The unsteady state: Uganda, Obote and General Amin
Authors: Saul John S. 
Published: July 2007

It would be incorrect to see in the replacement of the colonial state by the post‐colonial state merely a distinction without a difference. The colonial state provided imperialism with a quite direct and unmediated instrument for control in the interests of ‘accumulation on a world, scale’ within the colonial social formation. The post‐colonial state, while prone toplay a similar role tothat played by its predecessor, is something more of an unpredictable quantity in this regard. Unpredictable, because of the greater scope for expression given to indigenous elements who now find in the ‘independent’ state a much more apt target for their activities and a potential instrument for the advancement of their own interests and concerns.

In theory, such unpredictability might hold the threat of challenges to the structures of continuing imperial domination arising either from the left (socialism) or from the right (a burgeoning and competitive locally‐based capitalism), with indigenous classes attempting to use the state in order to realize independent national projects of their own. However, under African conditions, these have been much less prominent than a third, more ironic, kind of ‘threat’ to imperial interests: the crystallization in many African settings of a state too weak and too internally compromised to stabilize society and economy and thereby effectively guarantee the on‐going generation of surplus and accumulation of capital. Such weakness, when it evidences itself, certainly reflects economic contradictions as well as specific attributes of the class forces at play in contemporary Africa. Nonetheless, it is a brand of weakness which finds its primary expression in the political sphere and, as we shall see, only a proper understanding of that sphere can shed real light on the problems involved. Unfortunately, it must also be noted that neither bourgeois political science (as exemplified in the work of countless ‘Africanists') nor the work of those few Marxists who have undertaken analyses of African politics, have yet taken us very far towards such an understanding.

Uganda provides an example of these several points and will be explored in this article in order to illustrate them. Here is the ‘unsteady state’ par excellence—a dependent social formation which has not given rise to a revolution, but which has nevertheless failed to produce a state adequate to the task of guaranteeing the stable environment necessary for on‐going imperialist exploitation.At its most extreme, this has meant ‘Aminism’, a state ‘unhinged’, representing a situation so unpredictable that it has led, at least in the short‐run, to a particularly dramatic disruption of the production process‐a situation very far, it would seem, from servicing imperialism's most basic interests. At the same time, it must be emphasized that this bizarre denouement of Uganda's development is consistent with problems and possibilities present within Uganda from a much earlier period, problems which haunted General Amin's predecessor, Milton Obote, and problems which will not necessarily disappear with the passing of Amin himself.

Nor has the nature of such problems been well understood. Not, certainly, by those racists of all colours who either parody or praise Amin with little genuine concern for the havoc he has wreaked—most notably among his own African brothers and sisters. Not by President Nyerere and his advisors, whose ill‐fated support for Obote's post‐coup adventures served only to set back the emergence of a genuine resistance movement in Uganda. Not by the many western scholars interested in Uganda, even though they have provided a wealth of data on the various permutations and combinations of factional politics there. And not by Mahmood Mamdani; even though his recent pioneering work (both in a recent article in the Review of African Political Economy(No. 4) and in his soon‐to‐be‐published book‐length manuscript) does represent an important contribution to the Marxist study of Uganda‐and of Africa. In short, much remains to be learned—not least by Marxists—about the nature of African politics. What follows is intended, therefore, to suggest some possible directions which further discussion might take.