Big Men and Little People

Two recent books on Idi Amin’s Uganda present an African mirror for Trump’s United States to see itself.

By Samuel Fury Childs DalyMarch 12, 2026

• History

• Politics

THE BEST HISTORICAL analogue for Donald Trump probably isn’t an American. It also isn’t one of the great villains of 20th-century Europe, despite a long and tired debate about his relationship to fascism. Rather, Trump’s most obvious predecessor comes from one of the “shithole countries” in Africa he disdains: General Idi Amin, the autocrat who ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979. “It is not only the braggadocio, the self-regard, the love for military ceremony,” historian Derek R. Peterson writes in A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda (2025); it’s also the cruelly funny rhetoric, the demonization of immigrants and outsiders, and the political chaos that comes from constantly hounding your rivals and betraying your friends. Amin and Trump carry themselves alike, and they give the same belligerent speeches. They share a catty kind of charisma. Like Amin, Trump tells his supporters he’s fighting for their freedom, all while turning the screws.

It isn’t a coincidence that two of the most celebrated scholars of Africa in the United States both published books about Idi Amin in the past year. Only Peterson makes the comparison to Trump explicit, but Mahmood Mamdani’s portrait of the general in Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State is hard not to read through the lens of the United States, where Mamdani has lived since the 1990s. Peterson’s book is a social history of the regime, focusing on the people who made it work; Mamdani’s is a personal account of Uganda’s last half century, covering both Amin and the autocrats who followed him. Both depict Amin not as the buffoon that many remember but as a savvy political operator who knew what people wanted and what they feared. Neither Mamdani nor Peterson denies that Amin was violent and cruel, and neither is out to rehabilitate him. While his legacy means different things to them, they both take him more seriously than most who have written about him.

Not all tyrants have some great ideological evil behind them; some are animated by ideas we might find reasonable. Amin’s organizing principle was independence, which he promised his people so often and so loudly that some of them came to believe it was really his to give. Amin is sometimes called an “African Hitler”—for example, in the widely viewed 2021 Netflix documentary How to Become a Tyrant—as if the two figures shared a playbook. Mamdani asks his readers to give up this notion from the start; Amin made “Hitlerite proclamations,” he writes, “but that was not the same as committing Hitlerite atrocities.” It doesn’t diminish Amin’s crimes to say that he was evil in his own way, and there are limits to what historical analogy can say about him.

To Mamdani, Amin’s most revealing foil is neither Hitler nor Trump, but one closer to home: Yoweri Museveni, the radical turned autocrat who has ruled Uganda since 1986. Museveni is Mamdani’s true target. When he puts them side-by-side, Amin often seems like the more courageous and creative of the two leaders. Slow Poison is the coda to an argument that Mamdani has been making for decades: colonialism created Africa’s tribes through a complex process of defining, dividing, and ruling people on the basis of ethnicity. For this reason, the “tribalism” of contemporary African politics is a shadow of colonialism. Museveni has ruled through ethnic difference—and is therefore a kind of colonial stooge in Mamdani’s view—while Amin, for all his other ills, did not. Mamdani holds Museveni up like a stained shirt in a soap commercial, making the rest of the laundry seem cleaner by comparison.

Mamdani cycles through explanations for what made Amin the way he was, including childhood psychodrama, the trauma of his colonial military career, and the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of the 1971 coup that brought him to power. Mamdani’s book is partially a memoir, but those looking for insight about the author himself will be disappointed. He tells a few good stories—a shambolic trip to North Korea is especially entertaining—but he keeps mum about the things most readers will want to know. Almost no mention is made of his wife, successful filmmaker Mira Nair, nor their recently famous son, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. Sometimes Slow Poison reads like an apologia for Amin. Mamdani soft-pedals the 1972 expulsion of Uganda’s Asian minority, which is surprising given that he was among the expelled. “For Amin,” he writes, “the challenge of independence was to make Black rule meaningful by nurturing Black millionaires in place of wealthy Asians.” The expulsion comes across as a correction to Britain’s error of bringing in racial outsiders to do colonialism’s dirty work, even if it was also “one big, well-organized collective theft.” In contrast to Mamdani’s psychologizing, Peterson isn’t interested in what went on inside Amin’s head. He puts Amin himself in the background to focus on the people who surrounded him—a framing that is better able to explain how Amin managed to stay in power as long as he did. Peterson likewise downplays the expulsion of Asians. Perhaps they’re right to sideline this famous episode in Ugandan history: the Asian expulsion order was only one of Amin’s crimes, and not the most violent or consequential of them. The authors seldom see eye to eye, but they can agree that racism alone was not what made Amin a historically consequential figure.

