Dois novos livros, sobre a promessa de Kwame Nkrumah e a tirania de Idi Amin, capturam as esperanças crescentes e as amargas consequências da era da independência da África.
Kelefa Sanneh
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| Enquanto Gana celebrava sua independência, em 1957, Nkrumah era aclamado internacionalmente como uma figura da liberdade. Mas, internamente, seu governo tornou-se cada vez mais autoritário e impopular; quando os militares o derrubaram, em 1966, houve relativamente poucos protestos. Ilustração de Jonathan Djob Nkondo |
Em junho de 1952, a Ebony anunciou que uma nova era estava começando. “A África está despertando rapidamente de seu sono de 1.000 anos”, proclamava a revista, e nomeou uma figura como a personificação desse renascimento: Kwame Nkrumah, da Costa do Ouro, uma colônia britânica na África Ocidental, que tinha “um dos títulos mais ilustres já conquistados por qualquer negro em qualquer lugar do mundo”. Ele foi o primeiro primeiro-ministro da colônia — e, como as pessoas estavam percebendo, o último. A Costa do Ouro estava a caminho de se tornar uma nação independente chamada Gana, em grande parte devido a Nkrumah, a quem a Ebony saudou como o líder de uma “revolução sem derramamento de sangue” que estava transformando a África. Quando Gana declarou independência, em 1957, dignitários de todo o mundo desembarcaram na capital, Acra. Dois visitantes especialmente ilustres vieram dos Estados Unidos: Richard Nixon, então vice-presidente, e Martin Luther King Jr., recém-saído de sua vitória sobre a segregação nos ônibus, que teria dito a Nixon: “Estamos buscando o mesmo tipo de liberdade que a Costa do Ouro está celebrando”.
Em muitos aspectos, Ebony acertou. Nkrumah tornou-se não apenas um chefe de Estado, mas um símbolo global de liberdade, e o continente seguiu seu exemplo. Em meados da década de 1960, a África havia se transformado de um mosaico de colônias em um país majoritariamente independente, cada um devotado, pelo menos em teoria, à autodeterminação. Mas, em Gana, Nkrumah tornou-se cada vez mais autoritário — ele se autodenominava "Osagyefo", o Redentor — e cada vez mais impopular, e quando os militares o derrubaram, em 1966, houve relativamente poucos protestos. Nove anos é um curto período para alcançar a redenção, mas um período bastante longo para servir como chefe de Estado eleito. Outros líderes africanos teriam mandatos ou muito curtos, interrompidos por golpes ou assassinatos, ou muito longos, prolongados pela recusa em deixar o cargo; o mandato de Nkrumah, de alguma forma, conseguiu ambos. Após o golpe, Ebony resumiu: "Presidente deposto indiciado por seu povo como tirano-ladrão que quase arruinou Gana", e quando ele morreu, em 1972, um obituário do Times citou sua "megalomania galopante". Hoje, é King, e não Nkrumah, que é amplamente identificado com a luta pela liberdade. O que parece surpreendente agora é que, não muito tempo atrás, a África inspirava tanto entusiasmo e tanto otimismo nos Estados Unidos.
Howard W. French acredita que Nkrumah merece algo melhor. French foi correspondente de longa data do Times sobre a África e, em "A Segunda Emancipação: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanismo e a Negritude Global na Maré Alta" (Liveright), ele chama Nkrumah de "comparável em seu impacto no mundo de sua época a Mandela e até mesmo a Gandhi". French cresceu em Washington, D.C., mas passou algum tempo na juventude visitando a família na África Ocidental, onde conheceu a esposa e onde, como ele lembra, sua pele clara e seu "cabelo afro arenoso" o tornavam notável. Ele é especialmente atento à maneira como Nkrumah foi influenciado pelos negros americanos e como ele os influenciou, mostrando como o poder político negro poderia se manifestar. (A revista Ebony marcou a independência de Gana com fotografias de Nkrumah e treze membros do gabinete do novo governo, todos negros.) Richard Wright e Maya Angelou viajaram para o país e escreveram livros sobre sua estadia lá. "Logo fui tomado por uma adoração por Gana como uma jovem se apaixona", escreveu Angelou, "imprudentemente e com poucas chances de encontrar a emoção correspondida".
