remember seeing him when he came to the University. It was the 50th anniversary of Makerere and he came with an entire battalion of troops, armed. He stood there and said, “I came with a full battalion so that when you raise your heads from your books, you know who has power.”
We just froze completely.
Then he went on to say: “On my way, I stopped at Mulago (the university teaching hospital), and I looked at your medical records and I saw that most of you are suffering from gonorrhoea.” Then he paused and said, “I will not tolerate you spreading political gonorrhoea in Uganda.”
That was as explicit a warning as you can get. Students knew there would be no second chance. This man was ruthless and he would strike ruthlessly.
Amin was no brooker of dissent, I think it’s safe to say, and the elimination of academic resistance is a tried and tested dictatorial tool. The reason this struck me is that Kampala is a city I know very well and, despite having come a very long way under Yoweri Museveni, the ghosts of Amin’s victims continue to haunt Ugandans. Amin built Mulago hospital, in its time the best hospital in the region by a long chalk, but now plagued by chronic underfunding, staff shortages and a largely indifferent Department of Health. I’ve been there often and each time I can almost see the corpses that were allowed to build up there during Amin’s purges. It was chilling to see Mulago starring as itself in The Last King of Scotland (2006), a film I highly recommend for Forest Whittaker’s uncannily perceptive portrayal of Amin.
Every time a marabou stork appears in Kampala – and there are many scavenging carrion in the parks, rubbish dumps and central reservations – people mutter and cross themselves. They remember how marabou fed on the bodies of Amin’s victims, much like the Rwandan dogs in 1994. The ugly marabou has become inextricably linked with Amin’s transgressions and is now a convenient hate figure that embodies the sadness and anger so deep-rooted in Ugandan culture.
