Mahmood Mamdani
Based on Wikipedia: Mahmood Mamdani
In March 1965, a twenty-year-old Ugandan exchange student found himself in a Montgomery, Alabama jail cell. He had traveled south from Pittsburgh with other students organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to participate in the civil rights movement. When the police allowed him one phone call, Mahmood Mamdani dialed the Ugandan ambassador in Washington, D.C.
The ambassador was not pleased. "Why are you interfering in the internal affairs of a foreign country?" he demanded.
Mamdani's response would prove prophetic of the intellectual framework he would spend the next six decades developing: "This is not an internal affair but a freedom struggle. You got your freedom only last year."
The exchange captures something essential about Mamdani's life and work. Here was a young man born in colonial India, raised in colonial Uganda, educated in the segregated American South, who could see immediately what the Ugandan diplomat could not: that the struggle for Black civil rights in Alabama and the struggle for African independence were manifestations of the same global phenomenon. Colonial power, whether in Montgomery or Kampala, operated through similar mechanisms of racial hierarchy and exclusion.
A Life Shaped by Colonialism's Geography
Mahmood Mamdani was born on April 23, 1946, in Bombay, just one year before British India would be partitioned into independent India and Pakistan. His parents, Gujarati Muslims, had themselves been born in British Tanganyika—present-day Tanzania. His father was studying in Bombay when Mahmood was born, but the family soon returned to East Africa, first to Dar es Salaam when Mahmood was two, then to Uganda when he was five or six.
This geography of empire would shape everything. The Indian diaspora in East Africa existed because of colonialism—Indians had been brought to build the railways, to serve as intermediaries between British administrators and African populations. They occupied a peculiar middle space in the colonial hierarchy: above Africans, below Europeans, never quite belonging to either world.
Uganda in the 1950s was racially segregated in ways that mirrored the American South. Schools were segregated. Mosques were segregated. Even the areas where children could play were divided by race. Mamdani first attended a madrasa, then the Government Indian Primary School. He grew up speaking Gujarati at home, Urdu at the mosque, and Swahili in the streets. English came last, in sixth grade.
This multilingual childhood gave him something that would prove intellectually valuable: the experience of moving between worlds, of understanding that knowledge itself is structured differently in different linguistic and cultural traditions. He would later make this insight central to his academic work on the "politics of knowledge production"—the study of how the ways we categorize and understand the world are themselves products of power relations.
The Kennedy Airlift and the American South
In 1963, Mamdani was one of 23 Ugandan students selected for the Kennedy Airlift, an ambitious scholarship program that brought hundreds of East Africans to American and Canadian universities between 1959 and 1963. The program had been championed by Tom Mboya, a Kenyan labor leader, and had received crucial early funding from the Kennedy family before John F. Kennedy became president.
Mamdani enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh, arriving in an America convulsed by the civil rights movement. Two years later, he joined the bus ride to Montgomery.
After his jail call to the Ugandan ambassador, something curious happened. The FBI paid him a visit. Mamdani would later say that this encounter introduced him to the work of Karl Marx—perhaps the agents assumed any young African protester must be a communist, or perhaps they were simply following their standard protocols for civil rights activists. Either way, the irony was rich: American anti-communist surveillance became Mamdani's introduction to anti-colonial theory.
He graduated from Pittsburgh in 1967, then earned two master's degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University—one in political science, one in law and diplomacy. He completed his PhD in government at Harvard in 1974, writing his dissertation on "Politics and Class Formation in Uganda" under the direction of Karl Deutsch, a prominent political scientist known for his work on nationalism and political communication.
Expelled, Stateless, Exiled
In early 1972, Mamdani returned to Uganda. He took a position as a teaching assistant at Makerere University in Kampala while completing his doctoral research. His timing was spectacularly bad.
In August of that year, President Idi Amin announced the expulsion of Uganda's entire Asian population—some 80,000 people—giving them ninety days to leave the country. Amin claimed he was "reclaiming" Uganda for Africans, seizing businesses and properties that Asians had built over generations. In reality, he was consolidating power through ethnic scapegoating, a pattern that Mamdani would later analyze extensively in his scholarly work on African politics.
