The Ugandan scholar, Mahmood Mamdani, has written on the question of genocide in Rwanda, and more recently, that in Darfur, Sudan. His two well-received books, Citizen and Subject (1996) and When Victims become Killers (2001) attempt to theorize the volatile concepts of what a ‘citizen’, ‘subject’ and ‘victim’ are and can mean in different postcolonial African contexts. His essays on Darfur and the engaged responses from critics further confirm Mamdani as a committed scholar on genocide in Africa. Mamdani’s work is generally considered theoretically inspiring and insightful. However, the question that we raise in this article is the extent to which it is in fact theoretically flawed. We seek to critique Mamdani’s works, in which we have identified a problem of privileging a selective understanding of genocide in his writings on Africa.