Mahmood Mamdani on Zohran, Uganda and forced expulsion: Who is part of the nation and who is not?'

"The night before Mahmood Mamdani was expelled from Uganda in 1972, a senior professor from the university where he had been employed as a lowly teaching assistant wandered into his family home, looking for spoils. The rest of the family had already left for the UK, the US and Tanzania but 26-year-old Mamdani had decided to remain until the final day of the three-month period that Idi Amin, the Ugandan president, had designated for all Asians to leave the country."

"Every place we lived in after the expulsion, we lived as if we were guests, our houses or rooms stamped with the feeling of being transients, Mamdani writes in his book Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State, published this October. With the loss of Uganda, we lost a sense of belonging, and of rootedness. The question of who belongs in a political community has animated Mamdani's scholarship ever since."

Mahmood Mamdani was expelled from Uganda in 1972 under Idi Amin's decree forcing Asians to leave, while he remained until the final permitted day. A senior university professor entered his family home and took a carton of Johnnie Walker Red that actually contained cooking oil, an episode Mamdani later recalled amid loneliness, anxiety and depression. His parents settled in Wembley and awaited arrivals from Uganda, while Mamdani joined a vibrant intellectual community in Dar es Salaam. The family lived thereafter as transients, and the loss of rootedness has driven Mamdani's persistent scholarly focus on who belongs in political communities.

Read at www.theguardian.com