Wednesday, 12 November 2025

Terry Eagleton on V.S Naipaul


Perhaps the most enjoyable, but also the most misleading, essay on Sir V.S Naipaul was published some 25 years ago by Terry Eagleton- 

A Mind So Fine: The Contradictions of V. S. Naipaul

Naipaul wasn't cerebral. Unlike Ved Mehta, he didn't write a book about analytical philosophy. Nor was he interested in Economics or Geopolitics. His work could be considered ethnographic and humanistic. Unlike Niradh Chaudhuri, it made no grand world-historical claims. 

I suppose Marxists might say that as a darkie, it was a contradiction for him not to be a Marxist. Indeed, it was a contradiction that there were any non-Marxists in the world. Such people should just slit their own throat rather than put the proletariat to the inconvenience and expense of doing so for them.  

If Naipaul didn't become a Marxist, what did he become? It is tempting to compare him to 'outsider' authors like Colin Wilson. These were the 'angry young men' who started to get published around the same time as Naipaul. They were considered Fascists who thought of themselves as Nietzschean supermen. But they were from the wrong side of the tracks and did not have university degrees. Naipaul was more respectable. He stuck to a narrow groove while Wilson and Stuart Holroyd ended up babbling about Space Vampires or ESP. I suppose, having actually got a degree, Naipaul was under no illusions about his own intelligence. 

I suppose the same could be said of Dom Moraes who was younger and who achieved fame earlier than Naipaul. But Moraes was a poet, not a novelist. Like Ved Mehta he was quite good at getting international scoops- or what might pass for them. He could get interviews with the King or Prime Minister while Naipaul had to be content to talking to the cab driver. Moraes brought out the glamour and exoticism of foreign places, or- if too drunk to do so- was nevertheless prolific. Naipaul's was stingy and relentlessly morose. It was his one gift. 

Arriving at Oxford University from a down-at-heel family in Trinidad,

They were middle class and, on the maternal side, quite wealthy and socially prominent. His father owned his own house and a Ford Prefect car. Trinidad, as an oil exporter, was relatively well off. 

the eighteen-year-old V. S. Naipaul wrote: “Gone are the days of the aristocrats. Nearly everyone comes to Oxford on a state grant. The standard of the place naturally goes down.”

They year was 1950. Rationing only ended in 1954. The highest marginal rate of tax was 98 percent.  On the other other hand, the country needed scientists and mathematicians more than ever. Thus recruitment from State Schools rose to about 40 percent. The country needed to create 'Comprehensive' Schools on the model of the American High School. In other words, all children should have an opportunity to go on to College, otherwise the country would lose its super-power status. This meant that the quality of teaching had to rise. Thus many more women and working class origin men were entering the two ancient Universities. They were aware of their responsibilities to the State. University would fit them to serve it better. The days of Max Beerbohm & Evelyn Waugh were long gone. The country could not afford intellectual or aesthetic dandyism. Naipaul's own prose was workmanlike.

It was as though Dick Cheney were to complain that there were too few Trotskyists in his golf club.

Plenty of neo-cons were ex-Trotskyites.  

My own entry into the dreaming spires, a decade or so later, was unfortunate for just the opposite reason: the place was positively swarming with patricians, almost all of whom seemed to be called Nigel.

Tax rates were high but the Tories were in power. Anyway, you could get rich by writing about sexy secret agents who had been to the right schools and had good tailors. It must be said the 'public' (that is private) schools were upping their game academically. The War had shown that the British bulldog spirit wasn't enough. Brains too were necessary. 

Towering in stature as a result of generations of fine breeding, they brayed rather than spoke, elbowed the townspeople off the thin medieval pavements, and joked about letting loose their hounds on “oiks” (working-class undergraduates) like myself. 
As a stunted North-of-England plebeian, I found myself ducking servilely between their legs like Gulliver in Brobdingnag. It was the kind of place in which one would as soon have worn a pink tutu as sported jeans. Naipaul would have been in his element.

Wrong colour, old boy. Also, the other Indians at Oxford looked down on him because he was descended from cane-cutters or crab-catchers. 


Arriving in England only to become plus anglais que les Anglais is a familiar émigré tale.

It wasn't Naipaul's. He didn't get his B.Litt. Nor did he become a barrister. He worked for the BBC's West Indian service. His colleagues were Leftists.  

V. S. Naipaul, who came to the country in 1950 and has made it his home ever since, is one of the latest in a venerable line of literary refugees,

immigrant. Had he got his B.Litt and then a PhD, he'd have been a Professor back home living the good life.  

several of them among the most eminent figures in modern “English” literature. There was Joseph Conrad, the Pole who commended the chuckleheaded values of the British merchant navy;

Values that made this country stronger and richer. The merchant marine played a great role in both World Wars.  

Henry James, the American who attended English country-house parties

those given by bluestockings where he met fellow artists and intellectuals 

as devotedly as Madonna drops in on fashion shows; T. S. Eliot, who looked and sounded like a rather dotty Anglican vicar.

But he encouraged new writing by authors with widely differing points of view. Indeed, he had boosted G. V Desani who was a broadcaster for the Beeb. Would VS write in his vein? Or would he adopt the view of Niradh Chaudhuri whose Autobiography had enraptured E.M Forster, J.C Squire & even Winston Churchill? Naipaul, disillusioned by the failure of Indian, or African, of Caribbean Socialism, moved in Chaudhuri's direction. 

Eliot famously remarked of his compatriot James that “he had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it,” which was a backhanded way of congratulating him on being a kosher Englishman, since the English have customs and pieties rather than fancy theories. It was self-congratulation too: it takes one expertly disguised expatriate to know another.

Where was the disguise? Neither was a cowboy by birth or breeding.  

George Bernard Shaw recognized immediately that his fellow Dubliner Oscar Wilde had appointed himself Irish jester to the English court, a role he shared with Shaw and which would later be inherited by Brendan Behan.

Behan was an IRA man. He wanted to bomb the Brits not entertain them.  

Shaw was also aware of how dangerous as well as exhilarating this bit part was. The English relished Wilde's mimicry of them

They relished his wit. He wasn't a mimic.  

but also suspected that imitation was the sincerest form of mockery. (It was Naipaul who was later to put into currency the phrase “mimic men,” the title of one of his more lugubrious novels.)

It looked as though Naipaul might be moving to the left. The Communists condemned the 'bourgeois nationalists' who had taken power in the colonies. Naipaul had been in Uganda when he started writing the book. Obote had just deposed the Kabaka and was taking his country in a Socialist direction. Naipaul had some sympathy for Cheddi Jagan who had been displaced by Forbes Burnham. Naipaul could be seen as endorsing Afrocentrism. Asiatics merely mimicked the Europeans. African origin people would forge an indigenous path to Socialism.  

Wilde's use of the English language was a shade too polished and perfect;

he was a classicist. I suppose one might say he was influenced by Mahaffy who did have Gaelic ancestry. Wilde was a descendant of a Dutchman who came over with William of Orange. His blood was English though his mother was a fervent Irish nationalist. 

the genuine English aristocrat of the Victorian era said things like “huntin'” and “shootin',” too indolent to labor over his consonants.

Whereas proles never dropped their aitches.  

And indeed, without Farquhar, Steele, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Shaw, Wilde, and O'Casey, there would have been precious little English stage comedy to boast of.

Shakespeare remains the greatest comic dramatist in the language. King Lear is a laugh riot, provided Ophelia's farts are well timed. 

Who better placed to write comedy than those who know the natives' language and conventions from the inside, yet are also foreign enough to cast a sardonic eye on their sanctities?

Which is why the Chinese wrote better English comedy than the Irish who, after all, shared the language.  

The Irish did not only have to send the British their rents and cattle; they also had to write most of their great literature for them.

While being whipped by Capitalists wearing silk top-hats.  

In Ireland, as in Naipaul's Trinidad, one of the most revered of all native customs was getting out of the place.

Ireland had a big famine. Trinidad didn't. Naipaul's ancestors were happy enough to get sent there.  

The mountains in Ireland, somewhat unusually, are ringed around the coast, as though divinely arranged to keep the natives in; but writers could usually rely on being driven out by church and state to Boston or Birmingham.

Till the place became a knowledge economy and its per capita income rose above that of the UK.  

Although Naipaul found himself hemmed in by an ocean rather than a mountain range, crossing it proved to be a one-way passage, as it did for James Joyce.

Joyce might have settled in Dublin if his cinema venture had taken off. Naipaul had married an English woman and, I suppose, that might have caused awkwardness back then in Trinidad. 

Like Naipaul, Joyce abandoned his country early but never ceased to revisit it in imagination; having escaped in reality, both men could then find their way back in fantasy.

Both Ireland and the West Indies were interesting places. Their people were artistically gifted. Still, their populations were small and thus their societies afforded fewer avenues of advancement. 

Joyce once remarked that it was this freedom from English social and literary convention that lay at the root of his talent.

Joyce was a student of literature determined to advance the modernist school of writing. His experiments were appreciated for their boldness even when readers were left baffled.  

Deprived of a stable tradition, the colonial writer has to pillage, to parody, to make it up as he or she goes along, so that exile and experiment go together like Laurel and Hardy.

One might say this of G.V Desani who left school at 13 and knocked about the world before finding his calling as a journalist and broadcaster. Naipaul had been a student of Tolkien at Oxford. He had a keen sense of literary style and exercised an iron self-discipline over his pen. Indeed, his devotion to his craft was exemplary. 

It is not surprising that Ireland was the only region of the British Isles early last century to produce a flourishing indigenous modernism.

Virginia Woolf's real name was Peggy O'Hara.  

Otherwise, Britain had to import its modernism, along with its Ford cars and chinoiserie.

Britain produced cars which it exported. Eagleton may have heard of the Rolls Royce. England produced a lot of Chinese style porcelain from the late Seventeenth century onward.  

Naipaul is not nearly as avant-garde a writer as Joyce (who is?), but he has been both blessed and afflicted by a similarly skewed relationship to the metropolis.

Naipaul isn't avant-garde. On the other hand, his real name was Peggy O'Hara. His father was a leprechaun.  

Joyce leapt over the imperial capital of London into the arms of the continentals, with whom Ireland had enjoyed a fruitful cultural relationship ever since the monastic émigrés of the Middle Ages.

Irish monks had helped re-light the candle of learning on the continent in the sixth century.  

(His fellow Dubliner Samuel Beckett was to do much the same some years later.) As a Trinidadian, however, Naipaul had no such organic affinity to continental Europe; it was England or nothing.

Had he gone to America- like Ved Mehta- he would have done well enough. But he would have been held to a higher journalistic standard. 

In the litany of literary refugees, Wilde,

did have to leave England, but he wrote little after that.  Shaw did well in England but would have been welcome to settle in Ireland. Like Yeats, he might have been appointed a Senator. Joyce faced censorship. Paris was the ideal place for him. He was pushing forward the program of Mallarme. Either that or Tin Tin. I often confuse the two. 

Shaw, and Joyce stand out in one notable way.

Wilde & Joyce were poets but Joyce wasn't much of a dramatist. Exiles is execrable.

They are the only ones who were adamantly on the political left—though “Stalinist” might describe Shaw more accurately than “socialist,” and Joyce's radical sympathies were short-lived.

So, there is no commonality between the three. Wilde ended up converting to Catholicism.  Chesterton was more Socialistic- i.e. anti-Semitic.

The others were either studiously “unpolitical,” or ensconced somewhere on the political right. For many—Conrad, Pound, Yeats, Eliot, Lewis—the right in question was an unpleasantly embattled one, rather than the moderate Burkean Toryism of many of the English natives.

Conrad's Conservatism was of that sort. The others were a bit mad. 

If you think too much about conservatism, you cannot really be an English conservative, and other mimic men recognized as much.

Nor can you do any good as a Socialist if you see the Tory cloven hoof wherever you look.  

The resilience of this brand of conservatism lies in its distaste for the political in favor of the customary, instinctual, and spontaneous.

Eagleton had lived through the Thatcher era. Indeed, by the time he wrote this, Labour's Blair was pretty much a Thatcherite.  

