Mahmood Mamdani[a]FBA (born 23 April 1946) is a Ugandan[1][2] academic,author,and political commentator. He is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology,political science and African studies at Columbia University.[3] He also serves as the chancellor of Kampala International University in Uganda.[4][5]
Mamdani was born on 23 April 1946 in Bombay,India,during the period of British colonial rule.[8][9] He was raised in Kampala,Uganda,as part of the Indian diaspora in Southeast Africa. His parents,Gujarati Muslims,were born in the British territory of Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania),and moved to Bombay while his father attended college there.[10][11] The family returned to Dar es Salaam,Tanganyika when Mamdani was two,and moved to Uganda when he was five or six years old.[10] He is an Indian-Ugandan.[12]
At the time,Uganda was racially segregated,including where people lived,the schools,the mosques,and children's play areas. For his primary school education,he first attended a madrasa,and then the Government Indian Primary School.[10] He grew up speaking Gujarati,Urdu,and Swahili,and started studying English in sixth grade.[10] After junior secondary school,he attended Old Kampala Senior Secondary School,where he was secretary of the Do-it-Yourself Physics club.[13]
Mamdani was one of 23 Ugandan students in the 1963 group of the Kennedy Airlift,a US-funded scholarship program that brought hundreds of East Africans to universities in the United States and Canada between 1959 and 1963.[14][15] Mamdani began studying at the University of Pittsburgh in 1963 and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 1967.
He was among the many students in the northern US who made the bus journey south to Montgomery,Alabama,organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in March 1965 to participate in the civil rights movement. This was during the time of,but distinct from,the Selma to Montgomery marches. He was jailed during the march and was allowed to make a phone call. Mamdani called the Ugandan Ambassador in Washington,DC,for assistance. The ambassador asked him why he was "interfering in the internal affairs of a foreign country",to which he responded by saying that this was not an internal affair but a freedom struggle and that they too had gotten their freedom only last year.[16] Soon after,he learned about Karl Marx's work from an FBI visit.[17]
Mamdani returned to Uganda in early 1972 and was employed by Makerere University in Kampala as a teaching assistant at the same time conducting his doctoral research;only to be expelled later that year by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin due to his ethnicity. He left Uganda for a refugee camp in the United Kingdom in early November.[20]
He left England in mid-1973 after being recruited to the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.[16] In Dar es Salaam,he completed writing his thesis and was active with anti-Amin groups. In 1979,he attended the Moshi Conference as an observer and returned to Uganda after Amin was overthrown following the Uganda–Tanzania War[21] as a Frontier Interne of the World Council of Churches. He was posted to the Church of Uganda offices in Mengo.[22]
In 1984,while attending a conference in Dakar,Senegal,he became stateless after his Ugandan citizenship was withdrawn by the government under Milton Obote because of his criticism of its policies.[23] He returned to Dar es Salaam and was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan,Ann Arbor for the spring semester in 1986. After Obote was deposed for the second time,Mamdani once again returned to Uganda in June 1986.[15] He was the founding director of the Centre for Basic Research (CBR),Uganda's first non-governmental research organisation,serving from 1987 to 2006.[24]
In 1996,he was appointed the inaugural holder of the AC Jordan chair of African studies at the University of Cape Town.[26] He left after having disagreements with the administration over the draft of his syllabus for a foundation course on Africa called "Problematizing Africa".[27] From 1998 to 2002,he served as president of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. In December 2001,he gave a speech on "Making Sense of Violence in Postcolonial Africa" at the Nobel Centennial Symposium in Oslo,Norway.[28]
Mamdani specialises in the study of African and international politics,colonialism and post‐colonialism,and the politics of knowledge production. His works explore the intersection between politics and culture,a comparative study of colonialism since 1452,the history of civil war and genocide in Africa,the Cold War and the War on Terror,and the theoretical history of human rights.[34]
