Samuel Fury Childs Daly at the LARB:
It isn’t a coincidence that two of the most celebrated scholars of Africa in the United States both published books about Idi Amin in the past year. Only Peterson makes the comparison to Trump explicit, but Mahmood Mamdani’s portrait of the general in Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State is hard not to read through the lens of the United States, where Mamdani has lived since the 1990s. Peterson’s book is a social history of the regime, focusing on the people who made it work; Mamdani’s is a personal account of Uganda’s last half century, covering both Amin and the autocrats who followed him. Both depict Amin not as the buffoon that many remember but as a savvy political operator who knew what people wanted and what they feared. Neither Mamdani nor Peterson denies that Amin was violent and cruel, and neither is out to rehabilitate him. While his legacy means different things to them, they both take him more seriously than most who have written about him.
Not all tyrants have some great ideological evil behind them; some are animated by ideas we might find reasonable. Amin’s organizing principle was independence, which he promised his people so often and so loudly that some of them came to believe it was really his to give.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.