When Naipaul disowns politics by informing us, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, that he has “no guiding political idea” and cherishes his “intuition alone,” he is telling us his politics.

He is telling us he isn't political. He is an artist.  

It is, presumably, pure intuition that leads him to conclude An Area of Darkness with the declaration that the Indians have no sense of history and their country “will never cease to require the arbitration of a conqueror.”

In other words, Naipaul is repeating Niradh Chaudhuri's verdict. At the time is seemed plausible that India might become a client state because it couldn't feed or defend itself. Nehru, 'the last Englishman to rule India', had been a mimic man. He might have gone to the same school as Churchill but he could not do for India what Churchill had done for England.  

There is, then, a well-attested affinity in British culture between the émigré and the conservative intellectual

if they fled Communism or 'National' Socialism- sure.  

—not only in the literary field but all the way from Wittgenstein

who described himself as a Communist at heart though he also said he was against it in theory but for it in practice. He was a deeply silly man. 

and Namier to Popper and Gombrich.

Gombrich was a close friend of Popper. But it was Hayek who influenced Thatcher. One may also mention Michael Polanyi, who was close to TS Eliot. But his brother, Karl, was a Leftist at the time. The theory that emigres are likely to be right wing falls down when you find two brothers who choose opposing ideologies.  

Like Conrad, some of these luminaries were in flight from political turbulence at the heart of Europe and turned to what seemed a more sedate, traditionalist milieu in the United Kingdom.

The UK was quite rich and talented men could find a market there for their work. It was only if they wrote frankly about sex that they had to cross the Channel.  

Others, such as James and Eliot, were allured by what felt like a more “organic” social order—

they were returning to their ancestral island 

mannered, devious, and stratified—in which their thought could flourish more vigorously than it would in an autocratic culture

Doestoevsky's Russia was plenty autocratic. 

or in a brashly explicit one like the United States.

Emerson was constantly taking his dick out and slapping it on the table. Henry fled to Rome where the Pope is above that sort of thing. 

And émigrés do not kick a hole in the lifeboat they are clambering aboard;

sadly, some do.  

they compensate for their outsider status by becoming honorary aristocrats—but aristocrats of wit and style rather than of blood and property.

There are plenty of left-wing aristocrats. But a man of wit and style might end up the Earl of Beaconsfield. 

From Wilde to Tom Stoppard, Ernest Gellner to Isaiah Berlin, expatriates intent on out-Englishing the English have

confined their conversation to the weather. I find it is a mistake to dwell too much on ones relations with the Royal family even if one is the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and thus entitled to tell the publican to kiss my black arse if he suggests I am inebriated.  

resorted to humor, satire, and an acerbic vein of wit. In doing so, they become spiritually superior to the philistine middle classes who want to ship them back home.

I wasn't aware that anybody wanted to ship Stoppard or Gellner 'back home'. On the other hand, I did have a student who tried to mug Stoppard's son.  

Naipaul's conservatism has been lambasted often enough, notably by postcolonial critics, though his opinion of this school of thought is not, one imagines, all that different from what Clint Eastwood's would be if he ever got wind of it.

He wasn't particularly conservative. He liked the Shiv Sena. But he also thought India would go to the dogs without the Dynasty.  

Dagmar Barnouw's Naipaul's Strangers is a bravely unfashionable attempt to rescue the writer from those who accuse him of racism, chauvinism, and snobbery; and, although some might consider this as easy as defending George Bush from the charge of being parochial,

that would be difficult. He was parochial- if not the veritable village idiot. Cheney ran things. 

the book yields some admirably sensitive readings of Naipaul's prose, despite being extravagantly uncritical of its revered subject. Its pages are everywhere redolent of the smell of incense.

She was White- German white.  She had to say nice things about a darkie. 

Barnouw does aim a few well-targeted shots at the postcolonial romanticizing of “the other,” recording Naipaul's distaste for, in the words of another critic, “privileged people who are sentimental about primitivism in the Third World.”

i.e. guys who rave about Satyajit Ray movies.  

Anyone suffering from this widespread affliction could certainly do worse than read a few of Naipaul's books, even if the cure might turn out to be more nauseating than the disease.

Vomiting is a good thing if it gets rid of a toxin.  

This, after all, is the man whose oracular pronouncements include the judgment that nothing was ever created in the West Indies;

except calypso. Lord Invader's 'Rum & Coca Cola' was a hit for the Andrew Sisters during the War.  

that the West Indians never seriously doubted the virtue of the imperialist culture to which they aspired;

Because being rich is better than being as poor as shit.  

and that the ethnic situation of African Americans cannot be the subject of serious literature.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was a book about carpentry.  

If Naipaul is understandably irritated by well-heeled sentimentalists, it is partly because they dispute his insinuation that when it comes to colonialism, the natives were at least as much to blame as their masters.

This was the Leftist view. Local elites were very evil. Indeed, they still are. Why can't they all just slit their own throats?  

If you do not wish to provoke your compatriots to helpless fury, it is probably advisable not to open your account of the Caribbean, The Middle Passage, with the sentence: “There was such a crowd of immigrant-type West Indians on the boat-train platform at Waterloo that I was glad I was travelling first class to the West Indies.”

Who wouldn't be glad of travelling first class more particularly if the Government is picking up the tab?  

Boa Vista, in Brazil near the border with British Guiana, is a “preposterous city” (the Waugh-like epithet is significant), which probably means, among other things, that they did not bring Naipaul his coffee quickly enough.

It meant it was built on the Parisian model. I suppose it had declined economically somewhat.  

It is hard to know, muses Naipaul, what the Guianese are thinking—just as it is hard to know what he himself is thinking when churning out an obtuse cliché such as that.

No. We understand that the Guyanese are agreeable conversationalists but play their cards close to their chests.  

Like the equally dyspeptic traveler Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia seems to find most of the people he meets in his wanderings so disagreeable that one wonders why he doesn't just stay at home.

Disagreeable people are more entertaining to read about more particularly if they live far far away.  

Perhaps traveling is a way of staying faithful to having grown up nowhere in particular;

Naipaul has told us a lot about where he grew up.  

you can feel homeless anywhere at all.

More particularly if you don't have kids.  

Like Gulliver, Naipaul finds the same pettiness, corruption, and betrayal everywhere he goes. India, he announces in An Area of Darkness, “invited conquest” and has nothing to contribute to the world. It is a country “with an infinite capacity for being plundered,”

Not any more. The Chinese had found nothing worth taking and had withdrawn unilaterally.  

which is rather like claiming that Ethiopian children have an infinite capacity for starving to death.

No. They have just the same finite capacity as the rest of us. 

The Taj Mahal, he reflects, might as well be transported slab by slab to the United States, since in India it is sheerly wasteful. No doubt some enterprising Texan will take the hint. In Naipaul's own contemptuous imagery, India comes down to the starving child defecating by the wayside and the mangy dog waiting to eat up the excrement.

Life under Nehruvian Socialism had its drawbacks. His successors big plan for India involved everybody skipping a meal. 

These and similarly insulting fatuities are the language of a writer who detests political generalities, works by innocent intuition alone, and is celebrated by Barnouw, among others, for the delicate particularity of his perceptions.

At least the fellow didn't gas on about evil elites and the suffering subaltern.  

The portrayal of the Muslim world in Among the Believers would make the book enjoyable bedtime reading for Richard Perle.

It was an accurate enough reflection of popular opinion at the time. 'Beyond Belief' went further because Islamists were going further.  

With their Jamesian sense of nuanced judgment and fine discrimination, novels such as Guerrillas and In a Free State appear to view all colonial emancipation as self-interested, self-deluding fantasy.

Naipaul had been in Uganda before the place turned to shit. Museveni has helped the country rebuild from the bottom up. This involves respecting local history and traditions and bringing back the Kabaka etc.  

Naipaul has only to sniff an ideal to detect in it the stirrings of self-aggrandizement. He complains of his people having been stripped of history, but does just the same himself in order to avoid the discomforting truth that colonialism may have had a hand in their present plight.

Many share Lee Kuan Yeuw's view that colonialism ended too soon.  

Few writers have a shrewder understanding of what has been called colonial cringe, and few are more adept at analyzing the self-serving myths of the powerless.

Niradh got there first and did a more thorough job.  

In my own country of Ireland, it has not been unknown for some dejected soul to down one pint of Guinness too many out of sheer depression over the Gaelic defeat at the battle of Kinsale in 1601, or for the odd nationalist, outraged by the injustice of the eighteenth-century Penal Laws, to find it hard to struggle out of bed in the morning.

The same thing happens to me when I remember the ejection of Iyers from Iyerland by Maratha leprechauns like Leo Varadkar.  

Colonial peoples can indeed be marked by shame and fantasy, self-loathing and self-deception, pious rhetoric and sentimental bluster.

Anybody can do stupid shit.  

But some of them can also laugh about the fact; and there is a difference between recognizing this syndrome and asserting, as some in Ireland have, that the Irish themselves were largely responsible for the Great Famine.

The Finns were certainly responsible for theirs. Malthusian problems have Malthusian solutions.  

This is just another version of the self-odium for which the natives are being castigated.

Everybody should scold everybody for ever and ever.  

The colonial who rebukes his compatriots had better be careful that his complaints are not just another symptom of the whining he condemns in them. Naipaul sees with brutal realism how the dispossessed can sometimes collude in their own subjugation, but he does not dwell at length on the moral obscenity of the subjugation itself.

Not to mention the moral obscenity of having money in the bank. Everybody should simply starve to death to avoid this fate.  

Instead, he believes that all causes, including the idea of justice, are corrupting, that every man is an island, and that pity and compassion for a colonial people will not do because they baselessly encourage hope.

Also, Naipaul had some money in the bank. Yet he didn't even try to chop off his own head! This is morally obscene.  

Rare is the writer as exquisitely talented as he who is so long on observation and so short on sympathy. Naipaul does not seem to know the meaning of geniality, which may well be the ultimate judgment of the colonial system under which he grew up.

West Indians are terribly genial.  

In An Area of Darkness, we learn at one point that Naipaul's female companion has suddenly fainted at his side—a surprising revelation, since he had not previously bothered to mention her presence at all.

His wife was white- a fellow Oxford graduate. Naipaul chose his wives well. The one nice thing he did was take the blame for his wife's infertility.  

What champions like Barnouw would no doubt call steelily disenchanted realism is in fact the lopsided antirealism of one who can hardly bring himself to acknowledge the realities of love and courage.

Unlike Eagleton who praises the patriotic love and courage the British Merchant Marine displayed in two world wars. 

When he writes of how the powerless lie about themselves and to themselves, he cannot resist ruining the point by adding “since it is their only resource,” which is itself a sort of lie.

They should scold elites instead.  

Literary Occasions gathers together some of Naipaul's essays about writing, mixing autobiographical pieces, prefaces to his own novels, and his Nobel Prize speech with articles on Conrad, Kipling, Nirad Chaudhuri, and other Indian writers. The volume charts the extraordinary spiral of displacements that make up Naipaul's career.

There was no displacement- just a steady rise into affluence and international recognition.  

It is a life in which one fantasy gives way to another, one fiction is concealed within a second, one potential homecoming turns out to be yet another assignation with strangeness.

Nonsense! He did well at school and well enough at Uni. He fell on his feet with the BBC- a recognized path into the book racket. Two of his books- 'House for Mr. Biswas' & 'Area of Darkness' were good. After that, he turned out dreck which, however, found a ready enough market. He was a brown Eeyore at a time when things were improving for darker skinned people. 

Born into an Indian community in Trinidad, the grandchild of indentured immigrant laborers, Naipaul came from an island that was geographically ambiguous—marooned between the Caribbean and South America—and an ethnic background that was even more so.

Nonsense! He was from the Caribbean. His ethnicity was North Indian. There was nothing ambiguous about any of this.  

Trinidadian Indians still had a smattering of their indigenous culture but one that was already on the wane, so Naipaul claims, when he was a child.

Rising affluence meant the reverse was the case. The Arya Samajis felt themselves equal to the Presbyterians.  

He could understand Hindi but not speak it.

His sister studied at Benares Hindu University. She decided that Hindi is only good for talking to cows. After Independence, many Indians stopped learning a Vernacular language. It was the Brits who had insisted on it.  