E, no entanto, o programa político de Nkrumah era irritantemente diverso, ou simplesmente vago. Ele era uma espécie de socialista, não exatamente comunista, definitivamente nacionalista e declaradamente um "consciencista", rótulo que cunhou e tentou definir em um livro curto que parece muito longo. Em geral, ele personificava um slogan que outrora entoava e que soava radical em toda a África até que deixou de soar: "Autogoverno já!". Neste verão, o legado transatlântico de Kwame Nkrumah ressurgiu quando Zohran Mamdani venceu as primárias democratas para a prefeitura de Nova York. Ele disse que seu nome do meio, Kwame, foi escolhido por seu pai em homenagem a Nkrumah, que morreu duas décadas antes de Zohran nascer.
Esse pai é Mahmood Mamdani, um cientista político conhecido por sua visão rigorosa e nada sentimental da política africana. O velho Mamdani cresceu em Uganda, na África Oriental, em uma comunidade de ugandenses de ascendência indiana, conhecida como Bayindi, que desempenhou um papel proeminente no país até Idi Amin expulsá-los em massa em 1972. Amin, que governou Uganda por oito anos, é geralmente lembrado como um vilão de desenho animado, com um senso de humor grosseiro que só tornava sua crueldade mais perturbadora. Em "Veneno Lento: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni e a Criação do Estado Ugandiano" (Harvard), Mahmood Mamdani conta a história do exílio de sua família — e de seu próprio retorno — na esperança de complicar nossa visão de Amin e da política ugandense. Mamdani está menos interessado na alegria da independência do que na turbulência que se seguiu. A transformação da África se mostrou muito mais sangrenta do que muitos esperavam, mas Mamdani ainda insiste que os líderes da independência do continente têm algo a ensinar ao mundo. Lida com a crônica de Howard French sobre Nkrumah e seu movimento, "Slow Poison" parece uma sequência ácida: uma recria a era de esperanças crescentes na África, a outra lança um olhar cético sobre o que veio a seguir.
Like many ambitious intellectuals, Nkrumah discovered his love of home by leaving it. Born in a small village in 1909, or perhaps 1912, the son of a goldsmith and his senior wife, Nkrumah was quiet but charismatic—good at schoolwork, even better at persuading people to believe in him. With the help of mentors, he made his way to Accra, then to England, then to America, where he enrolled at Lincoln University, a historically Black school in Pennsylvania. He was an ardent anti-colonialist, radicalized not by anything he had experienced in the Gold Coast but by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, in 1935. In his autobiography, Nkrumah recalls hearing the news in England: “For the next few minutes I could do nothing but glare at each impassive face, wondering if those people could possibly realise the wickedness of colonialism, and praying that the day might come when I could play my part in bringing about the downfall of such a system.” It’s impossible to know whether this epiphany truly occurred; by the time he published the book, in 1957, he was already leading the struggle, and the anecdote served as proof of a lifelong commitment.
Some earlier African intellectuals looked at Black America with pity, even disdain. “The black man, you know, has had no chance in America,” J. E. Casely Hayford, a pioneering Gold Coast lawyer and author, wrote in 1903. “How could he? The environment has been dead against him, and, though emancipated, he remains in many respects a bondman.” Casely Hayford hoped that, given time and freedom, the Gold Coast might achieve the progress that had eluded Black Americans, restoring the peace and prosperity that existed on the continent “before the advent of the foreign interloper.” In the decades that followed, a number of Black Americans came to agree. Marcus Garvey, born in Jamaica but famous in the United States, launched the Back-to-Africa movement, urging Black Americans to help build a “Negro Empire” across the Atlantic. The project turned out to be a mirage, if not a scam: Garvey raised money for ships that couldn’t sail, he went to prison for mail fraud, and he never once visited Africa before he died, in 1940, at fifty-two. Still, many were inspired by this vision, including Nkrumah, who embraced the “Africa” part of Garvey’s dream, while discarding the “Back-to.” What Nkrumah wanted, he later wrote, was not Black nationalism but African nationalism—no need for infusions of Black Americans on steamships.