Mamdani left Uganda in early November 1972 and spent time in a refugee camp in the United Kingdom. The following year, he was recruited to the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where he completed his dissertation while becoming active with anti-Amin exile groups.
In 1979, he attended the Moshi Conference as an observer. This gathering of Ugandan exiles in Tanzania helped organize the political transition that would follow Amin's overthrow in the Uganda-Tanzania War. When Amin fell, Mamdani returned to Uganda.
But his troubles were not over. In 1984, while attending an academic conference in Dakar, Senegal, he learned that the government of Milton Obote—who had returned to power after Amin's fall—had revoked his Ugandan citizenship. His crime: criticizing government policies. For two years, Mamdani was stateless, living in Dar es Salaam. Only after Obote was deposed for the second time in 1986 could he return to Uganda.
This personal experience of citizenship being granted and revoked, of belonging and exclusion, would profoundly inform his theoretical work. When Mamdani wrote about how colonial and post-colonial states defined and redefined who counted as a "native" and who counted as a "citizen," he was not engaging in mere abstraction. He knew what it meant to be expelled from one's home because of ethnicity. He knew what it meant to have a government declare that you did not belong.
The Bifurcated State
Mamdani's most influential work is his 1996 book "Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism." The book won the Herskovits Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in African studies, and became required reading for students of African politics around the world.
His central argument challenges how we typically think about colonialism in Africa. The standard narrative goes something like this: Europeans arrived, imposed direct rule, and when they left, newly independent African states struggled to build democratic institutions from scratch. Mamdani argues this story is fundamentally wrong.
Instead, he describes what he calls the "bifurcated state"—a colonial system with two faces. In the cities, Europeans practiced what he calls "direct rule." This was a form of urban civil power that explicitly excluded Africans from the rights and freedoms granted to European citizens. Think of apartheid-era South Africa, where Black people could work in white cities but could not vote, own property, or move freely.
But the colonial state had a second face in the rural areas: "indirect rule." Here, rather than governing directly, European colonizers worked through local chiefs and traditional authorities. They created what Mamdani calls a "state-enforced customary order"—a system where Africans were governed by "African tradition," but this tradition was often invented or heavily modified to serve colonial purposes.
Mamdani calls this rural system "decentralized despotism." The local chief had enormous power over his subjects—power that was backed by the colonial state but exercised in the name of African tradition. This was convenient for colonizers: it was cheaper than direct administration, and it deflected African resentment away from European officials and onto African intermediaries.
The brilliant twist in Mamdani's argument is what happened after independence. New African leaders inherited this bifurcated system, and they reproduced it in different ways. Some conservative rulers kept the rural despotism intact because local chiefs formed their power base. Some radical modernizers tried to destroy chiefly power but replaced it with their own centralized authoritarianism. Neither path led to genuine democracy. Both, in Mamdani's phrase, "created their own distinctive version of despotism."
This analysis challenged two comfortable myths simultaneously. It challenged African nationalists who blamed all post-independence problems on European interference, showing how African leaders had actively reproduced colonial structures. And it challenged Western observers who saw African authoritarianism as proof of inherent cultural flaws, showing how these patterns were products of specific colonial institutions that had European origins.
Challenging Apartheid Exceptionalism
One of Mamdani's more provocative arguments involves South Africa. Conventional wisdom held—and largely still holds—that apartheid was exceptional: a uniquely evil system distinct from colonialism elsewhere in Africa. Mamdani disagrees.
Apartheid, he argues, was not the exception but the rule. It was the generic form of European colonialism in Africa, combining aspects of direct rule in urban areas with indirect rule through tribal homelands. What made South Africa different was not the nature of its system but its longevity: apartheid survived until 1994 because the white population was large enough to maintain it without needing to decolonize.
