Columbia scholar twice rendered stateless under British colonial system discusses parallels between his displacement and son’s challenge to power structures
Scholar’s Experience With Colonial Legacy Informs Understanding of Son’s Political Mission
Mahmood Mamdani, father of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, has spent decades examining questions of power, belonging, and colonial legacy through scholarship rooted in his own experience of displacement. The Columbia University professor of government and anthropology was twice rendered stateless due to political upheaval in Uganda, first during the Idi Amin dictatorship of the 1970s and again during subsequent political turmoil in East Africa. His latest book, Slow Poison, examines the making of the Ugandan state after British colonialism and argues that both Idi Amin and current president Yoweri Museveni inherited and governed within an intractable colonial legacy handed down from the British. In recent interviews discussing the book and his son’s historic mayoral victory, the elder Mamdani has drawn connections between his own quest to understand who belongs in society and his son’s challenge to established power structures in America’s largest city.
Colonial System Created Categories of Belonging That Denied Full Citizenship
Mahmood Mamdani was born into a community that British colonial administrators designated as perpetual outsiders in Uganda despite generations of residence in the country. “We were migrants, and under the colonial system, migrants were defined as non-Indigenous,” Mamdani explained. People like him were never made to feel fully at home in Uganda and were stripped of core rights. The British colonial government created a racialized system where South Asians in Uganda lived in designated quarters, attended segregated schools, received healthcare in separate hospitals, and participated in restricted economic activities. This system of racial categorization and separation shaped Mamdani’s consciousness from childhood and created what he describes as a fundamental question that has driven his scholarship: who belongs, who does not, and how these determinations change over time. The colonial legacy of categorizing populations into indigenous versus non-indigenous groups, with corresponding differences in rights and status, did not end with formal independence but continued shaping Ugandan politics through the post-colonial period.
1972 Expulsion Under Amin Displaced 80,000 Ugandans of Asian Descent
On August 4, 1972, Ugandan President Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of the country’s Asian population, giving them 90 days to leave. The original order applied only to British subjects of South Asian origin, but was expanded on August 9 to citizens of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. At the time of the expulsion, there were about 80,000 individuals of Indian descent in Uganda, of whom 23,000 had their applications for citizenship both processed and accepted. Amin later attempted to include even those holding Ugandan citizenship in the expulsion order, creating a category of stateless persons who were neither British nor Ugandan. Mahmood Mamdani was among those forced to flee the country where he had been raised. Departing Asians were limited to $120 and 485 pounds of property, leaving behind businesses, homes, and the lives they had built. The expulsion took place against the backdrop of economic scapegoating, with Amin accusing Asians of economic sabotage despite the fact that the Asian community contributed approximately 90 percent of Uganda’s tax revenue at the time.
Economic and Political Rationale Behind Ethnic Scapegoating
Amin defended the expulsion by claiming he was giving Uganda back to ethnic Ugandans, framing the removal of the Asian minority as an act of indigenous liberation. Amin accused a minority of the Indians of disloyalty, non-integration, and commercial malpractice, characterizing them as economic parasites. The reality was more complex and reflected both genuine economic disparities created by colonial policies and cynical political maneuvering by Amin’s regime. The colonial system had channeled Asian migrants into particular economic roles, creating a situation where a small minority population controlled substantial commercial activity. Rather than addressing these structural inequalities through reform, Amin seized Asian-owned businesses and properties for redistribution to political allies. The gross domestic product of Uganda fell by 5 percent between 1972 and 1975, while manufacturing output tumbled from 740 million Ugandan shillings in 1972 to 254 million shillings in 1979. The expulsion damaged Uganda’s economy and international reputation while failing to address the underlying problems it purported to solve. This pattern of scapegoating minorities for economic problems while avoiding structural reforms represents a recurring dynamic in post-colonial politics that Mamdani examines in his scholarship.