In the opening pages of “The Second Emancipation,” French makes clear that his book is “quite deliberately not a comprehensive biography of Nkrumah,” who emerges as an energetic but elusive figure. He was so devoted to African self-determination that he sometimes ended letters “Yours Africanly.” We know less about his marriage, to a Christian woman from Egypt, than about his friendship with the Englishwoman who served as his private secretary. (“Marriage does not exist in nature,” he once remarked, “and does not warrant the importance that has come to be attached to it.”) For all his grand talk of philosophy, his real interest was political strategy. He once listed the four groups he studied in America: “the Republicans, the Democrats, the Communists and the Trotskyites.” He returned to England, where he acquired a Communist Party membership card without signing it, and founded a cell he called the Circle, dedicated to creating a union of African socialist republics. The group was less Soviet than it seemed, French assures us, though it was not much less authoritarian: members swore a literal blood oath, pledging loyalty not to Moscow but to Nkrumah himself.
Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast in 1947. The next year, a protest he was involved with tipped into a riot, with mobs targeting Syrian shopkeepers, and he was arrested for being a threat to “public order.” He was released a few weeks later, and—once he had gathered enough followers, and quarrelled with enough local activists—founded his own party, the Convention People’s Party, launching a nonviolent campaign he called “positive action.” After further protests, in 1950, he was jailed again. (One of his lawyers was Archibald Casely Hayford, a son of the turn-of-the-century writer.)
All along, he calibrated his rhetoric carefully: radical enough to galvanize local supporters, restrained enough not to panic the British, who hoped to offer inhabitants of the Gold Coast a measure of autonomy without giving them control. Nkrumah was still in prison in 1951, when his party won an election that put it in charge of the colony. In deference to the results, colonial authorities released him, and he assumed office within weeks. Nkrumah was not a dazzling speaker, but he was forceful. When he formally demanded independence, in 1953, he wrapped the claim in stiff, high-minded language, presenting decolonization as a vindication of the West’s own ideals. “Throughout a century of alien rule, our people have, with ever increasing tendency, looked forward to that bright and glorious day when they shall regain their ancient heritage, and once more take their place rightly as free men in the world,” he said, speaking at the National Assembly but addressing an audience in London.
In French’s telling, Ghanaian independence feels almost inevitable—the British never had a feasible plan to stop it—and so its arrival is oddly anticlimactic. Perhaps it felt that way to Nkrumah, too. In his first speech as head of state, delivered just after midnight on March 6, 1957, the time the colonial mandate expired, he told a cheering crowd, “Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.” For him, Ghanaian nationhood was only part of a larger vision, and it’s this larger vision that French wants to celebrate.
Liberation was already spreading—not everywhere (Rhodesia stayed under white rule until 1980, when it became Zimbabwe, and South African apartheid lasted until 1994), but through most of the continent. To Nkrumah, unifying Africa was the logical next step, no more implausible than what had just been achieved. In 1958, he hosted a Pan-African conference with a motto that evoked “The Communist Manifesto”: “Peoples of Africa unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!! You have a continent to regain!”
Some earlier African intellectuals looked at Black America with pity, even disdain. “The black man, you know, has had no chance in America,” J. E. Casely Hayford, a pioneering Gold Coast lawyer and author, wrote in 1903. “How could he? The environment has been dead against him, and, though emancipated, he remains in many respects a bondman.” Casely Hayford hoped that, given time and freedom, the Gold Coast might achieve the progress that had eluded Black Americans, restoring the peace and prosperity that existed on the continent “before the advent of the foreign interloper.” In the decades that followed, a number of Black Americans came to agree. Marcus Garvey, born in Jamaica but famous in the United States, launched the Back-to-Africa movement, urging Black Americans to help build a “Negro Empire” across the Atlantic. The project turned out to be a mirage, if not a scam: Garvey raised money for ships that couldn’t sail, he went to prison for mail fraud, and he never once visited Africa before he died, in 1940, at fifty-two. Still, many were inspired by this vision, including Nkrumah, who embraced the “Africa” part of Garvey’s dream, while discarding the “Back-to.” What Nkrumah wanted, he later wrote, was not Black nationalism but African nationalism—no need for infusions of Black Americans on steamships.