His community, at home neither in the West nor in the East, held itself aloof from the racially mixed life of the street and knew nothing of Muslims.

They knew them well enough. There was a syncretic element to life in the villages.  

Naipaul would eventually come to see his own detached, passive, observer-like status as a kind of Hindu trait;

He identified as a Brahmin but had little interest in Vedanta which teaches that the atman (soul) is a detached observer.  

it certainly proved easily translatable later on into the sardonic, de haut en bas judgments of the English gentleman.

Like whom? Anthony Powell? Whatever Naipaul's faults, he never tried to pass himself off as the Duchess of Devonshire. I suppose that is one reason the English literary establishment hasn't taken to me in the way they took to Naipaul.  

In both cases, there is an apartness, a quick sense of caste, and a horror of uncleanness.

Nonsense! The English gentleman does not practice untouchability. I suppose India, being very hot, has a sense of caste because of a primitive type of pathogen avoidance theory.  

This insider/outsider status within Trinidad, which the colonial relation to Britain simply wrote large, was a social one too: the Naipaul family was lower middle class, furnished with some rudimentary culture but socially impoverished.

The African origin people had urbanized and risen through education and skills training. The Indians were at the bottom of the heap being concentrated in rural areas.  

Naipaul senior, an odd-job man turned journalist and short-story writer, tried to raise himself a little by writing,

he succeeded. A White editor spotted his talent.  

only to look in the mirror one morning and fail to see his face reflected there. He had merged back into the anonymous masses and suffered a mental breakdown.

He had written an article which provoked the wrath of some rural Hindus. He was forced to sacrifice a goat to Kali. Being an Arya Samajist, this caused him to suffer a nervous breakdown.  

Along with the émigré, the lower middle class occupies an honorable niche among the architects of English literature. It was from this Janus-faced social stratum (“contradiction incarnate,” Marx called it) that the major realist novel of the nineteenth century was produced. The Brontë sisters

didn't do realism.  

were the children of a poor Anglican parson; George Eliot was the daughter of a provincial farm bailiff;

No. He managed a big estate. Bailiffs worked under him. 

Charles Dickens was the son of an impecunious civil-service clerk; Thomas Hardy's father was a small-time West Country builder.

He was himself an architect- a step up from being a stone-mason and builder. 

Squeezed precariously between the social establishment and the impoverished plebs, this group lived out the conflict between aspiration and frustration,

No. It rose. The whole country did.  

individual ambition and communal loyalty, which also marks the work of so many colonial authors.

The nineteenth century Brits were writers living in an age of expanding affluence and political enfranchisement. They wrote for people like themselves. Colonial authors who wrote for a foreign audience faced very different challenges and had much more limited opportunities. 

If the émigré is literally foreign, the lower middle class are internal migrants.

No. They are indigenous. Some rise, some fall.  

They are inside and outside conventional society at the same time, peevish, resentful, and pathologically insecure,

like Marx & Engels? 

yet powered by a formidable drive for cultivation and respectability.

This may or may not be the case. George Eliot & Mrs. Gaskell was happy to use dialect words to add verisimilitude to their novels.   

The impulse to belong, and the urge to break away, fight it out in the Brontës as they do in Naipaul's Mr. Biswas, a portrait of his self-divided father.

Nonsense! Biswas is a journalist with Arya Samaji leanings. He wants reform, rationality and the purging of superstition. He reads Samuel Smiles & Epictetus. He believes in progress.

Biswas is 'ghar jamai'- i.e. financially dependent on his in-laws- and Indians easily understand the source of his frustration. But so do people from Hong Kong. Timothy Mo's 'Monkey King' features a protagonist in the same position. More daringly than Biswas, he won't consummate his marriage till his father-in-law pays the customary dowry. 

The colonial writer's talent, which allows him to portray his own people, is also what cuts him adrift from them.

Nonsense! R.K Narayan wasn't adrift from his people. If you have enough talent, your people will love you.  

To write about your people is already to write your way out of them.

It really isn't. To do it well you need to find out more about them. Journalism is a good stepping stone into novel writing.  

The act of portraying from the inside is also inescapably one of alienation;

It may be if you become more and more critical of your milieu 

in possessing yourself in the act of authorship, you come to dispossess yourself of your place.

Or your loving recreation of it increases the pleasure you derive from it.  

Childhood for most of us is a time when one has no idea what on earth is going on, but for the young Naipaul

the eldest son and his father's confidante 

this state of ignorance was painfully compounded.

The boy suffered when his father suffered. He produced a great book to commemorate that remarkable man. But VS was no 'village Hampden'. He was a guy who got a scholarship to Oxford at the age of 16.  

His own experience was profoundly strange to him,

he believed it was strange to his father. But he made a career for himself as a journalist. VS would make a place for himself in the world. But other Trinidadians had been equally successful in rising from generation to generation.  

as though the usual human faculties for orienting and identifying had simply crumbled.

I suppose one might speak of 'estrangement'. I suppose Naipaul read a lot of French modernist novels.  

Not knowing others, in a fractured, unstable society cobbled provisionally together and cut loose from history, he could know nothing of himself.

He needed to get some distance from himself. Dad is nice. But to write about him you have to see him as others saw him.  

Trinidad was a “borrowed culture,” a belated society with “that feeling of having entered the cinema long after the film has started.”

During the War, the Trinidadians were glad enough to be far away from German or Japanese bombers. Indeed, the War brought prosperity- 'Rum & Coca Cola' not to mention the Yankee dollar.  

Racism permeated the place like an invisible gas.

It was much worse in the American South.  

The novels he devoured as a boy were an imported product,

like films 

the fruit of an organized metropolitan knowledge that Naipaul lacked.

All kids lack knowledge.  

Bereft of this coveted knowledge, his early efforts at fiction were thrown back on pure impressions.

First novels are derivative. My own account of growing up as an Italian Pope in the Ireland of Parnell drew too much upon the first few pages of 'Portrait of the Artist'.  

He knew nothing of his own Hindu community except for what he learned from his father's stories, so that even experience close to hand had to be mediated through art.

No. He participated in family 'puja' and listened to the Pundit and the Arya Samaji pracharak same as everybody else.  

As for historical memory, that fizzled out around the time of his grandparents. The past, like the idea of India, was a dream.

Not really. It was easy enough to find your ancestral village where the Pundit would have your genealogical records.  

Within the official, “real-life” India of Nehru and Gandhi there was a more elusive, semi-fictional India from which his family obscurely stemmed.

It was the same place. The last Indian immigrants had come only about 15 years before Naipaul was born.  

He hailed from a half-remembered subcontinent, and when he later visited the place it turned out to be not, as he had expected, the whole of which his childhood community was a fragment but a solitary, separate, derelict nation, just like life at home.

Niradh Chaudhuri had made the point once and for all.  

Later, in a repetition of Trinidad, the England he knew would be mainly Oxford and literary London. (He was an undergraduate at Oxford's University College, whose tradition of distinguished overseas visitors has since dwindled to encompass Chelsea Clinton.)

The daughter of two of the most powerful American politicians.  

The Oxford of his day could give him little help with writing:

He wrote essays same as everybody else. His Latin must have improved. He didn't know Greek but, I suppose, did learn Anglo-Saxon from Tolkien.  

it was the 1950s, when Tennyson and Thackeray were considered by the English faculty rather too recent to be adequately assessed.

People read them for pleasure.  

But it was through writing that Naipaul would explore who he was, reclaiming in such works as The Middle Passage and Among the Believers the areas of darkness around him; it was by investigating other “half-made” societies that he would be able at last to get a grip on his own.

Had Naipaul joined the Labour party and taken up journalistic assignments covering strikes and so forth, his picture of England would have been more rounded. I think his one English novel- Mr. Stone & the Knights Companions- shows an interest in the 'Corporatist' philosophy popular with Catholics. Like Niradh Chaudhuri, Naipaul feared England might tear itself apart over questions of Social Justice. But, unlike Niradh, his theme was anomie. Without the joint-family, though women might thrive, men were adrift. Apparently, his wife liked India. He didn't. There were lots of people there who looked like Mama & Chacha. But they weren't Mama or Chacha. They were strangers. How fucked is that? 

The Indians, Naipaul considers with his usual withering contempt, are botched parodies of the English;

some were.  But the botched parodies of Chairman Mao were worse. 

but England was a fantasy as well, encountered as a child only in the pages of Dickens and a few other literary imports, on which he then modeled the real-life Trinidad around him.

He should have stuck to Enid Blyton. That is the secret to my success.  

Eventually, in The Enigma of Arrival, he reverses the relation and speaks of projecting an African landscape onto a Wiltshire one, in order to write about Africa from the only spot where he has felt truly at home.

Nobody is at home in the Gloucester road.  

Yet even the English rural landscape is portrayed here as one in decline, marked by that sense of decay, fragility, and impending chaos that inspires so deep-seated a fear in his novels.

Thus Naipaul was like Niradh Chaudhuri who despaired of India and then despaired of the England he had moved to. 

The young Naipaul had to translate the English classics into his own Trinidadian terms in order to make them work—

which is why few of the characters are chimney sweeps or Dowager Duchesses.  

though he would later come to realize that writing is a kind of translation anyway, distilling and distorting the actual world into aesthetic shape.

Or distilling and distorting the books that formed you so that they become part of the reality you inhabit.  

When he came to England in 1950, the nation that had previously figured only as a fantasy

an object of knowledge 

became one in another sense, full of English people pretending to be English.

They were only pretending to pretend- unless they were Russian spies.  

If the Indians and the Trinidadians were mimic men, the English were mimics of themselves, self-consciously performing their Englishness like a second-rate drawing-room comedy;

rather than a French farce 

men like Evelyn Waugh and the later Kingsley Amis really were irascible old reactionaries, but they also reveled in acting the part.

It is difficult not to be an irascible reactionary when you grow old and drink too much.  

At the same time, the social reality of England served to dispel the literary fantasy: the more Naipaul knew of English culture, the less he felt in possession of its literature.

He contributed to it but didn't want to own it. Borges said 'every author creates his precursors'. Who were Naipaul's precursors? I don't know. He doesn't write like Niradh Chaudhuri. Who does he write like? I can't tell.  

A country of the mind was forced to yield to the reality.

What was that country? Naipaul had a mind but it was not of any country in particular. He did not create a Malgudi which, over the decades, had to yield to the reality of social change.  

Knowledge was thus inseparable from loss, as it was in Naipaul's relationship to his small-time journalist father. It was his father's unpublished writings about Trinidadian street life

a lot of it was published.  

that inspired Naipaul to begin writing himself, so that the son's text became an extension of the father's.

Lots of people from his family took up the pen. Why? It was part and parcel of the Social Reform movements which enabled communities to rise up.  

What Naipaul did not know at the time, however, was that his father had suffered disgrace and humiliation: he was caught sacrificing a goat to ward off a curse placed upon him by some farmers whose cavalier way with government regulations he had exposed in the press.

Nonsense! He had criticized animal sacrifice because he was an Arya Samaji. Then his life was threatened. He had to sacrifice a goat to Kali.  

To this extent, Naipaul's knowledge of him was mixed with a saving ignorance, a salutary blankness that lies somewhere at the origin of his art.

Eagleton has plenty of ignorance. What precisely is it saving him from? We know the origin of Naipaul's art. Like Niradh or Desani or Aubrey Menon, he wrote for radio and developed a distinctive voice and an effective writing style. We also know he was rubbing shoulders with other ambitious young men and women some of whom would go on to be successful writers. He studied the market and found his own niche in it. 

Literary Occasions, like most of Naipaul's writing about himself, is remarkable for its honest lucidity and stringent self-criticism.

This was part and parcel of 'Reformist' literature. Sadly, Naipaul had no interest in Religion. Take Religion out of Indian or Russian literature and you have miserabilist dreck.  

If he is hard on others, he is quite as ungenial about himself. He admits, for example, that his early narrators in novels such as Miguel Street are a good deal more streetwise than he ever was;

because he was a swot.  

that he did not feel competent as a reader until his mid-twenties; and that “the ambition to be a writer was for many years a kind of sham.”