Book Examines Two Autocrats and Reversal of Anti-Colonial Movement
Slow Poison focuses on Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni, the two leaders who have most shaped post-independence Uganda. Yoweri Museveni came to power in 1986 after his National Resistance Movement waged a guerrilla war, and has remained president ever since. The book is about the reversal of the anti-colonial movement, which fought to create a nation out of a fragmented country. Mamdani speaks of slow poison as a gradual, piecemeal, step-by-step cutting up of the country so that you no longer have a single citizenship. The anti-colonial movement in Uganda worked to overcome the divisions the British had created among different ethnic and religious groups, building a unified national identity and citizenship. Museveni’s long rule, according to Mamdani’s analysis, has reversed this unification by fragmenting the population into ethnic minorities and recreating elements of colonial indirect rule. This fragmentation serves to maintain political control by preventing the emergence of unified opposition movements. The title Slow Poison refers to this gradual undoing of the nation-building project, a process that operates through accumulation of small decisions and policies rather than dramatic ruptures.
Racialized Upbringing Shaped Scholar’s Political Consciousness
In discussing his political awakening, Mahmood Mamdani described growing up in a highly segregated society where every aspect of life was organized along racial lines. He lived in quarters designed by the colonial government for lower-middle-class Asians, played in grounds designated for Asian kids, prayed in mosques limited to Asian Muslims, attended schools for Asian Muslims, and when sick went to a government-run hospital for Asians. This total immersion in racial categorization from childhood created both internalization of racial consciousness and questions about the systems that created these divisions. When Mamdani came to study in the United States in the 1960s, he connected his experience of racialization in Uganda with the civil rights movement’s challenge to racial categorization in America. He became involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and identified with struggles against racial hierarchy, despite the Ugandan ambassador’s questioning why he was involving himself in the internal politics of another country. The experience of being defined as perpetually foreign in one’s own country created solidarity with others fighting against systems that denied full belonging and citizenship to marginalized groups.
Parallels Between Father’s Exile and Son’s Political Project
In recent interviews, Mahmood Mamdani has drawn connections between his experience of statelessness and displacement and his son’s political challenge to power structures in New York City. Both experiences involve questions of who belongs, who has power, and how established systems determine citizenship and participation. The elder Mamdani’s scholarship examines how colonial powers created categories of indigenous and non-indigenous populations with different rights and levels of belonging. His son’s political career challenges different but related power structures that determine who has voice and influence in urban governance. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign emphasized working people, marginalized communities, and those traditionally excluded from political power. This focus on expanding belonging and power to those defined as outsiders by establishment structures echoes his father’s scholarly examination of colonial and post-colonial systems that created hierarchies of belonging. The connection is not direct equivalence but rather shared concern with how power structures determine who counts as full members of political communities and who remains marginal.
Colonial Legacies Continue Shaping Contemporary Politics
A central argument of Slow Poison is that colonial systems of governance and categorization did not simply disappear at independence but continued shaping post-colonial politics in Africa and beyond. The British policy of divide and rule, which Mahmood Mamdani describes as the foundation of what we now call identity politics, established structures that post-independence leaders inherited and often reproduced. Amin’s expulsion of Asians represented an extreme version of mobilizing ethnic and racial divisions for political purposes, while Museveni’s fragmentation of the country into ethnic constituencies represents a subtler continuation of divide-and-rule principles. These dynamics are not limited to Uganda or Africa but reflect broader patterns of how colonial power structures persist after formal decolonization. Understanding contemporary political conflicts requires examining these deeper historical roots rather than treating current divisions as natural or inevitable. Mahmood Mamdani’s scholarship provides tools for analyzing how historical power structures continue shaping who belongs, who governs, and whose interests political systems serve.
Questions of Belonging Remain Central to Global Politics
The fundamental questions Mahmood Mamdani has examined throughout his career, shaped by his experience of displacement and statelessness in Uganda, remain urgently relevant in contemporary politics worldwide. Issues of immigration, citizenship, indigenous rights, and national identity involve contested definitions of who belongs and what rights flow from different categories of membership. The experience of being rendered stateless, of having one’s belonging challenged despite deep connections to a place, provides particular insight into how political systems construct and police boundaries of membership. Mamdani’s experiences shaped a lifelong quest to understand who belongs, who does not, and how it has changed over time. His son’s political project in New York City engages these questions in a different context, challenging establishment definitions of who has voice and power in urban governance. The parallels between father’s scholarship and son’s politics reflect shared concern with power structures that create hierarchies of belonging and participation. As Mahmood Mamdani noted in discussing both his book and his son’s victory, these questions of belonging and power remain at the center of political struggles in the 21st century, shaped by but not limited to the continuing legacies of colonialism and historical systems of categorization.