In the opening pages of “The Second Emancipation,” French makes clear that his book is “quite deliberately not a comprehensive biography of Nkrumah,” who emerges as an energetic but elusive figure. He was so devoted to African self-determination that he sometimes ended letters “Yours Africanly.” We know less about his marriage, to a Christian woman from Egypt, than about his friendship with the Englishwoman who served as his private secretary. (“Marriage does not exist in nature,” he once remarked, “and does not warrant the importance that has come to be attached to it.”) For all his grand talk of philosophy, his real interest was political strategy. He once listed the four groups he studied in America: “the Republicans, the Democrats, the Communists and the Trotskyites.” He returned to England, where he acquired a Communist Party membership card without signing it, and founded a cell he called the Circle, dedicated to creating a union of African socialist republics. The group was less Soviet than it seemed, French assures us, though it was not much less authoritarian: members swore a literal blood oath, pledging loyalty not to Moscow but to Nkrumah himself.
Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast in 1947. The next year, a protest he was involved with tipped into a riot, with mobs targeting Syrian shopkeepers, and he was arrested for being a threat to “public order.” He was released a few weeks later, and—once he had gathered enough followers, and quarrelled with enough local activists—founded his own party, the Convention People’s Party, launching a nonviolent campaign he called “positive action.” After further protests, in 1950, he was jailed again. (One of his lawyers was Archibald Casely Hayford, a son of the turn-of-the-century writer.)
All along, he calibrated his rhetoric carefully: radical enough to galvanize local supporters, restrained enough not to panic the British, who hoped to offer inhabitants of the Gold Coast a measure of autonomy without giving them control. Nkrumah was still in prison in 1951, when his party won an election that put it in charge of the colony. In deference to the results, colonial authorities released him, and he assumed office within weeks. Nkrumah was not a dazzling speaker, but he was forceful. When he formally demanded independence, in 1953, he wrapped the claim in stiff, high-minded language, presenting decolonization as a vindication of the West’s own ideals. “Throughout a century of alien rule, our people have, with ever increasing tendency, looked forward to that bright and glorious day when they shall regain their ancient heritage, and once more take their place rightly as free men in the world,” he said, speaking at the National Assembly but addressing an audience in London.
In French’s telling, Ghanaian independence feels almost inevitable—the British never had a feasible plan to stop it—and so its arrival is oddly anticlimactic. Perhaps it felt that way to Nkrumah, too. In his first speech as head of state, delivered just after midnight on March 6, 1957, the time the colonial mandate expired, he told a cheering crowd, “Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.” For him, Ghanaian nationhood was only part of a larger vision, and it’s this larger vision that French wants to celebrate.
Liberation was already spreading—not everywhere (Rhodesia stayed under white rule until 1980, when it became Zimbabwe, and South African apartheid lasted until 1994), but through most of the continent. To Nkrumah, unifying Africa was the logical next step, no more implausible than what had just been achieved. In 1958, he hosted a Pan-African conference with a motto that evoked “The Communist Manifesto”: “Peoples of Africa unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!! You have a continent to regain!”
Before he could unite Africa, Nkrumah had to unite Ghana. Even the country’s name was a contrivance, borrowed from an empire that had flourished a thousand years earlier and hundreds of miles away, in what is now Mauritania and Mali. Much of the land that became Ghana had been part of the Ashanti kingdom, but calling the new state Ashanti might have implied that descendants of these people enjoyed a privileged place. One of Nkrumah’s first initiatives after independence was the Avoidance of Discrimination Act, which banned “the election of persons on account of their tribal, regional, or religious affiliations.” Like many appeals to unity, it doubled as a demand for obedience. The law hampered opposition parties, many of which were rooted in ethnic or religious groups; to survive, they banded together to form the United Party, Nkrumah’s main rival until 1964, when he banned opposition parties altogether.
French dutifully, if reluctantly, records how Nkrumah came to dominate nearly every corner of Ghanaian life—and how a good many Ghanaians came to feel that they needed liberation from their liberator. His face was on stamps and billboards; hundreds of his critics were detained or deported. One of the most prominent, the anti-colonial intellectual J. B. Danquah, died in prison. French sometimes points out, accurately but not germanely, that the British had been illiberal, too. At other moments he seems to excuse Nkrumah’s excesses by faulting his rivals: “Those who faced off against him rarely did so with anything resembling the spirit of a loyal opposition.” More often, he portrays Nkrumah as oddly passive. “The ruling party’s growing reputation for corruption, like its leader’s personality cult, created serious liabilities for Nkrumah,” French writes, as if the founder with great ideas and the autocrat who undermined him were two separate people. His view of Nkrumah resembles Nkrumah’s view of Garvey: a visionary whose vision is easy to admire if you ignore what he actually did.
