From father to son

How Mahmood Mamdani’s ideas could guide New York's prospective mayor

Zohran Mamdani has just won the Democratic primary for mayor in America’s greatest city. At only thirty-three, he has emerged as the frontrunner after a campaign marked by grassroots excitement, campaign videos in Urdu and Spanish, and a platform promising universal childcare, affordable housing, and a city that works for the many, not the few. While I have doubts about the wisdom of his economic policies, the media has had a field day with his youth and his politics. Clearly, his message has appealed to voters.

What has not been mentioned often, though, is that Mamdani is the son of Mahmood Mamdani, professor of anthropology, political science, and African studies at Columbia University, a scholar whose ideas have shaped debates about citizenship, justice and democracy from Kampala to Cape Town to Manhattan.

Mahmood Mamdani – I’ll call him Prof Mamdani – is no ordinary academic. For decades, he has explored how societies remake themselves after violence, colonisation, and division. He has asked what it means to belong, how we can educate for freedom and dignity, and why justice so often fails to heal. As a scholar of Africa’s economic history, I have read several of Prof Mamdani’s works. What follows is my interpretation of his ideas and their relevance for Zohran, as he potentially steps into the biggest mayoral seat in the world.

One of Prof Mamdani’s most searching questions is how societies decide who belongs and who remains a perpetual outsider. In his book Neither Settler nor Native, he traces the ways colonial powers and modern nation-states alike created ‘permanent minorities’: groups relegated to the margins of political community, whose claim to belong is always in doubt. The United States, he notes, is no exception. Its very foundation involved a settler-colonial project that displaced Native Americans and enslaved Africans, setting the template for who would count as a ‘real’ American, and who would be marked, sometimes for generations, as irredeemably foreign.

This legacy lingers today. Categories like ‘native-born’ versus ‘foreign’, ‘us’ versus ‘them’ shape public debate on immigration, citizenship, and belonging. Prof Mamdani critiques such dichotomies as a dangerous fiction rooted in colonial thinking. The politics of identity, he writes, is the mechanism by which colonisation makes permanent minorities and maintains them. In America, this is echoed in the treatment of newcomers, but also in the suspicion directed at long-established minorities. Americanness is conditional, always subject to being revoked.

For Prof Mamdani, the answer is not to manage diversity by tinkering at the margins, but to dismantle the trap itself. Decolonisation, in political terms, means the unmaking of the permanence of these identities. Americans must stop seeing any group as forever foreign. Identities are not fixed; today’s outsider can be tomorrow’s compatriot. A truly democratic society is one that makes citizenship inclusive and forward-looking, not anchored to bloodlines or soil, but open to shared ideals.

Prof Mamdani points to South Africa as a real-world example. After apartheid, South Africans did not enshrine revenge or partition. Instead, they set out to reimagine the political community. The 1990s transition transformed both former oppressors and the formerly oppressed into equal citizens, rejecting the idea that one group must forever rule and another forever serve. In the post-apartheid constitution, everyone born in the country is fully South African, regardless of ancestry, a radical departure from the exclusions of the past. Prof Mamdani calls this a moment of decolonising political community, abolishing the settler–native distinction and creating a new, inclusive identity.

What might such a shift look like in the United States?