Amin is not remembered fondly in Africa, but his political commitments still resonate there. In his own time, a fair number of people saw him not as a tyrant but as a liberator, and in some ways he really was one. He was avowedly anti-British and did none of the groveling to superpowers that other leaders of small countries did during the Cold War. The government Amin overthrew had been very unpopular, and many Ugandans were glad to see his predecessor, Milton Obote, go. While Amin’s nativist economic policies seemed extreme to some people, the injustice that they responded to—structural poverty, entrenched inequality between the races—was real. Like it or not, Amin was part of a “world-historical struggle against racism,” Peterson writes, though that didn’t preclude him from also being cruel, violent, and, in his own way, very racist. African decolonization is not a story of principled radicals and the toady colonial apologists who betrayed them. Independence was an empty vessel, and many things could fit inside it. Despite his famous girth, Amin was one of them.

The officers who stage military coups often claim to be acting in the name of freedom—paradoxically, given the despotic turn most of them take once in power. This is true of the recent coups in Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali, and it was true in the dozens of military takeovers across Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. Men like Amin cloaked themselves in liberation, arguing that they would deliver a second, more meaningful freedom than the disappointing version of it that civilians had negotiated during the process of decolonization. They argued that the elites who inherited political power from the former European empires had sold out independence. They were blinded by their colonial educations and incapable of imagining some other, better way of doing things. The consensus has long been that military officers like Amin appropriated this kind of radical language from anti-colonial freedom fighters (Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral) without understanding what it meant. But there was also a real affinity between the soldiers and the freedom fighters; men like Amin and Fanon shared more than we might like to admit. They wanted to decolonize minds as well as governments and understood that violence might be necessary to achieve such a radical transformation. Both Peterson and Mamdani can see the similarity between the two figures, even though they view it from different angles. One of African history’s cruelest ironies is that countries like Uganda fought for freedom from European colonialism and then succumbed to homegrown despotism not long after the Europeans left. When Amin shackled people in the name of freedom, a fair number of Ugandans took him at his word, some for a very long time. Why?

Peterson answers this question by taking the spotlight off Amin himself. When a despot is brash and colorful, as both Amin and Trump are, it’s easy to forget that he is not the one governing in the day-to-day. That task falls to bureaucrats, soldiers, the police, and other low-profile people who have interests of their own, some of which align with the dictator’s, while others don’t. People grit their teeth and work for a despot not necessarily because they worship him (though there are always some true believers), nor because they’re selling out. They work for him because they want to protect something—a community, an institution, an idea—and they decide the best way to do that is to put their shoulder to the wheel. Faced with Amin, some people collaborated, some left, and others resorted to what Peterson calls “do-it-yourself government.” The most striking example of this is the Rwenzururu Kingdom, a slow-burning secessionist movement in the mountains on the Zaire border. For years, people in this remote place lived “off the grid,” waging small acts of rebellion against the government and writing scattershot petitions for their cause (one appeal to the United Nations ended up in a file titled “Courageous Nuts”). When Amin came to power, Rwenzururu made its isolation an asset, carving out a place for itself as the rest of Uganda cracked. What resulted was a strange country within a country, left mostly to its own devices. Amin never quite defeated it, and when a Tanzanian invasion finally overthrew him in 1979, Rwenzururu rejoined Uganda. Its leaders recast their failed independence struggle as a triumph against Amin’s tyranny.