It is surely no accident that many of the twentieth century’s most beloved liberation heroes are men like King and Gandhi, who retain their unsullied reputations in part because they never had to govern. In Africa, one fondly recalled figure is Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese revolutionary who took inspiration from Nkrumah’s dream of a united continent. Lumumba briefly served as Congo’s Prime Minister; he was executed at age thirty-five by political rivals in collaboration with Belgian mercenaries. (The C.I.A. had drawn up its own contingency plans to kill him.) Nkrumah and Lumumba had once agreed, secretly, to form a Ghana-Congo federation. But, when Lumumba fought for control of Congo, Nkrumah held back, and Ghanaian troops, serving under U.N. command, once halted a radio broadcast of Lumumba’s. This may have been a Cold War calculation: Lumumba sought support from Moscow, while Nkrumah wanted American cash for a hydroelectric dam he hoped would supply power to Ghana. Africans may have had nothing to lose but their chains, but the leader of a precarious new state had plenty to lose—if, say, he failed to meet the country’s need for more electricity.
In 1966, the Kenyan political scientist Ali A. Mazrui published a blistering essay in the African journal Transition, titled “Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar.” Beneath Nkrumah’s elaborate rhetoric, Mazrui argued, lay a simple drive to consolidate control through a one-party state that would inevitably empower only his most loyal—and least thoughtful—allies. By the time of his overthrow, Mazrui wrote, Nkrumah’s “commitment to pan-Africanism” was “almost the only attractive aspect of his political career.” Nkrumah was abroad, touring China and Vietnam, when the coup came, and he went into exile in Guinea, where the President, Ahmed Sékou Touré, named him an honorary co-President. He never returned to Ghana, and he died in 1972, in Romania, where he was seeking treatment for prostate cancer.
Mazrui’s essay provoked a strong reaction. Transition published responses defending Nkrumah in terms that sound much like French’s position today: whatever his faults, he remained a symbol of African liberation, and could not be judged without taking into account (as one rebuttal put it) “the venom of all the imperialist powers” bent on sabotaging his Pan-African project. Mazrui noted, in a rejoinder to the rejoinders, that many of the most fervent letters did not seem to come from Ghana. “I have a strange suspicion,” he wrote, “that it is relatively easy to worship a particular African dictator—provided he is someone else’s dictator.” In fact, many Ghanaians seem to remember Nkrumah fondly, perhaps because of what followed his fall: decades in which the country’s leadership alternated between elected Presidents and military juntas. John Dramani Mahama, whose father served in Nkrumah’s government and was jailed after the coup, has recalled him as “a true visionary” and lamented the “lost decades” that followed his ouster. Mahama is now playing his own role in this history: he is the President of Ghana, reëlected this year to a second, non-consecutive term. Nkrumah may not generally be considered a global liberation hero, but in Ghana he retains a title that is plenty impressive: founding father.
Mamdani discusses Mazrui in his book, because Transition, the magazine that published him, was founded by Rajat Neogy, who, like Mamdani, was a Ugandan of Indian ancestry, eventually forced into exile. Neogy left not during Amin’s Asian expulsion but earlier, after running afoul of the preceding regime, President Milton Obote’s. (Neogy landed in Ghana, where Transition continued for a time; decades later, I worked for a revived version of the magazine.) When Amin seized power, in 1971, many Ugandans hoped that he would be less brutal than Obote, though the early signs were ominous. Mamdani, then a teaching assistant at Makerere University, had his one encounter with the new ruler when Amin visited the university on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. Amin, a decorated soldier who was also an accomplished rugby player and boxer, enjoyed jokes that doubled as threats. “I came here with a battalion of soldiers so that when you lift your heads from the books, you know who has power,” he told the academics. Next came a crack about gonorrhea which turned into a warning: “I will not tolerate you spreading political gonorrhea in Uganda.” Weeks later, he announced the expulsion of Ugandans of Asian descent, including Mamdani, who was left stateless—and who has spent his career analyzing the complex relationship between power and political identities.
