Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún

Mahmood Mamdani has spent his career examining how colonial rule built political identities and divided populations into native, settler, citizen, and stranger. Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State brings those questions into the history of modern Uganda and into Mamdani’s own life. In conversation with Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Mamdani considers what holds a nation together, what takes it apart, and how political communities are slowly reorganized into competing forms of belonging.

Between the late 1940s and the end of the 1960s, traders, printers, and schoolteachers in Onitsha turned a riverside market into one of the most prolific publishing scenes in modern Africa. Their pamphlets offered lessons in love, city life, etiquette, ambition, morality, and survival in an English that was inventive, unruly, and entirely its own. This conversation returns to Onitsha Market Literature and the wider traditions of popular writing it belongs to, asking where Nigerian literature begins, who literature is made for, what ordinary readers have always wanted from books, and what today’s publishing debates might learn from writing that flourished without metropolitan permission.