Excerpt from a book I'm reading, Slow Poison, by Mahmood Mamdani, father of Zorhan Mamdani.

"FBI agents knocked on
my door...they asked what I thought of Marx. I said I had
never met him. Not surprisingly, this Ugandan Muyindi had never heard of Karl
Marx. “He’s dead.”

I said, “I'm sorry, what happened?”

“No, he died long ago.”

I wondered why, then, the question. “Why, then, are you asking me?”
Later, I would remind myself: the FBI introduced me to Karl Marx! "
#books #bookstodon #book

@dilmandila I love it! The FBI 'accidentally' revolutionising him

@Tooden @dilmandila Seeing how Mahmood Mamdani, around 19-20 years old at this time, had come to FBI attention in the first place for going to Selma, Alabama to participate in the Civil Rights as a student from Uganda, you might say he was already a revolutionary to some degree.

@ljwrites Perhaps they thought he was naive?
He was a clever man. @dilmandila

@Tooden @dilmandila I still don't entirely buy he was ignorant of Karl Marx as a university student in the 60s tbh, but if his upbringing was very sheltered I suppose it was possible when he was still so young.

@ljwrites He was certainly lucky to get out of Uganda when he did. @dilmandila

@Tooden @dilmandila wdym he was lucky to leave, was there a particular event in Uganda between 1963-1972 that he was lucky to miss? If you mean the Amin coup, Mahmood Mamdani went back to Uganda under Idi Amin after his studies. The elder Mamdani remains an Ugandan citizen and takes an active role with Ugandan institutions.

@ljwrites @Tooden It is possible he had not heard of Karl Marx, given that he had just moved to the US. He might have heard of communism and the Soviet Union, though.

Also, yes there was no reason for him to fear living in Uganda at that time. His book is about the Ugandan-Asians struggling with identity and belonging, and they were sort of stateless at that time. So when Idi Amin expelled them it was something of a gift to them for it helped force Britain to accept them as British citizens.

@dilmandila @Tooden Oh, so it really was possible for a Ugandan university student not to have heard of Karl Marx? That sounds like a fascinatingly different intellectual and social atmosphere than the ones I'm used to, I stand corrected! Of course he had good reason to play naïve with the FBI man since the feds were fishing for a reason to paint the Civil Rights movement as a Communist plot, but given how he maintains his ignorance at the time decades after the need for it was gone there's little basis to disbelieve him.

What awes me is that Mamdani was later made actually stateless when Milton Obote's government stripped them of citizenship for his dissent, but he went back AGAIN after Obote was disposed. Like there was nothing that could stop this Ugandan man from being Ugandan and he persisted despite two different regimes' attempts to get rid of him, you gotta love that xD