When Zohran Mamdani surged onto the political scene in New York earlier this year and won the city’s Democratic Party primary, many wondered what kind of leader he would make for the United States’ largest and most cosmopolitan city if he were to become mayor after the general election in November.
From the heights of the banking, real estate, and media sectors, the city’s establishment looked on this prospect with deep misgivings and even outright hostility given 33-year-old Mamdani’s self-identification as a democratic socialist. Many in New York City’s large Jewish population, especially older voters, objected to him over his support for Palestinian rights and for his prior use of the slogan “globalize the intifada,” which he now says he will avoid or discourage.
Others have raised questions about Mamdani identifying as an African American in an unsuccessful undergraduate application to attend Columbia University years ago. For skeptics, as a prospective student, he was being manipulative or deceptive, gaming the United States’ obsessive and peculiar conventions of racial identity. For Mamdani, whose parents’ descent traces back to India but who spent his childhood in Uganda, where his father grew up and enjoyed citizenship, there was much less here than meets the eye.
It is important to remember that for most voters, at least in the mayoral primary, none of these questions raised insurmountable objections. As much a reflection of the candidate’s widely noted speaking skills, his careful dress and ready smile, along with his steady focus on New York’s exorbitant cost of living, this may be a statement about how many U.S. cities are becoming more international and open-minded about the world, even at a time when the federal government under U.S. President Donald Trump has turned sharply hostile to immigration.
While no one can know with any certainty what kind of leader such a young political newcomer might turn out to be if elected, it is possible, nonetheless, to say quite a bit about the household in which he was raised. By a kind of astral coincidence, Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy coincides with the publication of Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State, a fascinating memoir by his father, Mahmood Mamdani, a renowned scholar of politics and anthropology at Columbia University. His mother, Mira Nair, a Punjabi raised in a Hindu household in India, is equally renowned as a filmmaker, with credits including Monsoon Wedding and the Oscar-nominated Salaam Bombay! Because Mahmood Mamdani began work on the memoir years ago, and because of the long lead times between a writer’s completion of a book and its publication, there is little chance that he could have shaped the story with his son’s mayoral campaign in mind.
By another fascinating coincidence, one of Mahmood Mamdani’s great intellectual preoccupations has been the role of identity in national politics, particularly how racial, ethnic, and religious minorities secure their places against the background of very different and dominant majorities. It is a theme that recurs across many of his books, and his new memoir about Uganda is no different.
Mamdani père was raised by ethnically Indian parents in Kampala, Uganda, a landlocked colony in East Africa. He grew up in a neighborhood whose racial segregation was an integral feature of British rule. As a boy, this meant playing in “race-exclusive fields,” studying in officially designated Indian schools, and praying in “racialized mosques.” “How does the offspring of a middle-class Asian family break from their race-tinted and narrow political horizons,” he asked, identifying a central theme of his life. In a provisional answer near the beginning of Slow Poison, he said, “My political awakening began in the United States and matured in Dar es Salaam,” the largest city in neighboring Tanzania and the site of his grandfather’s birth.
Mahmood Mamdani said that as a child, he was resentful of having been born in India, unlike Uganda, where all his ethnically Indian friends came from. It may be a modest coincidence, but this seems to foreshadow his son’s insistence on including Africa in his college application. Mamdani’s Indian birth was mere biographical accident, due to his own father’s temporary move to India to get married before pursuing a college education. Born in 1946, he describes himself as “one of India’s midnight’s children”—a reference to Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning novel, in which the protagonist was born precisely at midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, at the moment of India’s independence and violent partition that also led to the creation of the Muslim-majority Pakistan. As Gujarati Muslims, this effectively left the Mamdani family without a home in India. Further attesting to his attachment to Uganda and Africa, Mahmood Mamdani wrote that he did not visit his ancestors’ native Gujarat for the first time until 2008.
Remarkably, the Mamdani family would experience another dispossession in Africa. After Mamdani completed his work at Harvard University, he returned to Uganda in July 1972. That same month, Idi Amin, the country’s dictator and one of the main subjects of the Slow Poison, announced that all people of Asian descent would be expelled from the country, causing the family to relocate to Tanzania.
It is the details about the Mamdani family’s time in the United States, however, that provide the deepest insights into the sort of formative influences that today’s young mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, likely received. Mahmood Mamdami was one of 23 Ugandans who received scholarships to study in the United States upon Uganda’s independence from Britain in 1962. He left for America with the intention of becoming an engineer, but at the University of Pittsburgh, like most U.S. colleges, he was required to take electives and discovered his love for political science—and for the humanities in general.