Unlike Nkrumah, Amin was an extraordinarily vivid character, sometimes gruesomely so. Forest Whitaker won an Oscar for playing him in “The Last King of Scotland,” a film based on a novel inspired by his reign. (The title nods to Amin’s taste for extravagant honorifics.) Nothing in the movie, however, matches the opening of Barbet Schroeder’s 1974 documentary, “General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait,” which lingers on a public execution—bodies dumped into a truck, blood still seeping from bullet holes. Mamdani takes a more nuanced view. He comes neither to bury Amin nor to praise him, but rather to puncture the more lurid myths—there’s no evidence, he notes, that Amin was a cannibal—and to rebut the idea that Amin was “a Hitlerite presence in Africa.” Even mild revisionism, however, proves hard to sustain. Mamdani suggests that the Army “kept theft of Asian property to a minimum” during the expulsion, though his own mother’s jewelry vanished at customs. He quotes Mazrui, who taught at Makerere and investigated a supposed campus massacre; after asking around, Mazrui concluded that soldiers had “started beating up students” but that no one had died. In 1978, testifying in Washington before Congress, Mazrui called Amin “a very brutal tyrant,” but described Uganda as “relatively anarchic”—less controlled, he suggested, than apartheid South Africa, and therefore a less suitable target for economic sanctions.
If Mamdani seems curiously forbearing toward Amin, given his own history, that has much to do with what happened next. Amin was toppled in 1979, with Tanzanian help, and lived out his exile mostly in Saudi Arabia. A few years of chaos followed: Obote briefly returned and then, in 1986, Yoweri Museveni, a former Marxist, seized power and never relinquished it. He is now one of the longest-serving heads of state in the world. Where some accounts emphasize Uganda’s economic growth and relative peace under Museveni, Mamdani emphasizes the way he amassed power by carving the country into ethnic districts. Much of Mamdani’s scholarship has shown how colonial powers ruled Africa through tribal leaders, thereby hardening ethnic divisions, and how, in the post-colonial era, “tribal” politics persisted. Amin’s mistake, he argues, was to treat the Bayindi as a special caste, just as the British had done. And Museveni’s mistake, in Mamdani’s view, was to treat “indigenous” inhabitants as entitled to preference from the state. In earlier books, Mamdani pointed out how “indigenous” status could amount to second-class citizenship, as in the United States, where Native Americans on reservations were long denied full rights. Wherever “tribal” or “indigenous” identity is invoked, Mamdani sees the remnants of a colonial order, and it sometimes seems that he rejects the possibility that any African phenomenon could be oppressive without also being tied to colonialism.
Despite his son’s name, Mahmood Mamdani has shown little enthusiasm for Nkrumah. (In an essay published the year before Zohran was born, he listed Nkrumah among the African leaders whose “nationalism turned into a language of state repression.”) For Mamdani, the most inspiring political story of the twentieth century is not Ghana’s independence but South Africa’s transformation from apartheid to multiracial democracy. In “Neither Settler nor Native” (2020), he described the way that states have often treated settlers as citizens, and natives as aliens. He wrote that too many governments—from the U.S. and Israel to Sudan—have tried to distinguish between different kinds of citizenship, with predictable results: persecution by the state, or by citizens emboldened by the state. South Africa, by contrast, was “at the frontier of decolonization,” because it had sought to treat all groups as survivors of a common past, and as citizens. Mamdani is an unconventional thinker, but here he essentially affirmed the conventional wisdom—that Nelson Mandela, who declined to seek revenge or consolidate power, got it right. Or nearly right. Mamdani also argued that South Africa’s celebrated Truth and Reconciliation Commission was, in fact, fatally flawed, because, by encouraging perpetrators to confess in exchange for possible amnesty, it framed apartheid as a set of personal crimes. In this way, he writes, the commission helped “maintain racial privilege even in a South Africa with formal racial equality.”
