Mahmood Mamdani Examines Ugandan Authoritarianism

In the opening pages of , a new account of authoritarianism in postcolonial Uganda, author Mahmood Mamdani evokes a nineteenth-century world of exploration and violence in Africa, centering on a long-forgotten Conradian figure. Eduard Schnitzer, a German Jewish physician, had come under the employ of the Anglo-Ottoman incursion in what is today South Sudan, where he converted to Islam and took the name Emin Pasha. He went on to establish a private mercenary army whose several thousand members…