This could be said by any writer looking back on his youth. You have to fake it to make it or- in my case- not make it and turn to blogging.  

He is not in the least given to posturing or self-dramatizing. The collection is the work of an artist who nevertheless exemplifies one of the minor catastrophes of the twentieth century: the fact that the conflicts and instabilities that issued in so much superb writing led also, all too often, to a harsh, unforgiving elitism.

Naipaul was born into a stable world. He moved to England after it became entirely peaceful. Things just kept getting better and better for Naipaul and his family and the people of Trinidad and the UK. Even India turned the corner as did Museveni's Uganda. 

Is Naipaul's writing 'superb'? No. It is good enough for its purpose. Naipaul was modest in his aims and, for that reason, was able to succeed. As for 'elitism', it curled up and died when a grocer's daughter became the British Prime Minister. 

Great art, dreadful politics: it is the link between the two that needs to be noted.

There is no link between the two. One might as well say Gentzen or Teichmuller were shit at logic & math just because they were Nazis.  


Sunday, 9 November 2025

Mahmood Mamdani's slow poison



Mahmood Mamdani left Uganda at the age of 17 to study in the US. There he was taught an abstract sort of political science which preserved a jealous distance from 'anthropology' or actual political history or human geography. Soon after returning to Uganda in 1972, Mamdani was expelled along with other Ugandan Asians, by Idi Amin. Some months later, he went to the University of Dar as Salam which was much more left-wing than Makerere in Uganda. As he says 'My political awakening began in the United States and matured in Dar es Salaam.' In other words, he had no emic understanding of Ugandan politics. 

 As a doctrinaire Marxist with no personal knowledge of events in Uganda after Independence, Mamdani was seen as a 'useful idiot'- nothing more. He returned to Kampala after Amin fell as part of a Christian NGO initiative but was thrown out by Obote. Finally, when, for economic reasons, Museveni invited back the Asians, Mamdani- as an Asian- could be displayed as a sort of mascot. From time to time he would say something critical of Museveni and people would say 'how kind of Museveni not to kill or deport Mamdani!' 

In his new book, 'Slow poison', Mahmood Mamdani writes- 

ETHNICITY AND TRIBE Africa has always been a collection of tribes, goes the conventional refrain.

No. Africa had become a collection of States by the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Previously, it had featured Kingdoms, Empires and some territories ruled in a traditional manner. This may have involved a dominant tribe under a hereditary Chieftain. But this was not always the case. 

Uganda, unlike Kenya, was a Protectorate. In other words, it was conceived as a place with its own indigenous centres of authority and traditions of jurisprudence. It was like the Indian Princely States. It wasn't like directly administered India. Thus Museveni & Amin & Obote were born as 'British Protected Subjects' and became Ugandan citizens at Independence. Mamdani's parents were British subjects and chose to retain that nationality after India became independent. Had the Ugandan Protectorate granted citizenship to Indian immigrants, they would have been Ugandan citizens- unless they preferred to remain British. But this did not happen.

Mamdani thinks Idi Amin was 'a maker of modern Uganda'. This is false. He was a corrupt general who first killed his Acholi rival in the army- the man had protected Obote from an assassination attempt probably sponsored by Amin- and then came to power through a coup. He sought to retain power by filling all important posts with his own Kakwa or Nubian people. Mamdani is at pains to paint the 'Nubi as neither an ethnic group nor a multi-ethnic formation. They came out of a mix of conscripts and runaway refugees drawn from many ethnic groups;- i.e. they were bandits or mercenaries. Nothing good happens when such people take over a peaceful, agricultural, country with its own indigenous cultures and traditions.

In an interview, Mamdani says 'Amin was trained as a mercenary, a child soldier, by the British.

If so, it was at his father's behest because his people had come to Uganda as mercenaries. First, however, he was indoctrinated in Islam by Muslims, not British people.  The Gurkhas could be called mercenaries for the British. But they weren't Muslim and didn't launch coups or commit genocide. Idi Amin did. For Mamdani- who also admires the Janjaweed- this makes him the George Washington of Uganda.

If Amin was a mercenary for the British, did he cease to be so when the Kabaka became President of Uganda?  Obote got rid of the Kabaka. Was Amin a mercenary for Obote? If so, it didn't stop him trying to get the fellow assassinated. Amin got a fellow tribesman to kill the Acholi second-in-command who had protected Obote. Fearful that Obote, who was Lenga and thus closer to the Acholi, would punish him when he returned from abroad, Amin launched a coup against him. The mercenary had taken over a country where Muslims were a small minority. He announced that Uganda was now an Islamic nation. Mamdani, being Muslim, thinks this makes him the 'maker of modern Uganda'. 

 He was taught to be a ruthless, violent person.

Mamdani was taught to be a stupid, useless, person.  

And he indeed was ruthless and violent. The worst, most violent period of his rule was the first two years when the army was split and thousands were massacred in their barracks.

He was killing Acholis who traditionally dominated the Army so his own people could replace them.  

His close allies were the British and the Israelis.

No. They were Libya & the PLO. He was a Muslim not a British Jew. He expelled the Israelis about 13 months after coming to power. 

The British had suggested that he assassinate Obote [Milton Obote, who led Uganda before Amin].

No. They had suggested that he sodomize Obote and then eat him. British are like that only. Queenji would often shout 'off with their heads' when she saw a group of darkies. Idi Amin would plead with Queenji saying 'spare the lives of these innocent Black people' but Queenji was very adamant. Thus Amin was obliged to chop off the heads of trillions of Black people. This is because he was a child soldier trained by Prince Phillip.  

The Israelis were skeptical. Even if he succeeds in assassinating Obote, they said, his entire power structure would be intact; his military forces would be there.

The big massacre of Acholi & Lenga soldiers occurred in July 1971, 6 months after he came to power.  American journalist, Nicholas Stroh, and, Makerere University lecturer, Robert Siedle who went to investigate this were killed by Amin. 

So Amin dealt with that power structure by physically eliminating them. That was the worst period, a period in which his closest allies were the British and the Israelis,

He called Siedle an Israeli agent.  

and you could say they were accomplices in this mass murder.

No. They were sickened by it. Brits & Jews don't like to see kaffirs being killed. But Libyans & Palestinians can't get enough of the stuff.  

Amin’s killings became far fewer and far more selective,

no. They increased in size and scale. To make Uganda a Muslim nation, you have to kill the Christian majority.  

targeting prominent persons like the chief justice or the vice chancellor of the university,

or the Bishop. Their crime was their religion.  

persons he suspected of being connected to the opposition.

Mamdani is a Muslim. That is why he praises Amin, the only Muslim Dictator of Uganda.

 It must be said, Uganda at independence was like Ghana or Burma. It had a relatively high material standard of living, a growing educated class, and prosperous landlords and peasant proprietors connected to international markets for cash crops. Sadly, Obote, who belonged to a Nilotic tribe allied to the Acholis. who dominated the Army, conspired against the Kabaka and the prosperous Buganda people. It must be said, when Amin first took power, he held a state funeral for the monarch and paid for his son's education in the UK. The hope was that Amin would hold elections and permit a return to constitutional methods. At a later point it was suggested that the Buganda elite received the lion's share of the assets of the Asians and thus they were quietly supportive of Amin. There seems little evidence for this view. Buganda people, like the Acholis and Lango, were targeted by Amin. The arrest and killing of the Acholi Archbishop and two Cabinet Ministers (both speaking Nilotic languages) in 1977 showed that nobody was safe. Henry Kyemba, Amin's Health Minister, defected to the UK just after this happened. His book 'A State of Blood' was a best seller and created the image of Amin as a deranged cannibal. Like other well educated Buganda people, Kyemba returned to Uganda under Museveni. 

Obote had gained power by allying with the Kabaka but later sent Amin and his soldiers to attack the Kabaka's palace. After getting rid of the Kabaka, Obote, took his country in a leftward direction thus earning the approval of Nyerere in Tanzania where he found refuge after Amin's coup. With Tanzanian help, he was restored to power (after a brief period when a Buganda academic, and then a Buganda lawyer, were Presidents) by Ojok,  the Lango Army Chief, on the basis of an election whose fairness was disputed. After Ojok died in 1983 in a helicopter crash, Obote's days were numbered . He was toppled by Okello who was angered by Obote's appointing a Lango, rather than an Acholi, as the next army chief. The Acholi dominated army then took power before being defeated by Museveni, a Southerner, who promised a more even handed approach. In particular, he wanted each ethnic group to administer its own territory so as to prevent the country once again becoming prey to marauding soldiers of one ethnicity or another. Sadly, this involved a terrible war with the Acholis. Joseph Kony, is Acholi, and remains at large. Still, since 2006 most Acholis have returned to their villages and are living peacefully.

 Museveni's rule has lasted for almost 40 years. He has remade Ugandan identity and secured its status as a sovereign Nation-State.  Obote & Amin had all but destroyed what was inherited from the British or, going further back, the ancient kingdoms of the region. 

The speaker will point to the multitude of language groups on the continent, their numbers more or less constant over time.

They will point to the rapid spread of lingua francas- e.g. Swahili. However, English and French too have spread very rapidly.  

But is a language group the same as a tribe?

No.  

Tis book argues otherwise: a language group is a cultural community, an ethnic group.

No. An English speaking Ugandan isn't part of the same ethnic group or cultural community as an English speaking Yorkshireman.  

An ethnic group becomes a tribe when

it evolves institutions- e.g. Chieftainships- to deal with collective action problems. Speaking generally, the process continues as a number of tribes unite to form a City-State or Nation. 

politicized, and identifed with a fixed territory (“homeland”),

Nonsense! No tribe is created when convicts are shipped off to some remote island. 

a hierarchical authority (“customary authority”), and a set of laws that apply only to members of the tribe (“customary laws”).

In which case, Singaporeans belong to a tribe. If I move to Singapore, I am allowed to send my kids to private schools. Singaporeans have to send them to government primary schools. But an Indian origin Singaporean does not belong to the same ethnicity or tribe as a Malay origin or Chinese origin Singaporean. Mamdani is talking nonsense. Why? He is thinking of 'Reservations' in the US or 'Bantustans' in South Africa. But both US & South Africa were 'settler' societies. In the former the European immigrants are still the largest percentage of the population. South Africa, however, has come under majority rule. Uganda, unlike Kenya, never had much European settlement. There was about half as much Asian settlement as Kenya in Uganda but Obote & Amin got rid of the Asians fifty years ago.  

A tribe is a political community.

No. It may have no political activity or representation whatsoever more particularly if national boundaries run through it and State power is exercised despotically.  

In the African countries, the politicization of culture took place over the colonial period.

No. It always existed and gave rise to Kingdoms and religious movements and population transfer through the slave trade.  

Modern colonialism created the tribes of Africa.

No. It merely took cognizance of the facts of human geography.  

It is colonial power that translated linguistic boundaries into political ones,

No. Colonial powers carved up the continent with scant regard for 'linguistic boundaries'. That's why the Buganda wanted a separate state. Andrew Cohen, the Governor of Uganda, deposed and exiled the Kabaka in 1953. Intense protests by his people led to the Kabaka's return two years later. Obote & Amin finished what Cohen started. The Kabaka was exiled in 1966. Under Museveni, the Kabakas and other traditional monarchs have returned and can live peacefully in their ancient ancestral homes. This shows Museveni is very evil. It is not enough to deport Asians. You must also deport Africans. Also, you must completely destroy the economy. Otherwise- like Museveni- you are slowly poisoning your country. Hopefully Zohran will deport the Jews and Christians from New York. Only once cannibalism prevails in the streets of Manhattan, will the 'slow poison' of colonialism be purged from the body politic. 

and language groups into “nations,” claiming that these were really a carryover of premodern units.

There was no such claim. It is a different matter that 'language groups' demanded 'Nation States' when multi-ethnic Empires began to break up- e.g., in Europe, after the Great War.  

To see through these claims,

which didn't exist 

we need to focus on three critical changes under colonialism.

The 'scramble for Africa' resulted in Treaties carving up the continent without regard to language, ethnicity, or religion. De-colonization, more often than not, ignored these factors. To be fair, it was hoped that regional economic federations would mitigate problems arising from borders dividing communities.  