There are not many heroes or villains here; everyone makes compromises in a dictatorship, and not all of them are as obvious as snitching on your neighbor. One of the more memorable people in Peterson’s book is John Mbiti, a theologian who taught at Makerere University during the Amin years. Amin had more of an intellectual profile than people give him credit for, and the mild-mannered Mbiti gave credence to some of his more repressive religious policies—banning Pentecostal and Adventist churches, for example, and bullying members of the Bahá’í faith into leaving the country. Mbiti saw African religion as holistic. It permeated every aspect of how Africans lived, he argued, and gave order and stability to public life. It was also singular; all African traditional religions were more or less the same beneath the variations of local spirits, shrines, and oracles. Mbiti’s theology was useful to Amin. His talk of tradition was appealing to a regime that valued discipline and order, and his belief in the unity of African religion could justify cracking down on dissenting faiths. Mbiti eventually crossed Amin, as nearly everyone around him did sooner or later, and he spent the rest of his life in exile in Switzerland. Mbiti is having an unlikely revival today. A TikTok video explaining his peculiar theory of time (namely that Africans live perpetually in the present) has been viewed millions of times, and he has been co-opted as a kind of decolonial sage. Like many putatively radical ideas, Mbiti’s thought had a sharp edge.

Amin promised a future where Uganda would have a place at the table in world politics. This promise was appealing, especially in a small country still recovering from the humiliation of colonialism. “Amin was inviting Ugandans to act as though they were at the center of things,” Peterson writes. While no one took his more outlandish demands seriously—to move the headquarters of the United Nations to Kampala, for example—their brazenness had a certain appeal. He took up strange causes. Scottish, Eritrean, and Hawaiian nationalists all had his ear at various points, and he supported a militant faction of the anti-apartheid movement, much to the consternation of its mainstream. He regularly chastised powerful foreign ambassadors and broke the rules of diplomatic discretion by broadcasting his diplomatic cables for everyone to hear. He was not a fast friend. He came to power as an ally of Israel, but following a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1972, he abruptly threw his weight behind the Palestinian cause, adopting historically convoluted antisemitic rhetoric in the process. “Hitler and all German people knew that the Israelis are not people who are working in the interest of the people of the world,” he wrote to Prime Minister Golda Meir a year after she had warmly hosted him in Jerusalem. “That is why they burnt the Israelis alive with gas on the soil of Germany.”

This kind of bombast—cruel, unapologetic, spoken shamelessly in the open—made Amin more popular, not less. Even in the nastiest bouts of his rule, people believed that they were building something with Amin. They carved statues of him, kept careful records of their service to the regime for posterity, and wrote some of the worst poetry I have ever read in his honor (from his American admirer Roy Innis: “[Y]our electric personality pronounced the imperialists’ doom. / Your pragmatism has given Ugandans their economic boom”). Peterson takes this all seriously, without ever making apologies for Amin. “There is labor involved in the making of myths,” he writes. “It needs concrete, wire, bamboo, thatch, and sweat.” Peterson knows this better than most. He has a real commitment to the archives used in his research and has devoted much of his career to making sure that they survive for the next generation—something most historians would leave to other people. Without the work of Peterson and his collaborators, the millions of pages that record this history would be lost to the relentless assault of time and termites.

Peterson’s book will make even the staunchest critic of Amin sympathetic to the bureaucrats who made his regime tick. In their paperwork, they seem so human, full of personality, more often well intentioned than not. He is also drawn to oddballs. The book’s main characters are mostly unknown people: small-town petitioners, an outsider artist, a quixotic builder of a war memorial to a battle that didn’t really happen. Peterson never says it, but there’s a whiff of madness to some of them. Mad people stand out in an archive. After reading a hundred letters complaining about property taxes and pesky neighbors, the one claiming that the government has been infiltrated by space aliens can seem like a breath of fresh air. None of Peterson’s subjects quite reach that level of delusion, but if some of them were, as I suspect, not quite sane, that doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of historical inquiry. Sometimes the dark glass of insanity reflects something that we’d otherwise miss. It isn’t just that mad people get it right in mad times, but also that the boundary between normal and perverse degrades when someone like Amin or Trump is in charge. It is good to take nonconformists and busybodies seriously, as Peterson does, but it’s also important to acknowledge that dictatorship blurs the vision of those who live under it. Maybe, looking back on Trump, Americans will be able to see something like the nuance that Peterson and Mamdani find in the Amin years. Or maybe we’ll only have questions: Who wanted this? How did we let things get so out of hand? Just as in Amin’s time, the answers will have more to do with the little people than the big men.