Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Mahmoud Mamdani is an academic,

a scholar who spent years studying colonialism and international politics. He's also a dad,

and his son happens to be Zoran Mamdani, mayor-elect of New York City. But back to the elder

Mamdani's scholarly work, his new book is

Slow Poison, Idi Amin, Uyri Meseveni, and the making of the Ugandan state. And in this interview

with Empires-Laila Fadl, Mamdani, who is a Ugandan citizen originally from India, talks about his

strong connection to Uganda and the quote, fiction that we all belong to a homeland that's ahead

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These days, Mahmoud Mamdani is known as Zohran Mamdani's dad, the political superstar that felt like he came out of nowhere to win New York's mayoral race.

But before his son's political rise, his father had long been a storied academic focused on colonialism

and anti-colonialism in Africa, and that academic work stems from his own experience

as a Ugandan citizen of Indian origin.

We were migrants, and under the colonial system, migrants were defined as non-indigenous.

And that meant people like him were never made to feel fully at home in Uganda and were stripped of core rights.

That inspired a lifelong quest looking for answers on...

Who belongs, who does not, and how it has changed over time.

His latest book, Slow Poison, focuses on the making of the Ugandan state, post-British

...