First was the creation of a power structure in the new units:

speaking generally, the existing power structure was maintained. Alternatively, new men were designated as 'Chiefs' and given wide administrative powers.  

“traditional authorities” were empowered by colonial authorities to run the newly bounded “traditional societies.”

In some places, not others. The problem was that if authority did not exist, it could not be exercised. Mamdani wants to tell us a horror story about feudal chiefs exercising power on behalf of Colonial masters. The truth was that such power as they had was ebbing away. If the Chief can't give valuable gifts, his position becomes merely ceremonial. He is merely a pensioner of the Government.  

Second was the creation of “customary law.” This law claimed to be a continuation of precolonial custom, but at the same time distinguished between two kinds of residents: indigenous and migrants. Traditional authorities were said to be empowered by customary law to discriminate between those indigenous and those not—the former tracing their genealogy to the time before colonialism and the latter to colonization or after.

Where land is owned collectively, such a distinction is bound to be made. But will it be upheld in practice? No. Coase's theorem explains that how property rights are distributed doesn't matter. A deal can be done for 'control rights'. Those who are more efficient can gain control and make 'side payments' which pass judicial or other scrutiny.  

Even when colonial migrants had come to speak the language of the locality (“culture”), they were considered not indigenous to the area.

Not really. There are plenty of stories about this leader or that leader not being a genuine member of the ethnicity he claims.  

And even when culturally assimilated, they were treated as political strangers.

No. Sometimes, such matters would be raked up. But, speaking generally, the thing didn't matter in the slightest.  

They were considered not part of the tribe. Finally, in a continent where most ethnic groups had historically been mobile, moving in search of productive land and waters, these same ethnic groups were now fixed to a territory (“tribal homeland”) and said to have been fixed to it eternally.

This simply hasn't happened. I suppose Mamdani is thinking of Bantustans. But they disappeared three decades ago. 

Colonial power built the colonial state on tribal building blocks.

No. Colonial power built on the Army and the Navy and the Railways and the Telegraph and global markets for cash-crops and raw materials. Tribes simply didn't matter save in so far as it affected military recruitment.  

Recruitment into all colonial institutions was based on tribal identities.

The problem got worse after Independence when the Dictator recruited from his own clan. But Saddam was doing something similar in Iraq.  

Every institution—from the army to the police to the prisons, even plantation or factory or domestic labor—was identified with particular tribes.

This was the Uganda Mamdani returned to, not the one he left at the age of 17 to take up an American scholarship. Had Governor Cohen accepted the demand of the Buganda and other ancient kingdoms, you might have had a Federal Uganda of a peaceful, prosperous type. Cohen was wrong to think 'top-down' State building could be done. Sadly, it was that nonsense Mamdani imbibed in US universities. Had he studied in Dar as Salam- which had some good British Africanists, he wouldn't have so strong a prejudice against the 'Anthropological' or 'Human Geography' approach. Interestingly, Museveni- who was more radical than Mamdani when they first met in 1973- had studied in Dar as Salam. But he also had personal experience of the Mozambique struggle. He was a genuine revolutionary who learnt from his mistakes. Mamdani was and is a doctrinaire Pundit with no emic knowledge of the country he emigrated to as a child.  

When members of a tribe demanded increased representation in any institution, their calculation was inevitably based on a tribal arithmetic. Tribalism was a representation of colonial logic.

Tribes rebelled against Colonial authorities. Surely, this cretin has heard of the Maji Maji and He He rebellions? We were taught about them in Primary School in East Africa. It is obvious that 'tribal arithmetic' is the same thing as democratic arithmetic. African politics wasn't so very different from Indian politics.  

Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni have been defined by their opposed relationship to tribalism: Amin as the father of the nation,

 he was a Muslim and, as such, was given refuge by Saudi Arabia. But he relied on his own 'Nubians'. He did much to destroy his country. But so did his former patron, Obote. Mamdani was brought back to Kampala by Obote. He became deliriously happy when he was invited to Pyongyang. Uganda must follow the North Korean example. The position of Dictator should be hereditary. But it is Museveni, not Obote or Amin who will be able to pass on power to his son. Don't forget Museveni was once far to the left of Obote or Nyerere. 

and Museveni as one who has sought to resurrect tribe as a political identity and make it permanent.

Museveni has given Uganda stability. True, like other Socialist leaders he has embraced some market-based reforms. But, like Nyerere his Socialism is African, not something derived from obsolete textbooks written in the Nineteen Fifties or Sixties by stupid American Leftists. 

I first saw Idi Amin in 1972, after I returned home to Kampala from the United States to begin research on my doctoral thesis.

Had he studied in Africa, he might have understood something about his own country.  

Ali Mazrui

from an important family of Islamic scholars in Mombasa. Both the crazy John Okello (who had massacred Arabs and Asians in Zanzibar) and Idi Amin wanted to exploit his prestige. He was smart enough to refuse and head for the University of Michigan in 1974. 

, the head of the Political Science Department at Kampala’s Makerere University, had suggested I join the department as a teaching assistant,

Muslims should stick together 

which I was delighted to do. That same year, Amin came to Makerere to preside over the university’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations.

He would kill the Vice Chancellor soon enough.  

From the moment he arrived, Amin was the center of attention. As he took the podium, Amin’s remarks had the effect of a tremor: “I came here with a battalion of soldiers so that when you lift your heads from books, you know who has power.” We were stunned. Then came an even more outrageous statement: “On my way to the main hall, I stopped at Mulago (the university hospital). I looked at your records. I see that most of you are sufering from gonorrhea. I will not tolerate you spreading political gonorrhea in Uganda.”

Amin knew Obote was planning an invasion. The African students he was talking to understood what he was saying. If you back Obote, I will kill you. The V.C, however, was supposed to be a friend of Amin's. 

This was my introduction to Amin’s many uses of public buffoonery as political performance.

He was deadly serious. Mazrui took the hint.  

A year later, I joined the University of Dar es Salaam as a young lecturer. There, I met Yoweri Museveni

who had played a part in the first invasion of Uganda the previous year 

who had graduated from the university and taken a job as an instructor at the Cooperative College in Moshi,Tanzania. I had heard of him as the charismatic head of the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front (USARF) at the University of Dar es Salaam.

The guy was an actual revolutionary. He had participated in the 1972 invasion. More importantly, he learnt from his mistakes and prevailed as a military leader. How? Organize 'liberated areas' to be self-administering and self-garrisoning. Otherwise, you just have a game of musical chairs with endless coups and bands of marauding soldiers crossing borders with impunity.  

By contrast, Mamdani was a pedant with little knowledge of Africa. He may have been a Marxist but he was no revolutionary. 

Perched on a hill several miles from the city center, the university campus was generally known as “The Hill.” Never a shortage of anecdotal stories when it came to Museveni, one went like this. In the week after Mao’s death, Museveni was teaching at the Hill. Before class began, he walked to the blackboard and wrote something like, Marx was a great man. Marx is dead. Lenin was a great man. Lenin is dead. Mao was a great man. Mao too is dead. I, too, am not feeling so well . . . There was little reason to think of Museveni as modest.

Museveni has held power for 40 years. What he learnt from Marx & Lenin & Mao is that you have to build 'from the bottom up.' The result is that he will go down in history as the true father of his country. Obote & Amin were tribalist Dictators who implemented crazy economic policies. 

 Like other subjects in the colony, both Amin and Museveni were products of British colonialism in at least one sense: they were both publicly identified as members of a race or a tribe.

Unlike Mamdani, who was a British subject, they were British protected subjects till Uganda became independent. In Amin's case, tribalism was a feature of the way he exercised power. 

And so was I.

His parents could have chosen Indian or Pakistani nationality. 

The British were master classifiers.

No. They didn't classify their own people. Who now knows which Anglo-Saxon or Celtic tribe they belong to by virtue of paternal descent?  

They understood that to be modern was to be master of all; the power to define would lead the way to other powers, to arrange and rearrange everything, in nature and in society.

This is magical thinking. I may say 'I define Putin as a pussycat'. But this does not turn Putin into a pussycat.  

This hubris would ultimately lead the British to cleanse and reorder areas of the world as part of a larger effort to remake the world as a whole.

Nonsense! The Brits were smart. They saw that transoceanic trade could make their home islands more prosperous and more secure. But, by the 1930s, it was becoming obvious that the Imperial game was not worth the candle. Darkies would have to learn to rule themselves or perish in the attempt.  

Not surprisingly, their first act after conquest was to classify all plants and animals.

Linnaeus was Swedish. The reason for classification was scientific. It enabled more rapid accumulation of useful knowledge.  

Humans, too, were classifed, into natives and non-natives.

and male and female. British invented gender! We must 'decolonize' our bodies by repudiating the notion that we either have a penis or a vagina but not plenty of both. Then we should fuck ourselves to death to protest against Israel.  

Non-natives like myself (I was of South Asian descent) were persons of no fixed abode.

No. Mamdani's permanent address was mentioned on his passport. Idi Amin decided to cancel his Ugandan passport and deport him. That's why he says 'Amin is the father of the Ugandan nation'. Museveni is very evil though, under him, even my son got an Ugandan passport.  

In contrast, natives, like Amin and Museveni, were defined by place. Classified into a variety of species, each belonged to a “tribe” with a designated territory (“tribal homeland”), under charge of a single “traditional authority.”

Who had 'traditional authority' over Amin? No one save his seniors in the Army. What about Museveni? The answer is the same. Neither belonged to a traditional kingdom or acknowledged a hereditary chieftain. This is not to say they would not have been subject to the authority established in their place of domicile. But, by moving elsewhere, they would be free of it.  

The “tribe” was different from the precolonial “ethnic group” in two ways.

Only one way. It was recognized for legal and administrative purposes.  

First, it was identified with a fixed territory

because all legal and administrative jurisdictions have this feature 

and, second, every tribe had a hierarchical authority with the right to mete corporal punishment to native subjects as the exercise of a “customary” right.

Nonsense! There was no right to beat people. What Mamdani means is that there was an immunity for holders of specific types of legal or administrative authority to inflict corporal punishment under specific circumstances.  

The person in charge of maintaining order and gathering taxes in this territory was known as the tribal chief, as distinct from the clan head.

He could be both.  

By foxing cultural identity to a territorial space, colonialism politicized culture as “tribe” and organized it under a single traditional authority.

No. The State subdivided the territory it controlled and created or recognized legal and administrative authorities with geographically delimited jurisdiction.  

By the time of Uganda’s independence in 1962, the colony represented a patchwork of tribes.

Who wished to maintain those tribal identities. Also, they wanted Asians to fuck the fuck off.  

The colonial economy that Britain created was powered by migrant labour.

No. It attracted some migrants.  

In Uganda, migrant workers came from across several borders, including Rwanda, Sudan, and Kenya, and small traders came from the older British colony of India. Having brought these migrants to Uganda

they came on their own. Mamdani is thinking of 'indentured labour'- e.g. in Fiji. There was no such thing in Uganda.  

without any restriction on the duration of their stay, the colonial authority at the same time barred them from owning land in their new home.

They could take out 99 year leases.  

The prohibition on owning land was extended to denial of birthright citizenship at independence.

Because that is what indigenous Ugandans wanted.  

As part of the preparation for independence, Britain finalized a list of “indigenous tribes” (communities) in the colony so as to leave no doubt as to who was considered officially “indigenous” and who was not.

Why did they do so? It was because that is what the Ugandans wanted.  

The constitution at independence (that is, the 1962 Constitution) reserved citizenship by birth to members of “indigenous tribes” in the country.

That is still the legal position. Why? That's what Ugandans want. On the other hand, it is true that Ugandans rejected the gender binary forced upon them by the British. Idi Amin was well known for lamenting his lack of a vagina- for which he blamed Queen Victoria.  

The first government, led by Milton Obote, the then– prime minister and second president of Uganda,

the first President was the Kabaka whom Obote exiled

followed Britain’s lead when it expelled all Luo persons living within the country as indigenous—regardless of how many years they had lived there.