His research as of 2016 took "as its point of departure his 1996 book,Citizen and Subject:Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Colonialism".[35] In it,he argued that the post-colonial state cannot be understood without a clear analysis of the institutional colonial state. The nature of the colonial state in Africa was a response to the dilemma of the 'native question' and argued that it took on the form of a 'Bifurcated State'.[36] This was characterised by 'direct rule' on the one hand which was a form of 'urban civil power' and focused on the exclusion of natives from civil freedoms guaranteed to citizens in civil society.[37] Whilst on the other it was characterised by indirect rule which was rural in nature and involved the incorporation of 'natives' into a 'state enforced customary order' enforced by a 'rural tribal authority' which he termed as 'decentralised despotism'.[37] This state was 'Janus faced' and 'contained a duality:two forms of power under a single hegemonic authority'.[37] In the post-colonial realm,the urban sphere was to an extent deracialised but the rural one remained subject to quasi colonial control whether at the hands of conservative rulers for whom it provided their own power base or those of radical ones with centralised authoritarian projects of their own.[38] In this way both experiences reproduced 'one part of the dual legacy of the bifurcated state and created their own distinctive version of despotism'.[39] Mamdani analysed historical case studies in South Africa and Uganda to argue that colonial rule tapped into authoritarian possibilities whose legacies often persist after independence.[40] Challenging conventional perceptions of apartheid in South Africa as exceptional,he argues that apartheid was the generic form of a European colony in Africa,encompassing aspects of indirect rule and association.[41]
In his 2004 book Good Muslim,Bad Muslim:America,the Cold War,and the Roots of Terror Mamdani said that suicide bombers should be recognized “as a category of soldier”and that it should be “understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism”.[42] Some academics said this was not an advocacy of suicide bombing,but merely an analysis.[43]
Personal life
Mamdani is married to Mira Nair,an Indian film director and producer. They met in Kampala,Uganda,in 1989 when Nair was conducting research for her film,Mississippi Masala,[15] and married in 1991. As of 2025[update],they live in Manhattan,New York City.[44]
↑ Shachtman, Tom (2009). Airlift to America. How Barack Obama Sr, John F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya, and 800 East African Students Changed Their World and Ours. St. Martins Press.[pageneeded]
↑ Allen, Judith Van; Mamdani, Mahmood; Shivji, Issa G. (November 1977). "Reviewed Works: Politics and Class Formation in Uganda. by Mahmood Mamdani; Class Struggles in Tanzania. by Issa G. Shivji". Contemporary Sociology. 6 (6). American Sociological Association: 702. doi:10.2307/2066367. eISSN1939-8638. ISSN0094-3061. JSTOR2066367.
↑ Mamdani, Mahmood (1 January 1996). Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. pp.15–16. ISBN9780852553992.
1 2 3 Mamdani, Mahmood (1 January 1996). Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. p.18. ISBN9780852553992.
↑ Clapham, Chris (1997). "Review: Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism by Mahmood Mamdani'". Royal Institute of International Affairs. 73: 606.
↑ Mamdani, Mahmood (1 January 1996). Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. ISBN9780852553992.
↑ Mamdani, Mahmood (1 January 1996). Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. p.37. ISBN9780852553992.
↑ Mamdani, Mahmood (1 January 1996). Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. pp.16–18. ISBN9780852553992.
↑ Sen, Manjula (25 January 2009). "She interviewed me, we fell in love almost instantly". The Telegraph. Calcutta. Archived from the original on 2 February 2009. Retrieved 21 March 2013. Ten years ago my mother wondered what happened to the nice boy who prayed, fasted, read the Koran. 'Now, look at you. Nobody would know you were Muslim.'" Mamdani retorted he was a Muslim when Muslims are persecuted. She called after 9/11. "Now, you must be a Muslim every day. I smiled. She had the last word."
↑ Mamdani, Mahmood (2007). Scholars in the Marketplace. The Dilemmas of Neo-Liberal Reform at Makerere University, 1989-2005. Codesria. ISBN9782869782013.
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