Instead of giving South Africa a full-throated endorsement, Mamdani urged readers to imagine “political community beyond the nation-state,” though he declined to be prescriptive. “Exactly what this new kind of state might look like is hard to say,” he wrote. French, for his part, admits that the “second emancipation” he describes was in some ways a disappointment. He blames rich countries for being “miserly toward Africa,” but also notes the role of “unaccountable” rulers, and he seems unsure whether the next era will look much different from the last. French, writing about one of the most celebrated leaders of the independence era, and Mamdani, writing about one of the most reviled, show how easy it can be to imagine African politics as either a dream or a nightmare. What remains harder to imagine is something in between. ♦
Unlike Nkrumah, Amin was an extraordinarily vivid character, sometimes gruesomely so. Forest Whitaker won an Oscar for playing him in “The Last King of Scotland,” a film based on a novel inspired by his reign. (The title nods to Amin’s taste for extravagant honorifics.) Nothing in the movie, however, matches the opening of Barbet Schroeder’s 1974 documentary, “General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait,” which lingers on a public execution—bodies dumped into a truck, blood still seeping from bullet holes. Mamdani takes a more nuanced view. He comes neither to bury Amin nor to praise him, but rather to puncture the more lurid myths—there’s no evidence, he notes, that Amin was a cannibal—and to rebut the idea that Amin was “a Hitlerite presence in Africa.” Even mild revisionism, however, proves hard to sustain. Mamdani suggests that the Army “kept theft of Asian property to a minimum” during the expulsion, though his own mother’s jewelry vanished at customs. He quotes Mazrui, who taught at Makerere and investigated a supposed campus massacre; after asking around, Mazrui concluded that soldiers had “started beating up students” but that no one had died. In 1978, testifying in Washington before Congress, Mazrui called Amin “a very brutal tyrant,” but described Uganda as “relatively anarchic”—less controlled, he suggested, than apartheid South Africa, and therefore a less suitable target for economic sanctions.
If Mamdani seems curiously forbearing toward Amin, given his own history, that has much to do with what happened next. Amin was toppled in 1979, with Tanzanian help, and lived out his exile mostly in Saudi Arabia. A few years of chaos followed: Obote briefly returned and then, in 1986, Yoweri Museveni, a former Marxist, seized power and never relinquished it. He is now one of the longest-serving heads of state in the world. Where some accounts emphasize Uganda’s economic growth and relative peace under Museveni, Mamdani emphasizes the way he amassed power by carving the country into ethnic districts. Much of Mamdani’s scholarship has shown how colonial powers ruled Africa through tribal leaders, thereby hardening ethnic divisions, and how, in the post-colonial era, “tribal” politics persisted. Amin’s mistake, he argues, was to treat the Bayindi as a special caste, just as the British had done. And Museveni’s mistake, in Mamdani’s view, was to treat “indigenous” inhabitants as entitled to preference from the state. In earlier books, Mamdani pointed out how “indigenous” status could amount to second-class citizenship, as in the United States, where Native Americans on reservations were long denied full rights. Wherever “tribal” or “indigenous” identity is invoked, Mamdani sees the remnants of a colonial order, and it sometimes seems that he rejects the possibility that any African phenomenon could be oppressive without also being tied to colonialism.
Despite his son’s name, Mahmood Mamdani has shown little enthusiasm for Nkrumah. (In an essay published the year before Zohran was born, he listed Nkrumah among the African leaders whose “nationalism turned into a language of state repression.”) For Mamdani, the most inspiring political story of the twentieth century is not Ghana’s independence but South Africa’s transformation from apartheid to multiracial democracy. In “Neither Settler nor Native” (2020), he described the way that states have often treated settlers as citizens, and natives as aliens. He wrote that too many governments—from the U.S. and Israel to Sudan—have tried to distinguish between different kinds of citizenship, with predictable results: persecution by the state, or by citizens emboldened by the state. South Africa, by contrast, was “at the frontier of decolonization,” because it had sought to treat all groups as survivors of a common past, and as citizens. Mamdani is an unconventional thinker, but here he essentially affirmed the conventional wisdom—that Nelson Mandela, who declined to seek revenge or consolidate power, got it right. Or nearly right. Mamdani also argued that South Africa’s celebrated Truth and Reconciliation Commission was, in fact, fatally flawed, because, by encouraging perpetrators to confess in exchange for possible amnesty, it framed apartheid as a set of personal crimes. In this way, he writes, the commission helped “maintain racial privilege even in a South Africa with formal racial equality.”
Instead of giving South Africa a full-throated endorsement, Mamdani urged readers to imagine “political community beyond the nation-state,” though he declined to be prescriptive. “Exactly what this new kind of state might look like is hard to say,” he wrote. French, for his part, admits that the “second emancipation” he describes was in some ways a disappointment. He blames rich countries for being “miserly toward Africa,” but also notes the role of “unaccountable” rulers, and he seems unsure whether the next era will look much different from the last. French, writing about one of the most celebrated leaders of the independence era, and Mamdani, writing about one of the most reviled, show how easy it can be to imagine African politics as either a dream or a nightmare. What remains harder to imagine is something in between. ♦
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