Mamdani means Obote's expulsion of Kenyans- mainly Luo, in 1969-70. It is believed 25,000 people were affected. But this was after Obote had turned to the Left. He was giving the Brits a hard time by threatening to expel Asians with British passports. Many had already been deprived of their livelihoods.  

The distinction between “indigenous” and “non-indigenous” became critical when it came to staffing the modern sector emerging in the colonial period—the army, the police, large-scale trade.

No. Obote & Amin wanted to put in loyalists of their own tribe.  

The power to define and distinguish the “indigenous” from those not was the first lever of power wielded by postindependence governments.

Because 'tribalism' was an African, not a British, thing.  

It was at the heart of the politics of “tribalism.” Though invented by Britain,

in the sense that the distinction between penises and vaginas was invented by the British 

we shall see that none perfected it as did Museveni.

His son is his army commander. That makes for stability. I suppose he is seen as favouring his own Southern 'Hima' group but he has done much to conciliate the Buganda.  

As part of an attempt to stabilize his rule and vanquish all opposition, Museveni subdivided existing districts into many, doubling, tripling, and even quadrupling the number of districts. Now, each district had its “native” tribes (sometimes more than one) alongside “non-native” or settler tribes. Continuous fragmentation of the subject population, an ongoing and seemingly endless process, reinforced by official violence and institutionalized corruption—that is, diferent ways of disciplining resisters and rewarding collaborators—is what I call “slow poison.”

But, it is what the rest of the world calls 'effective cement'. Museveni has ruled for four decades. He says 800,00 were killed between 1966 and 1986. The total population at that time was about 15.5 million. 

A decade after independence, in 1971, Amin became president in an orgy of violence, wielding one part of the colonial army as a hammer against the part that remained loyal to the ousted Obote government.

Amin thought Obote would sack him and thus struck first. Obote had underestimated the less educated man.  

The colonial army had been recruited from groups marginal to the country’s administration and the economy and was marked by two features. First, the army came mostly from the area north of the Nile River, which gave it a regional character. Cash crop– producing peasants south of the Nile River were carefully kept out of the army, even though they had a long tradition of participating in military service in different centralized kingdoms of the south.

Sadly they tended to fight each other in succession battles.  

The reason was simple: after all, the army was likely to be used against them. Second, the colonial army was recruited from particular ethnic groups.

There was the belief that people who ate green plantain could not subsist on grain and thus grain-eaters were recruited (grain is easier to transport). But there was also a theory that 'Nubians' were 'martial' while Bantus were docile agriculturists.  

Mamdani stresses the miscegenated and quite recent origin of the Nubians. He considers Emin Pasha, a German Jewish convert to Islam who was appointed an Egyptian Governor of a region they soon lost, to be the true author of their existence. He appears to lend credence to stories of Idi Amin's mothers spiritual or magical powers. He displays a degree of erotic arousal while recounting tales of Amin's physical and sexual prowess. It is on the basis of these stories that he regards Amin as 'the father of Uganda'. Yet, Amin was repudiated by his people. He died in exile. He may have fathered many many children, but it is Museveni, not Amin, who will pass power to his son. Already, Museveni has been in power for the greater part of Uganda's history. By the year 2000, after 14 years of Museveni, Ugandan per capita income returned to the pre-Independence, 1960 level. In the last 25 years, real per capita income has almost doubled. This isn't 'slow poison'. It is slow but steady improvement in State Capacity and material standards of living. 

Mamdani writes-

 'I present this narrative as an opportunity for the reader to see through the standard academic claim to “objectivity” and “neutrality.”

In other words, 'I, as an academic, have written down a string of stupid lies. This is so that readers understand that academics are incapable of objectivity or neutrality.' 

The problem here is that not all academics are useless. There are some who can give valuable advise on how to make your country more secure and more prosperous. This is because they search out alethic information which is objectively verifiable. They use the Structural Causal Model which makes the best predictions, not the one which appeals to them subjectively for ideological reasons. Thus they are able to tell countries what can be done in the short to medium term to benefit the whole country.  

I have come to question any claim of a single objective truth.

Because you have been repeating stupid, mischievous, lies for six decades.  

It is more illuminating to think along the lines of Ibn Khaldun, who suggests that we see objective truth as an attribute we give God, for only an omniscient power can be privy to one objective truth.

Ibn Khaldun said that people in a useful profession gravitate to the same objective, ideologically neutral, method of quantifying and predicting things. Sadly, Mamdani's own profession was not useful.  

The truth we strive for and glimpse as humans is inevitably coloured by our location and perspective.

For any useful purpose, we can adopt better, more objective, more 'neutral', methods of acquiring facts and finding Structural Causal Models. Saying 'Idi Amin was the father of Uganda' is not useful. It is not truthful. It is not objective. It is a vicious lie.  

I invite the reader to share these changing vantage points, both social and political, that have shaped my own point of view.

What would be the consequence of doing so? It would be to say Florence Nightingale was very evil. Jack the Ripper was the true Feminist. What is the point of having so crazy a point of view?  


Saturday, 8 November 2025

Mamdani on the Ugandan Asian


Three years ago, Mahmood Mamdani- a handsome Ismaili, just like 'Musa Mzuri' a handsome Ismaili trader in Uganda in the early nineteenth century-  wrote in the LRB of 

The Asian Question

which was resolved long ago. If a country is turning to shit, don't ask questions. Run away.  

Mamdani, as a Muslim, may have preferred Islamic dominance in Uganda- which Idi Amin supplied. But, as a Communist, he also preferred regimes which had no truck with free market policies. It appears, he retained his connection to Uganda to push for these two unrelated agendas. 

I may mention, the University of Tanzania in the late Sixties and early Seventies was more left-wing than Makerere in Uganda. Thus, Museveni, who studied there, was initially to the left of Obote or even Mamdani. 

In 1979, Yusuf Lele- an academic and bureaucrat was appointed President. As a Buganda (albeit a Muslim who had converted to Christianity) he was popular with his own people. But this reign did not last long. Once again in exile, he allied with Museveni. Thus, when he died in 1985, Museveni could be said to have inherited much Buganda support. This in turn, meant he could follow a more conciliatory, pro-market, policy. However, what Ugandans wanted most was stability. Museveni has delivered that for four decades. He invited Asians to return for the simple reason that they contribute the lion's share of government revenue (currently about 65 percent) despite being less than one percent of the population. 

I was​ in my mid-twenties in November 1972 when I left Uganda on the orders of Idi Amin, who had seized the presidency in a coup the previous year.

Mamdani had been part of the Kennedy airlift of young scholars from East Africa. He had completed his Masters and was doing field-work for his PhD in Kampala. Sadly, what he had studied was shit. He had doomed himself to being a camp-follower of African Dictators who were doing stupid shit. By 1966, Obote and his henchman Amin had attacked and put to flight the Kabaka, monarch of the Baganda people. The country became a one party state. The first Prime Minister, a Catholic (unlike the Protestant Baganda elite), was jailed.  Amin launched a coup while Obote was out of the country. A year later, Obote, with Tanzanian help, launched an ill-fated invasion. Seven years later another invasion was launched which was more successful. But, Obote probably killed more than Amin. He had fallen out with Museveni who was able to overthrow Okello (an Acholi soldier who had overthrown Obote, who favoured his own Lango tribe, 6 months previously) in 1986. He is much less vindictive and Mamdani was able to return to Kampala (Mamdani had criticized Obote and had once again been deported).  Lately, the 79 year old scholar has turned against Museveni, who is 81 years old. Indeed, Mamdani now compares Museveni unfavourably to Idi Amin who, at least, was Muslim. 

The expulsion of Uganda’s Asian population, estimated at seventy thousand, was announced in August; we were given three months to leave.

In mid-September, the former dictator, Milton Obote launched a shambolic invasion from Tanzania. Amin retaliated by rounding up and killing a lot of potential enemies- including the Chief Justice whom he had himself freed and appointed to the Bench. Asians were glad to get out when they did.  They had lost their property but kept their lives. 

It must be said, both Obote & Amin were merely imitating what Kenya was doing to the Asians. The difference was that Kenya did not nuke its own economy. 

Around twenty thousand had Ugandan citizenship. Roughly the same number had applied for citizenship, but their applications remained unprocessed – a sign of how politically explosive citizenship had become.

It was meaningless. The Brits claimed at one point that those who had applied for a Ugandan passport had thereby lost British nationality. Still, in the end, most Asians were resettled in the West. 

Then there were those who had never applied for citizenship or a passport. I was among those who had registered as a Ugandan citizen at independence and whose nationality was later rescinded. With at least 25,000 other Ugandan Asians I headed for Britain,

But didn't stay long. The UK faced its own political problems. The 'three day week' was just around the corner. Militant Socialism can fuck up any country- White or Black or Chinese. 

and was placed in a youth hostel on Kensington Church Street, just behind Kensington Palace, which had been turned into a transit camp for the refugees. Six months later I took up my first academic post at the University of Dar es Salaam.

where Milton Obote was holed up. Mamdani was a Marxist. Obote and Nyerere were Socialists.  

Mamdani met Museveni- who was more left wing and who had been part of the 1972 attempted invasion- in 1973 but refused to join his outfit. This meant that after Tanzania helped Obote to depose Amin and return to power and Museveni and Obote fell out, Mamdani was able to return to Kampala as a Professor. He helped found the Ugandan Korean Friendship Society and was thrilled to visit Pyongyang circa 1982. Mamdani made some criticisms of Obote and was stripped once again of citizenship and had to go into exile. He was able to return after Museveni kicked out Okello in 1986. But Mamdani is very unhappy of pro-market policies pursued by Museveni. 

After the fall of Amin in 1979, I returned to Uganda as an intern with the All Africa Conference of Churches, a Nairobi-based ecumenical Christian alliance, working at the Church of Uganda’s offices in Kampala. The following year, I joined Makerere University. I made a point of asking most of the Ugandans I met to share their thoughts about the expulsion.

What was there to say? The Asians had been lucky to be pushed out before they could be hacked to death with pangas.  

For most of them, it wasn’t the decision to expel the Asian population that was troubling, but the way the expulsion had been carried out: this was the beginning of wisdom for me.

Instead of getting refuge in UK, Canada & Europe, they should have died in the bush.  

Ten years later, whether we met in Uganda or in Britain, I put the same question to friends, former neighbours and schoolmates of Asian heritage from the pre-1972 period. To my surprise, more than 90 per cent of them said they would not want to return to the years before Amin ordered them out:

because Obote was just as bad- if not worse.  

whatever they experienced at the time, they – like the ‘indigenous’ Ugandans I’d been questioning since 1980 – had nothing against the expulsion. Why did an overwhelming majority of current or former residents in Uganda, brown or black, feel this way?

Because Uganda was badly hit by wars and purges and economic dislocation. Then came the AIDS epidemic. Those who get to escape a war-zone are the lucky ones. Amin did the Asians a favour.  

The Acholi (a Nilotic group in the North) remained discontented. The Lord's Resistance Army created chaos across borders in the region. Still, for almost 20 years now, most Acholi have been able to return to their villages and live peacefully.

It seems, there is no alternative to Museveni's approach of getting each ethnicity to govern and garrison itself as far as possible. Perhaps, Museveni's early exposure to the thought of left wing British Africanist professors- Terence Ranger, John Iliffe, Andrew Roberts, John McCracken and the Guyanese born Walter Rodney- made him less doctrinaire and more 'anthropological' in his approach. Also, his experiences in Mozambique, as part of FRELIMO, had taught him the importance of 'bottom up' institution building in 'liberated areas'. 

The answer, I learned, is that what happened in 1972 was the culmination of a process that had started a few years earlier, when many Ugandan Asians were disenfranchised both by British and Ugandan law.

He was 17 when he left Uganda for the US. At that age, in that part of the world, you knew all about passports. Granny has an Indian passport and there's a bit of money stored up there if that is the place we have to flee to. Dad has a British passport and is sending money to Uncle in Leicester with a view to establishing a base there. The eldest son opts for the Ugandan passport just in case he can remain and run the business or rise in the professions. The younger sons are encouraged to think about the US or Canada. 