This argument was not designed to minimize apartheid's brutality. Rather, Mamdani wanted to show that the bifurcated state existed throughout colonial Africa, and that post-apartheid South Africa would face the same challenges of institutional transformation that other African countries had faced—and often failed to meet—decades earlier.
The Mamdani Affair
In 1996, Mamdani was appointed as the first holder of the A.C. Jordan Chair of African Studies at the University of Cape Town. It was a prestigious position at a historic moment: South Africa was just two years into its democratic transition, and universities were grappling with how to "decolonize" curricula that had been designed under apartheid.
Mamdani proposed a new foundation course called "Problematising Africa." His draft syllabus challenged the way African studies had traditionally been taught at Cape Town, which he characterized as treating South Africa as separate from the rest of the continent. He wanted students to understand South Africa as an African country, shaped by the same colonial dynamics as Kenya or Uganda or Nigeria.
The mostly white faculty objected. Mamdani escalated the conflict, labeling the existing curriculum as "Bantu education"—a deliberately provocative reference to the apartheid-era system designed to provide inferior education to Black South Africans. He was suspended. He eventually resigned.
"The Mamdani Affair" became a famous case study in debates about academic freedom and decolonization. For some, Mamdani was a visionary who had exposed how deeply colonial assumptions remained embedded in supposedly progressive institutions. For others, he was an outsider who had arrived with a predetermined agenda and refused to engage collegially with local scholars.
Mamdani himself would later say there was no personal bitterness. He maintained friendships from his time at Cape Town and acknowledged the dispute was about "differences in perspective" regarding how to study South Africa's relationship to the broader continent. In 2018, more than two decades after his departure, the University of Cape Town brought him back as an honorary professor—a gesture of institutional reconciliation that acknowledged his enduring influence on the field.
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Mamdani turned his analytical framework toward a new subject: the War on Terror. His 2004 book "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror" proved controversial.
The title captured Mamdani's central critique of how American policy and media discourse divided Muslims into acceptable and unacceptable categories. "Good Muslims" were secular, pro-Western, and modern. "Bad Muslims" were religious, anti-Western, and traditional. This binary, Mamdani argued, reproduced colonial logics of dividing colonized populations into cooperative and resistant factions.
But the book went further. Mamdani traced the origins of militant Islamism to Cold War American foreign policy, particularly the CIA's support for the Afghan mujahideen in their fight against Soviet occupation. The United States had actively cultivated and funded Islamic militancy when it served American strategic interests. What became Al-Qaeda had been, in its origins, an American project.
Most controversially, Mamdani argued that suicide bombers should be understood as "a category of soldier" and analyzed as "a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism." Critics accused him of excusing terrorism. Defenders argued he was simply applying social-scientific analysis to understand a phenomenon rather than merely condemning it—the same analytical approach scholars routinely applied to, say, the American military.
The Politics of Knowledge
Throughout his career, Mamdani has been concerned not just with what we know about Africa but with how knowledge about Africa is produced. Who gets to define what counts as African? Who decides which questions are worth asking? Which languages and intellectual traditions are considered legitimate sources of understanding?
This concern led him to challenge Western universities for treating Africa primarily as a source of raw data to be processed by theories developed in Europe and America. Why, he asked, should African scholars have to master European intellectual traditions while European scholars remain ignorant of African ones? Why is an American PhD considered superior to an African one?
From 2010 to 2022, Mamdani directed the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala, trying to build an institution that could produce knowledge about Africa on Africa's own terms. He wanted to train scholars who could engage with European theory but were not subordinate to it, who could draw on African intellectual traditions as living resources rather than museum pieces.
This work connected to broader debates about "decolonizing" higher education that erupted across the world in the mid-2010s. When students at the University of Cape Town launched the "Rhodes Must Fall" movement in 2015, demanding the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes and a transformation of the university's curriculum, many pointed to Mamdani's scholarship as providing the theoretical framework for understanding what needed to change.
