Mahmood Mamdani, Father of NYC Mayor, Is Writing a Book on Gaza

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At once, Mahmood Mamdani’s fame was eclipsed by his son’s. At the same time, the election of Zohran Mamdani has attracted new interest in his father’s work.

Since his days as a scholar in Tanzania in the 1970s, Mahmood Mamdani has wrestled with subjects including the nature of colonialism and its enduring consequences.

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In-Depth Context: Mahmood Mamdani

Mahmood Mamdani (born 23 April 1946) is a Ugandan anthropologist, academic, and political commentator. He is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology, political science, and African studies at Columbia University. He also serves as the chancellor of Kampala International University in Uganda, and honorary professor at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. He was previously the director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) in Kampala, Uganda, from 2010 until 2022. Mamdani specialises in the study of African and international politics, colonialism and post‐colonialism, and the politics of knowledge production. He is married to filmmaker Mira Nair. He and Nair are the parents of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

== Early life and education == Mahmood Mamdani was born on 23 April 1946 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, the year before the end of British Raj. He was raised in Kampala, Uganda, as part of the Indian diaspora in Southeast Africa. Both his parents, a Gujarati Muslim couple, were born and raised in the British territory of Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania). The couple moved to Bombay while his father attended college there. The family returned to Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, when Mamdani was two, and moved to Uganda when he was five or six years old. At the time, Uganda was racially segregated, including where people lived, the schools, the mosques, and children's play areas. For his primary school education, Mamdani first attended a madrasa, and then the Government Indian Primary School. He grew up speaking Gujarati, Urdu, and Swahili. He started studying English in sixth grade. After junior secondary school, he attended Old Kampala Senior Secondary School, where he was secretary of the Do-it-Yourself Physics club. Mamdani was one of 23 Ugandan students in the 1963 group of the Kennedy Airlift, a US-funded scholarship program that brought hundreds of East Africans to universities in the United States and Canada between 1959 and 1963. Mamdani graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1967. He was among the many students in the northern US who made the bus journey south to Montgomery, Alabama, organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in March 1965 to participate in the civil rights movement. This was during the time of, but distinct from, the Selma to Montgomery marches. He was jailed during the march and was allowed to make a phone call. Mamdani called the Ugandan ambassador in Washington, DC, for assistance. The ambassador asked him why he was "interfering in the internal affairs of a foreign country", to which he responded by saying that this was not an internal affair but a freedom struggle and that they too had gotten their freedom only last year. Soon after, Mamdani learned about Karl Marx's work from an FBI visit. He attended the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University and graduated in 1968 with a Master of Arts degree in political science and a Master of Arts degree in law and diplomacy in 1969. He obtained his doctor of philosophy degree in government from Harvard University in 1974, under the direction of Karl Deutsch. His thesis was titled Politics and Class Formation in Uganda.

== Career == Mamdani returned to Uganda in early 1972 and was employed by Makerere University in Kampala as a teaching assistant, at the same time conducting his doctoral research. He and most Asians were expelled later that year by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin because of their ethnicity; Amin intended to "reclaim" businesses and properties. Mamdani left Uganda for a refugee camp in the United Kingdom in early November. He left England in mid-1973 after being recruited to the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. In Dar es Salaam, he completed writing his dissertation. He was active with anti-Amin groups. In 1979, he attended the Moshi Conference as an observer. He returned to Uganda after Amin was overthrown following the Uganda–Tanzania War in 1979. During this period, he was employed as an intern with the All Africa Conference of Churches, an ecumenical Christian alliance based in Nairobi, Kenya, working at the Church of Uganda's Kampala office. From 1980 (following Amin's ouster in 1979) until 1993 he was again employed by Makerere University. In 1984, while attending a conference in Dakar, Senegal, he became stateless after his Ugandan citizenship was withdrawn by the government under Milton Obote because of his criticism of its policies. He returned to Dar es Salaam. After Obote was deposed for the second time, Mamdani once again returned to Uganda in June 1986. He was the founding director of the Centre for Basic Research (CBR), Uganda's first non-governmental research organisation, where he served from 1987 to 1996. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Durban-Westville in South Africa (January to June 1993), at the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library in New Delhi (January to June in 1995), and at Princeton University (1995–96). In 1996, he was appointed the inaugural holder of the AC Jordan chair of African studies at the University of Cape Town, and in early 1997 became head of the Centre for African Studies (CAS). He left after having disagreements with the (mostly white) faculty over the draft of his syllabus for a foundation course on Africa called "Problematising Africa". Mamdani, who labelled the present syllabus as "Bantu studies" (in a reference to education of Black people under the apartheid regime) was suspended and eventually resigned. "The Mamdani affair" continues to be referenced in debates about the decolonisation of higher education. He later said that there was no personal bitterness, and he had many enduring relationships from his time there. He said it was about differences in perspective, in particular the structure of the curriculum with regard to the study of South Africa as an African country. He was later (

Background information sourced from Wikipedia: Mahmood Mamdani under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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Original Source: Mahmood Mamdani, Father of NYC Mayor, Is Writing a Book on Gaza