Did the British 'disenfranchise' Asians? No. They were given a choice. They could either be British or Ugandan. India or Pakistan too permitted citizenship claims on the basis of patriality. Obote had cracked down on British Asians in 1969. Smart people jumped before they were pushed- i.e. emigrated before UK tightened passport controls in 1968. 

At that time, they had been a presence in the country for about seventy years. The kingdom of Buganda became a British protectorate in 1884 and the territory was rapidly expanded to roughly the size of modern-day Uganda. In 1895 a 300-strong contingent of Punjabi troops was brought in to put down an uprising by the Nubi in the north-west, which had led to the killing of several British officers.

It was a mutiny. The Brits started to favour the Acholi over the Nubians who had been active in the slave trade. It should be kept in mind, originally it was the Egyptians who were interested in the region. They would appoint European governors like Gordon, Stanley, Baker, or Emin Pasha (a German Jew). Mamdani thinks the Nubians, as a class, were created by Emin. 

It was already possible to identify three groups of Indians in Uganda by the time the Punjabi regiments were withdrawn in the 1930s. The first were those who arrived to run a string of dukas (shops) set up by Indian merchant financiers on the initiative of Allidina Visram. Visram had made his fortune in Zanzibar and Mombasa and encouraged small and medium-size commerce deep in the hinterland, including Uganda and eastern Congo.

It is believed that by initially buying cash-crops at a loss, he enabled the spread of this type of farming thus greatly contributing to endogenous growth in the region.  Visram, like Tippu Tip, started off in ivory but steered clear of slavery. What killed off the slave trade was the ability of the region to export cash crops. This meant retaining rather than selling labourers. Mamdani makes no mention of the slave trade- an important motive for British activity in the region. 

The second group was drafted from India by the British after 1895 to build the Ugandan railway: 35,000 Indian labourers, mostly from Punjab, were recruited to work on the project; after its completion in 1901, about seven thousand of them stayed on in British East Africa. The third group was brought from India to serve in the British colonial administration.

The problem with using ex-slavers in the administration was that they would use the same methods to enrich themselves. Sooner or later they would rebel.  

Unlike the neighbouring colonies of Kenya and Tanganyika (which was German until after the First World War), Uganda had a ‘native’ elite,

It had monarchs. In Kenya, chiefs were appointed. There was a 'loyalist' element which had better access to land in Native reserves and which served an administrative function.  

whom the British administration had handsomely rewarded for their role alongside colonial forces in enlarging the protectorate. Buganda itself was an expansionist state, with a standing army and civil administration. As it absorbed new territories, it sought alliances against its dominant neighbour, the kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara.

It was in decline and thus the victim of Buganda slaver raids. 

The British played a key part in this process:

They were replacing slave-traders like Ahmed bin Ibrahim, the first Arab trader to reach Buganda in the 1840s, and later the Swahili trader Songor. By 1886, the Kabaka was selling his own people. 

first, they intervened in Buganda when a civil war broke out between three factions, followers of French (Catholic) and English (Protestant) missionaries, and Muslim supporters of Kabaka Muwanga,

he was initially against the Missionaries and massacred Christians. There was a rebellion but the next Kabaka lasted for just a month. Then came a fanatical Muslim Kabaka who massacred 30 princes and princesses. Muwanga signed a treaty with the Brits but later rebelled and was exiled. He may have been forcibly converted to Christianity. His infant son was made the new Kabaka. 

tipping the balance in favour of the English-aligned faction; then they drafted most of Buganda’s adult population into military service and set about subduing Bunyoro-Kitara. Eventually a third of the territory of Bunyoro-Kitara

Buganda had helped install Kabelega after a succession war there, in 1871. Samuel Baker, on behalf of the Egyptians, turned up to claim the territory. Kabelega chased him away. Then came the Ethiopian defeat of the Egyptians and the Mahdi uprising. Egypt was knocked out of the scramble for this portion of Africa. Sadly, Kabelega's resistance to the British was less successful. He too was exiled to the Seychelles. 

was transferred to the Buganda monarchy as a reward for its collaboration and eight thousand square miles of Baganda land were distributed as freehold to Protestant notaries,

notables. There were no notaries till about 1950. 

laying the groundwork for a land aristocracy.

Interestingly, the industriousness of the 'commoners' cultivating the land quickly led to the fragmentation of estates and the emergence of a prosperous class of agriculturists producing cash crops. Many used the money they earned to educate their sons. Thus, the previous system where 'pages' were educated in the Ruler's household was supplanted by Mission Schools and, later, Colleges. There was some discrimination for the purpose of rent extraction- e.g. restrictions on whole-sale dealing or cotton ginning, but the Brits could be flexible in settling grievances. Thus Uganda appeared prosperous and, like Ghana, a suitable candidate for a rapid hand over of power. The problem was that the Buganda were divided between Catholics and Protestants and the Brits sometimes had trouble with the Kabaka. Still, few would have foreseen Uganda's rapid decline under first Obote & then Amin. 

There was also a plantation model in Uganda, with large land grants being given to former British soldiers who grew rubber for export.

Only about 14,000 acres. It wasn't profitable.  

During the commodity crash that followed the First World War, prices plummeted and the plantations were auctioned off; the buyers were wealthy Indian merchants, the Mehta and the Madhvani families, who replaced the rubber with sugar for domestic consumption, and went on to manage profitable conglomerates with holdings in engineering and manufacturing in towns including Lugazi and Kakira – also known as Madhvaninagar or Madhvani town.

There was a rising class of coffee and livestock farmers who were beginning to get economies of scope and scale. The next step would be to form cooperatives and improve transport linkages. Sadly, Obote- like Nkrumha- took his country in a Socialist, One party, direction. 


There were no comparable opportunities in Tanganyika – immigrants looking to prosper considered it a poor option – while Kenya was seen as a ‘white man’s country’.

It had twice as many Asians as Uganda.  

If you were an Asian looking to build a future, Uganda was your best bet.

No. The presence of Whites is reassuring. If you are emigrating, try to go where there are plenty of Whites. Not Commie Whites. The other sort.  

As a consequence, at the time of independence in 1962, there were two contending elites: the Baganda landed elite created by the British and the immigrant merchant elite.

No. There was the traditional elites- somewhat factionalized- and there were the new men- like Obote- who ran circles around the Kabaka and other hereditary leaders. There were one or two Asians- like A.G Mehta, Kampala's Mayor- who appeared to have a political role in the Sixties but there could be little doubt that Obote would crash the economy sooner or later. 

Uganda’s first independent administration, under Milton Obote, had no real support in Buganda: its political base lay mostly in the north of the country, and Obote was soon faced with a hostile Bagandan middle class of landlords and bureaucrats, which drove his government into an economic alliance with the Asian merchant and manufacturing elite.

Middle class is very evil. Obote was a nice and sweet man. He was a proletarian. Evil bougies forced him to ally with dirty Asians. Chee chee!

When Idi Amin overthrew Obote’s ‘northern’ regime in 1971,

It was very nice Socialist regime. Sadly, Obote wasn't allowed to reduce his country to starvation the way Mao and Stalin had done in their countries.  

he turned to the Baganda as his natural allies.

No. He continued Obote's policies towards them just as he continued Obote's anti-Asian policies. He just kicked things up a notch because he was a soldier.  

He could also count on their enthusiastic support when he decided to ‘solve’ the Asian problem, which had gained political traction since independence.

Uganda copied Kenya. But its leaders did not command the sort of respect Kenyatta did. In the end, Kenya maintained economic growth while getting rid of a goodly quantity of uppity Asians.  

At the heart of the problem were Uganda’s citizenship laws, drawn up when Britain relinquished its protectorate. A clause in the Independence Constitution of 1962 restricted citizenship by birth to those born of Ugandan parents, one of whose grandparents must also have been born in Uganda.

Marxists love legalese.  

My guess is that no more than 10 per cent of Ugandan Asians would have qualified for citizenship under this clause at the time of independence. Six years later, Britain added an ‘indigenous’ ingredient to its own citizenship laws, and another layer to the complexities facing Uganda’s Asians. As Ian Sanjay Patel argues in We’re Here because You Were There, the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrant Act ‘was the first immigration law specifically designed to target non-white British citizens not resident or born in Britain ... Astonishingly, Britain allowed its primary form of nationality to be disconnected from a right of entry into Britain’; this legislation ‘dramatically restricted the flow of migrating citizens, but stopped short of blocking it outright’.

Africans didn't want Asians. Asians didn't want Whites. But Asians were greatly peeved when Whites expressed a similar sentiment.  

In 1968 and 1971 ‘rules-based ancestral descent’ became part of British legislation. The new arrangements would block ‘some 1.5 million non-white British citizens (Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies) in various former colonies around the world, Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and Southeast Asia, who held an automatic right of entry into Britain’.

Just as those ex-colonies had withdrawn automatic right of entry from White Britishers. What's sauce for the goose... 

They also violated Article 3(2) of the Fourth Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights, which stipulated that ‘No one shall be deprived of the right to enter his own country,’ and Article 5(d) of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which came into force in 1969, and held not only that a person had the right ‘to return to his country’, but that this right should be honoured ‘without distinction as to race’.

Stuff like that may matter in Britain. It didn't matter at all in Uganda.  

This left the ‘Asian problem’ squarely with Uganda and other East African countries.

Where Chief Justices weren't killed. They were listened to very politely.  

In response, Obote’s government passed a Trade Licensing Act (1969) and then an Immigration Act (1970) targeting Asian non-citizens. Several thousand Ugandan Asian British subjects became, as Patel puts it, ‘stateless, though they continued to be described as British citizens’. Three days after Amin’s expulsion order, the foreign secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, said in the House of Commons that his government acknowledged ‘a special obligation for these people’, and declared that there were ‘some 57,000 British citizens in Uganda’. But the government was careful to signal this as a humanitarian, not a legal, obligation. Patel cites T. Fitzgerald, a Home Office official, writing to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in August 1972 that ‘it seems preferable to accept the UKPHs [UK passport holders] from Uganda on the basis that they are “refugees”, whether or not they are technically refugees.’ When it came to drawing up contingency plans to evacuate three thousand white British citizens living in Uganda in September, weeks before the Asian expulsion, the British authorities distinguished them from non-white UKPHs as ‘belongers’.

Which is what they were. The plain fact is the Brits could have kept out, or deported, darkies and nobody could have done a thing about it.. But they needed immigrants and followed up ever crack-down with a permissive scheme for some other group. Hilariously, Indians could get a superior right of settlement in the UK by claiming to be Portuguese citizens from Goa. Brexit closed that loophole. 

The last word on this lies with the Ugandan Mission to the UN, which in September 1972

around the time Amin killed the Chief Justice.  

circulated a document at the General Assembly pointing to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968 as the original sin which Amin had simply repeated. As Patel writes,

The 1968 Act, it claimed, was ‘a racist device put in the way of British people of black and brown races’, but not ‘those British citizens whose parents and grandparents were from the British Isles’. ‘Why,’ it asked, ‘should a white Briton from South Africa, Zimbabwe or Hong Kong be able to enter Britain any time he wishes while his counterpart from Asia is refused or frustrated when he tries to gain entry?’

Because he is white. He has patriality. But Asians too must be admitted. Otherwise those nasty Africans will cook and eat them.  

The two sets of citizenship laws, in Uganda and Britain, were a vice in which tens of thousands of Asians were squeezed.

Nope. They were chucked out of Uganda. Britain took a lot of them. They did well there. Uganda didn't do well. That's the whole story.  

After 1968, no British passport-holding Asian in Uganda could obtain a work permit or trading licence in Uganda, or gain entry into the United Kingdom.

There was a quota. But you could get 6 months stay on the basis of 'independent means'.  

In economic terms, Ugandan Asians before the expulsion were a diverse group: as well as thousands of people in precarious circumstances there were a handful of wealthy families occupying leading positions in manufacturing and trade. But an even larger distinction needs to be drawn between the Asian population on the eve of expulsion and those who returned to Uganda in the 1990s, encouraged by Yoweri Museveni after he became president in 1986. Several hundred owners of large properties went back to reclaim them. Not many small property owners returned. Instead they were sought out in Britain and Canada by unscrupulous lawyers hoping to secure power of attorney and eventual right of ownership. Many newcomers took advantage of the new mood of welcome and entered Uganda from India and Pakistan. Most hoped it would be a way station on their journey to the West; some were stranded victims of people smuggling. These newcomers were known as ‘rockets’, moving in a single direction with no prospect of a return journey.