The Personal and Political
In 1989, Mamdani met the Indian filmmaker Mira Nair in Kampala. Nair was conducting research for what would become "Mississippi Masala," her 1991 film about an Indian Ugandan family expelled during the Amin era who settles in Mississippi and becomes entangled in the African American community there. The film's themes—diaspora, racial identity, the unexpected connections between the American South and post-colonial Africa—resonated with Mamdani's life and work.
They married in 1991 and had a son, Zohran, born in Kampala that same year. When Mamdani took the Cape Town position in 1996, the family moved to South Africa for three years before settling in New York around 1999. Mamdani has taught at Columbia University ever since, currently holding the title of Herbert Lehman Professor of Government.
Zohran Mamdani grew up between worlds—born in Uganda, raised partly in South Africa, educated in America. He became a housing activist and democratic socialist, winning a seat in the New York State Assembly in 2020 as part of a wave of progressive candidates challenging the Democratic establishment. In 2025, he ran for Mayor of New York City and won, taking office on January 1, 2026. Both parents supported his campaign.
The generational arc is striking. Mahmood Mamdani was expelled from Uganda because of his ethnicity, rendered stateless by African governments, and spent his career analyzing how post-colonial states categorize and exclude. His son became the mayor of America's largest city, a multiracial politician whose identity embodies the diasporic mixing that colonialism both created and tried to control.
Neither Settler Nor Native
Mamdani's most recent major work, "Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities" (2020), extends his analysis to a global scale. The book examines how modern nation-states create categories of belonging that permanently exclude certain populations.
The title captures a paradox. In colonial situations, people are divided into settlers (those who came from elsewhere and claim the land) and natives (those constructed as indigenous but subordinate). But what about the Indian diaspora in Uganda, or the Jews of Central Europe, or the Palestinians—peoples who fit neither category neatly? Mamdani argues that modern states have created "permanent minorities," populations legally present but never fully belonging, always vulnerable to exclusion or expulsion.
The book was shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize and recognized as a finalist in the World History category by the Association of American Publishers. It represented the culmination of decades of thinking about the relationship between political violence, colonial categories, and the possibilities for moving beyond them.
The Gaza Tribunal
In 2024, at age 78, Mamdani joined the Gaza Tribunal, an effort to mobilize civil society response to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. The Tribunal aimed to document potential violations of international law and "awaken civil society to its responsibility and opportunity to stop Israel's genocide in Gaza."
This was consistent with Mamdani's long engagement with questions of political violence, colonial categories, and the distinction between settlers and natives. Israel-Palestine had appeared in his work before as an example of how colonial categories persist, creating populations that exist in legal and political limbo. His participation in the Tribunal reflected his view that scholarship should not remain neutral when confronted with what he considered ongoing colonial violence.
The Recognition
In 2008, Prospect Magazine and Foreign Policy conducted an open online poll to identify the world's "top public intellectuals." Mamdani ranked ninth. In 2017, he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for humanities and social sciences.
He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Johannesburg, Addis Ababa University, and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His books have won major prizes and become standard readings in courses on African politics, post-colonial studies, and political theory.
But perhaps the more telling recognition is how often his ideas appear without attribution, absorbed into the common sense of how scholars think about colonialism and its aftermath. When students learn that apartheid was not exceptional but representative of colonial rule, when they analyze how post-colonial states reproduced colonial categories, when they question who has the authority to produce knowledge about Africa—they are often thinking with Mamdani's concepts, whether or not they know his name.
The Continuing Questions
Mamdani's work raises questions that remain unresolved. If post-colonial states have reproduced colonial structures, how can they be transformed? If the categories of settler and native are colonial inventions, what new forms of belonging might replace them? If knowledge production has been colonized, what would decolonized knowledge actually look like?
These are not questions Mamdani claims to have answered definitively. His contribution has been to pose them with clarity and to insist that they matter—that understanding how we got here is essential to figuring out where we might go.
That twenty-year-old in the Montgomery jail understood something that many older and more powerful people could not: that freedom struggles are connected, that colonial power operates through similar mechanisms in different places, and that challenging injustice in one place has implications for challenges everywhere else. Six decades later, he is still working out the implications of that insight.
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