Yearning for a deeper experience of the United States, Mamdani wrote that during the summer of 1964, he bought a seasonal ticket on Continental Trailways and set off by bus to California, visiting a variety of cities along the way. Leaving Las Vegas for New Mexico, he asked the driver if he could make a stop to pray—one of his religion’s rites of worship. “Folks, we have a Muslim with us. He wants us to stop for ten minutes so he can pray.” The driver submitted the request to a vote, and the passengers unanimously approved. They got off the bus and formed a circle around him, silently observing his kneeling recitation of verses from the Quran. One can only wonder how such a request would be met in today’s America under Trump.
In 1965, during his third year at Pitt, Mamdani recounted coming across a sign advertising a talk about civil rights given by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, one of the most important activist groups that advocated for full rights for African Americans. At the end of the event, he wrote that he “walked out of the hall and straight onto a bus” bound for Montgomery, Alabama, in the heart of the segregated South.
“The experience in Alabama was a turning point in my political development. That night, we slept in a Black church, singing one protest song after another. The next day we went to an open ground where big names from the civil rights struggle, including Martin Luther King, talked of the importance of this struggle, and of waging it with prudence,” he wrote, then citing the words of James Forman, who spoke in a more fiery style. “If you do not let us sit at the table of democracy, we will blow them legs off.”
Reflecting his overwhelming identification with Uganda and East Africa, there is no hint in Mamdani’s narrative that he knew that even after the terrible violence India experienced during the partition, it immediately granted voting rights to its citizens, irrespective of religion or ethnicity from the moment of independence. By contrast, despite its status as the world’s oldest democracy, the United States was still struggling toward this goal in the 1960s.
Later, as student protesters marched on Montgomery, they were herded roughly by police and hauled off to jail. Mahmood Mamdani used his one phone call to reach the Ugandan ambassador to the United States, who berated him for “interfering in the internal affairs of a foreign country.” “This is not a foreign matter,” he replied. “Have you forgotten that we got our independence only a few years ago[?] This is the same struggle for freedom.”
Back at Pitt a month later, Mahmood Mamdani said the FBI knocked on his door to question him. They wanted to know what he thought of Karl Marx. He answered that he had never met him, drawing the explanation that Marx believed that “the money of rich people should be taken away and distributed to poor people.”
“It sounded like a fine idea,” he wrote in recollection of this moment. He later went to the library to look the subject up and wrote of that time, “I would remind myself: the FBI introduced me to Karl Marx!”
Following his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, it was a natural step for the global-minded Mamdani to join the burgeoning anti-war movement, which was protesting the U.S. supply of arms and deepening combat involvement in the Vietnamese civil war. His graduate education and fellowships ensued at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and at Harvard, but Mamdani was never one to cocoon himself in the ivory tower. “I learned the importance of political activism, of linking classroom learning with public mobilization.”
In 1972, these instincts led him back to Uganda, where he would lead an unusually engaged life, moving repeatedly back and forth between academia, regional politics, and his insistently principled progressive politics. As fascinating as they are, the details of his reengagement with Africa, which occupy most of the book, are beyond the scope of this column.
Sons are not always cut from the same cloth as their fathers, but the similarities in this case seem too obvious to ignore. He is his own man, of course, but Zohran Mamdani’s politics seem broadly inspired by his father’s life, and why shouldn’t they be? This means more than easy and vague political labels, like democratic socialist. He is not Black, but his attachment to Africa seems entirely genuine, as does his commitment to the excluded, the marginalized, and the downtrodden. Like his father, who speaks the Hindi-Urdu of his ancestors with elegance (along with Swahili and Arabic), Zohran Mamdani seems natural and comfortable wearing multiple hats.
In a city like New York, where the incredibly affluent thrive alongside people who are abandoned to their own devices, this can seem jarring and even threatening to the privileged. If he is anything like his father, though, the younger Mamdani is driven more by a sense of community and of the need for greater inclusion than he is for class retribution or expropriation, which is well beyond the powers of a New York mayor.
What seems certain is that if Zohran Mamdani is elected, the United States’ greatest city will move beyond politics as usual and enter into a season of clean-sheet experimentation that will command the world’s attention.