Museveni may have opened the door, but the constitution of 1995 entrenched the barrier against citizenship for non-indigenous applicants, who now had to belong to an indigenous group. Schedule 3 of the constitution included a list of ‘indigenous’ tribes. By this criterion, no Ugandan Asian could be a citizen by birth after 1995,

So Zohran squeaked in. He was born in 1991 

no matter how many generations his family had been in the country. Museveni was careful not to refer to Asians as citizens; he explained that they were ‘investors’, with no right to remain in the country, but entitled to certain privileges denied to their local counterparts in the business and investment sectors. This led to a sense of insecurity among Asians and to Ugandan resentment. Museveni was following Obote’s lead in the 1960s, when he looked to an Asian merchant class to provide a counterweight to the old Baganda elite.

I suppose Mamdanit means Obote's alliance with Mehta.  

For those who have arrived since the 1990s, Uganda is a transit station, as it is for their descendants. For the Asians who were thrown out in 1972, Uganda was home.

But they lived to tell the tale.  

There is an unmistakeable tendency to portray the Ugandan Asians expelled in 1972 as victims. Few in the first generation wrote of our experience. As a people, we were not chroniclers, nor were we given to reflecting critically on our own experiences, but the children of the refugees – the second generation – have attempted to address this deficit and their hand-me-down stories have gradually homogenised into victim narratives. For this to work, a villain is required. The corollary of the victim narratives has been the methodical demonisation of Amin as an uncivilised brute, guilty of countless crimes.

He may have killed 100,000 to 500,000. Obote in his second term is said to have scored 300,000 to a million. Mamdani, as a Marxist, has a soft spot- in the head- for their brand of African Socialism. The South Africans should adopt it. What could go wrong? 

How Amin, once regarded by the British as a noble savage who delivered the country from Obote’s erratic dictatorship, suddenly became a pariah is a long and fascinating story taken up by several narrators: British politicians, the British media, individuals who encountered him at one point or another, and Ugandan public figures such as Henry Kyemba, who spun tales of Amin as a cannibal and killer, including of his own wives and children. David Owen, foreign secretary under James Callaghan, compared him to Pol Pot; he also looked into the possibility of having Amin assassinated.

Obote wasn't much better. Come to think of it, he rescinded Mamdani's citizenship during his second stint in power.  

But Ugandan Asians are a poor fit as victims. For a start, the expulsion meant different things to different people. For a substantial group – the lowest estimates are upwards of twelve thousand – the expulsion marked the end of an impossible situation. Their predicament originated in the citizenship laws in Britain and Uganda, and the denial of work permits by the Ugandan government, which meant that they could no longer afford decent rented premises and were forced to live in places of worship – temples, mosques, gurudwaras – or to crowd into single-room tenements. According to Bob Astles, a senior intelligence officer under Obote and Amin, they lived in ‘concentration camp conditions’. This group celebrated the expulsion. For UKPHs, it had the advantage of forcing open the gates in Britain. The non UKPHs went to Canada and the rest to UN camps, and from there to an assortment of European countries, primarily Sweden. The industrialists and merchants, a few thousand of them if you include family members, lost valuable property, which they went on to claim under Museveni, but often went on to prosperous lives in exile.

Tories good. African Socialists bad. I suppose this is the only verdict the Ugandan Asian can truthfully return. Rishi Sunak's parents were from East Africa. He became PM. 

The expulsion industry, as I’ve come to think of it, has produced shelf on shelf of books. In this chorus, Neema Shah’s portrayal of an Indian merchant family in Kololo Hill stands out for its candour.* The story unfolds through the eyes of Asha, the newly married daughter-in-law of a wealthy couple living in a prestigious neighbourhood in Kampala. Asha settles in with her husband, Pran, a shopkeeper, only to discover that he is caught in a web of self-serving lies and deceptions, along with his parents, the extended family and what seems at times to be the entire Asian merchant culture. The novel raises many questions about the standard depiction of Ugandan Asians as victims of theft, rape, violence – all of which are now commonplace in the expulsion genre.

I look forward to Mamdani's account of his rape at the hands of Idi Amin.  

It is worth noting that there was no large-scale loss of life in 1972.

Yes there was. Obote tried to invade. Lots of people were killed- including the Chief Justice.  

Indeed, none of the sporadic massacres that occurred in Uganda in the seventy years since their arrival involved the Ugandan Asians. Nor did they suffer much in the way of robbery or looting: the expulsion itself was a grand, well-organised act of theft, which left little room for pilferers to take advantage. Amin’s army were ordered to make sure that no rank-and-file soldier tampered with goods and property earmarked for the officers. The greatest privation was the loss of our home, a loss shared by all the refugees. A sense of belonging develops over generations. Those who were expelled went on to live as ‘strangers’, musafir

means traveller. 'Safari' means journey in Swahili.  

in Hindustani; wherever they fetched up, they had a sense that it was provisional and that they might have to uproot again at short notice. When I visited friends who had resettled, I noticed that their living arrangements were like those of people staying in guesthouses.

Their bags were packed and stacked by the door. I suppose, people may want to flee if they hear Mamdani might be popping by.  

Ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of the expulsion, Samwiri Lwanga-Lunyiigo, emeritus professor of history at Makerere, published Uganda, an Indian Colony 1897-1972. The title is a publisher’s dream: no Ugandan could resist the provocation, since most of us think of Uganda as a former British colony.

But the place did turn to shit when the Indians left.  

Lwanga-Lunyiigo argues that although Indians in East Africa may not have constituted a colonial power, they were ‘deputy imperialists, sub-imperialist, privileged workers of the colonialists’. Arguments in Uganda about which groups were or were not ‘sub-imperialists’ are fierce and go back a long way. During the 1960s and 1970s they focused on the kingdom of Buganda’s collaboration with the British;

rather than with slave traders.  

the remuneration of the predominantly Protestant elite,

only slave traders should be remunerated 

who collaborated actively; and the fact that once Britain’s military objectives had been accomplished, agents from Buganda were posted to subjugated territories with orders to organise a Buganda-style hierarchical administration. In light of this history, the argument ran, Buganda should be seen as Britain’s junior partner in colonisation.

bring back slave-trading. Colonialism is very evil because it bans slavery.  

The counter argument was that the Baganda remained an oppressed people, whether or not they had been complicit in the oppression of others. For Lwanga-Lunyiigo, a similar debate can be had about the Ugandan Asians.

Mamdani had a colleague at Makerere who felt she ought not to be forced to teach PhD students. Mamdani reallocated her office space. She stripped naked in front of TV cameras as a protest. That's the sort of person you get to debate with in Kampala.  


At heart, this is a question about ‘indirect rule’, the system devised by colonial powers to harness junior partners – local or not so local, native or immigrant – to do the dirty work of conquest, market capture and daily administration.

That's not dirty work. It is well paid and prestigious. Teaching shite to cretins is dirty work.  

In return, they were rewarded with privileges and sometimes, like the Baganda notaries,

notables. Notaries were only introduced in 1950.  

given land, but they remained colonised. When these debates were at their most heated, in the first years of independence, ‘sub-imperialism’ and ‘indirect rule’ implied antithetical outcomes. Sub-imperial agents were the enemy; agents of indirect rule were potential allies, with a place in the anti-colonial united front. Lwanga-Lunyiigo does away with this distinction; in his view the Ugandan Asians were agents of indirect rule and yet no alliance with them was possible.

Why not ally with Idi Amin instead? That ended well- right?  

His account of the conferences Amin held with Asian leaders in the months before the expulsion reveals an astonishing failure of imagination on their part. Amin opened the bidding with a list of Indian shortcomings: they were guilty of social exclusion and a self-justifying racism that glossed over the petty privileges colonialism conferred on them while blaming the British for the colonial legacy; their business culture was dishonest; their commitment to Ugandan society was minimal. He invited them to reflect on a way forward, but they refused. They were a small community, they argued, with no role to play in government decisions.

Like Amin's decision to kill the Chief Justice.  

Asians in Uganda, as in East or Southern Africa, were immigrants, not settlers.

They were deported. Get over it.  

The difference is telling: immigrants are prepared to accept the arrangements of the state to which they move, including its borders, and therefore to be part of an existing political community, whether or not they favour its mode of governance;

sadly, some of them may want Shariah law 

settlers aim to create their own discrete political community or colony, hence the term ‘settler colonialism’. Settlers are always at odds with the native communities among which they live. It is difficult to find a settler without a gun. It is just as difficult to think of a dukawalla, or Asian shopkeeper, with a gun. (The only example of Indians using guns were plantation owners during the 1958 trade boycott by the Uganda National Movement.) The dukawalla is proverbially known for being accommodating, even timid. This is hardly the material from which conquerors or colonists are fashioned. It is, however, the material from which merchants are made. When an elite emerged among the dukawallas, they rose to economic rather than political prominence.

Then they were deported. This turned out to be a lucky break. 

The Indian community did produce individuals who possessed greater imagination. Rajat Neogy,

who converted to Islam. Peter Nazareth didn't.  

the editor of Transition, collaborated with the lawyer-politician Abu Mayanja and the political scientist Ali Mazrui in producing a magazine that imagined the contours of post-colonial Africa.

Africa became shittier than they could have imagined. Neogy decamped for the States in 1975.  

There were also the more overtly political activists from a younger generation who formed the Uganda Action Group, associated with Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress.

It must be said, Obote killed a lot of Ugandan people. I trust they were grateful.  

But they were not ‘Asian’ political leaders. If anything, they distanced themselves from the Asian community, riddled in their eyes by caste and sect. Traces of their thought survive in the founding document of a group called the Asian African Association of Uganda, formed in the post-1995 period: 

We are not South Asians (Indians, Pakistani or Bangladeshi), for South Asians live in South Asia and are committed to making a future there. Nor are we overseas South Asians, who are part of a South Asian diaspora whose members aim to return home to South Asia after a temporary sojourn overseas. True, our origin is South Asia, but our present is African. Many of us hope to make a future in Africa. We are Africans of Asian Origin, Asian Africans.

like Zohran. Get to America. You can be Mayor of New York. Kampala will never again have an Asian Mayor.  

There is much to reflect on fifty years after the expulsion. The great strength of African societies in the pre-colonial period was their ability to

provide slaves?  

absorb newcomers.

slave traders? 

The Baganda, for example, are said to have started out as four clans in the 13th century, expanding to more than forty by the 20th century. The African tradition is to integrate, not to segregate; it is common to Amhara, Arabs, Hausa, the Waswahili, Zulu and others.

like the Lord's Resistance Army?  

But Uganda’s first constitution suggested that newly independent East African countries were likely to follow the colonial, rather than the pre-colonial, tradition

of getting conquered? 

and the 1995 constitution produced under Museveni confirmed this tendency. Faced with the multi-party polities authorised by the 1995 constitution, the Museveni administration has extended its use of ‘indigeneity’, making it a prerequisite to local government by multiplying district boundaries on the principle that each minority should be recognised as ‘indigenous’ and granted its own district.

Sounds sensible. Governance is about solving collective action problems. Subsidiarity is the way to go.  

The alternative would have been to acknowledge the principle of equality for all residents in a territory.

especially if they are slave-traders.  

Whether or not we agree with the way Lwanga-Lunyiigo frames it, the Asian question has not gone away.

Yes it has. Take a fucking hint Mamdani.  

But in the Museveni era, it is no longer the same question. His insistence that recent Asian arrivals – even if some of them have Ugandan passports – should be seen as investors, and as holders of property rather than political rights, exonerates them from political obligations and forces them to live year on year in the country as permanent strangers.

Resident aliens or 'expats'. Nothing wrong with that at all.  

In the African imagination, they have become the prototype of the mercenary community. In their own minds, they are there on sufferance, always on guard, never at peace.

Which is why they should try to ensure their kids get Green Cards. When the White Man took America away from the First Nations, he created a place where the Ugandan Asian could at last put down roots. Sadly, Socialist policies can destroy even a White Nation.