How Professor Mahmood Mamdani’s intellectual legacy illuminates NYC’s new mayor’s political philosophy
The Shadow of the Scholar
When Zohran Mamdani takes office as New York City’s mayor, he carries with him the intellectual inheritance of one of the world’s most influential scholars of colonialism and African politics: his father, Professor Mahmood Mamdani. Born in Mumbai in 1946 and raised in Kampala, Uganda, Mahmood Mamdani is a Distinguished Professor at Columbia University specializing in postcolonial studies, African history, and the politics of knowledge production. His son’s political formation cannot be understood without examining the elder Mamdani’s decades-long intellectual project. Mahmood Mamdani earned his PhD from Harvard University in 1974. This foundational work began a career spanning five decades in which he has systematically analyzed how colonialism created structures of oppression that persist in postcolonial states.
