Out of Africa

Is history repeating itself for the Mamdani family?

In the wake of the October 7 attacks and the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza, I wrote a few things about the reemergence of what was once called “Third-Worldism,” and the rising salience of terms like “decolonization” and “settler colonialism.” I broadly argued that the revival of rhetoric that first emerged in the era of (literal) decolonization was anachronistic, and also bespoke an amnesia about the history of postcolonial nationhood.

More recently, my colleague Matthew Schmitz made a compelling case that the revival of this political orientation reflects a demographic reality: The younger generations who make up the most militant section of the progressive left are heavily drawn from “post-1965 Americans” whose families arrived relatively recently in the United States from what we now call the “Global South.” As this generation comes of age, the moral drama of racial oppression that has defined US politics for so long must necessarily shift emphasis. As Matthew wrote: “To the extent that progressive politics focuses on the history of slavery, it puts them on the sidelines. If, however, progressive politics is best understood as a global anti-colonial struggle, then every descendant of non-white immigrants has a part in it.” The increasing dominance of this framework helps explain why leading black intellectuals have lately made the Palestinian struggle central to their politics.

The figure who most embodies the “post-’65” generation of the American left, of course, is NYC mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani. While he has attempted to make his campaign primarily about affordability, anti-colonial themes inevitably continue to surface, especially in critiques of his candidacy. Trying to make Barack Obama a “Kenyan anti-colonialist” was a stretch, but Mamdani was born and partly raised in Uganda to a father who is a scholar of postcolonial Africa and a mother who has made acclaimed films about India and the global South Asian diaspora; his middle name honors Kwame Nkrumah, the first post-independence leader of Ghana; and he majored in Africana studies at Bowdoin, where he wrote a thesis on Frantz Fanon, the iconic intellectual of the era of national liberation. His critics have highlighted these influences. According to the writer Zineb Raboua, for instance, “Mamdani repurposes the lexicon of Third-World liberation for American soil, transforming decolonization into a scaffold for moral and political identity.”

What hasn’t been discussed much in this context, however, is Mamdani’s specifically Ugandan origin, which ties him directly to one of the most fraught and disturbing episodes in the era of decolonization. Mamdani was born in Uganda in 1989 and (controversially to some) retains Ugandan citizenship, having been naturalized as a US citizen in 2018. Recently, some congressional Republicans suggested undoing his naturalization on the grounds that he had concealed his radical anti-American views. This seems unlikely to go forward, but if it did, it would oddly replicate the experience of his father, Mahmood, as well as the rest of his Ugandan forebears, who were stripped of any claim to Ugandan nationality by Idi Amin in 1972 and expelled from the country along with the entire Asian-descended population.

All of this is recounted in Mahmood’s new book Slow Poison, which I will be reviewing in Compact. Mamdani père has been denounced by his son’s detractors as an anti-American radical and more; regardless of how accurate that characterization is, Slow Poison is an impressively levelheaded account of an extremely violent history in which the author was intimately involved, and the book offers no simplistic moral lessons of the sort today’s progressive activists might be looking for. Decolonization, as Mahmood portrays it, is not a cathartic struggle for recognition so much as a harsh, grinding process of negotiation with implacable realities. Previewing my longer review, I will make a simple point here about the relevance of Mamdani’s Ugandan background to the current American panorama in which he is now a player.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the abrupt contraction of British imperial power created a power vacuum into which political entrepreneurs vied with each other, typically with foreign entities (including Britain) in the background trying to instrumentalize them. Idi Amin, who in 1971 seized power from Uganda’s first president, Milton Obote (who had been groomed by the British before falling afoul of them), was one such case. Unlike Obote, Nkrumah in Ghana, and others in the first generation, he wasn’t a highly educated native anointed by the departing British, but a rough and ready military man.

It is admittedly a cliché to compare Third-World leaders to Donald Trump, but the resemblances with Amin are worth noting. Like Trump, Amin was a charismatic rabblerouser and born showman who detested the politesse of international diplomacy. He was skilled at taunting and trolling his enemies at home and abroad, most notably the British, who initially supported his coup against Obote before turning against him. Partly for this reason, he was demonized by the “lying news media” abroad. By Mahmood Mamdani’s account—I have read others to the same effect—Amin was brutal, but not exceptionally so among postcolonial African leaders. His outsized reputation as a cannibal and sadist was mostly the result of a successful propaganda campaign waged by exiled opponents and the UK government and press.

Amin’s basic message was economic nationalism: “Uganda for Ugandans.” It was on these grounds that he expelled the Asians, seen as a remnant of colonialism representing foreign commercial interests; the seizure and redistribution of their property was thus seen as an extension of the struggle against colonialism. As Slow Poison makes clear, as horrifying as this act was to international observers, it was popular in Uganda, and gave Amin an enduring base of support. (Despite being seen as a monster abroad, he remains popular among Ugandans to this day.) By Mahmood’s account, the problem went deeper than Amin in any case. The uncertain status of Asian-descended Ugandans had been a festering problem since the end of British rule because of the way the postcolonial constitution defined nationality.

The main options available to recently independent countries like Uganda were to define nationality capaciously—for instance, by making those of Asian descent full citizens—or to limit it to those with a claim to “indigeneity.” Although we might think of “indigeneity” as a key element of anti-colonial radicalism, this concept was in fact central to the way the British governed in the colonial era—essentially, pursuing a divide-and-rule approach where local and tribal identities were strategically reinforced to coopt and forestall any broad-based opposition to colonial rule. Amin, in contrast, attempted to strengthen a collective sense of Ugandan (rather than local or tribal) nationhood. In doing so, he needed someone to define this nascent identity against, and Ugandan Asians fell afoul of this nation-building imperative.

The broader lesson here is that dying empires are often difficult and dangerous places to be a cosmopolitan minority. It is hardly a surprise that Mahmood Mamdani found a more hospitable environment in a rising one: the United States, where he first lived and studied in the 1960s, a sojourn he writes fascinatingly about in Slow Poison; and to which he later returned (to teach at Columbia). His son has now become a prominent political figure in the heart of that same empire as it enters an era of seemingly inexorable decline. In a manner reminiscent of the family’s remote past, it is governed by a populist leader who is seeking to redefine nationality—by, for instance, limiting birthright citizenship—and deport large numbers of foreigners seen as worsening the economic prospects of the native-born. So far, as was true when Amin came to power in Uganda, this approach has proven more politically efficacious at appealing to the masses than the more cosmopolitan alternatives on offer. The test of Mamdani’s political project is whether it is possible to fuse populist appeals with a renewed vision of cosmopolitan identity that differs from the moribund imperial liberalism of the Democratic Party establishment. “Decolonization,” viewed as historical reality and not as shopworn slogan, offers no simple answers to that question.

This week in Compact:

• Heather Penatzer on the international order after liberalism

• Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel on pornocracy

• Vincent Lloyd on black postliberalism

• Michael Tracey on how everything became “trafficking”

• Sam Goldman on Christian Zionism