It’s undeniable now, although New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani denies it anyway: he is a Marxist, and a convinced and determined one at that. Nor is the incoming mayor’s ideology one of convenience, or recently adopted. Whatever else he may be, Zohran Mamdani is a dutiful son who is reflecting the values and perspectives that he learned from his parents.
His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is an internationally renowned Marxist academic, a cosseted professor at Columbia University who says that he became a communist in the early 1960s, while studying in the United States. Mahmood Mamdani turned American generosity toward students from the Third World against the giver, and now his son is poised to twist the knife even more as he brings socialism to America’s foremost city.
As Intifada on the Hudson: The Selling of Zohran Mamdani explains, both Mahmood and Zohran Mamdani were born in Uganda, although a great deal of drama unfolded between the two happy occasions. Born in 1946, two months before Donald Trump, Mahmood Mamdani says that in his youth, he had little awareness of political and social issues. He was awakened to political and social activism only because of the generosity and idealism of the world’s foremost capitalist state, which later became the object of his and his son’s intense hatred. As Mahmood Mamdani recounted in 2007, he took advantage of a major opportunity: “I had finished my O’Levels [sic] in 1962 at the senior secondary school, Old Kampala. I was one of over 20 students who received scholarships to study in the US.”
He wasn’t grateful, but he didn’t hesitate. Mahmood Mamdani entered the University of Pittsburgh. “The scholarships,” he recalled, “were part of America’s independence gift to Uganda. In the language of that period, I was among those who could claim to have literally eaten the fruit of independence. Certainly, without a successful struggle for independence, I would not have got the higher education that I did.” And without the generosity of the United States, he might never have developed the notion that he needed to play a role in the class struggle.
He had planned to study electrical engineering, but during his first year at the University of Pittsburgh, Mahmood Mamdani recounted, “a friend of mine took me to a SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] meeting, six or seven months after I was here. At the end of the meeting they announced that buses were going to Montgomery, Alabama, to demonstrate. I went there, got beaten up, thrown in jail.”
Yes, the Birmingham jail, just like Martin Luther King. When he was allowed to make the proverbial one phone call, Mahmood Mamdani called the Ugandan ambassador in Washington, DC, Dr. Solomon Bayo Asea. The ambassador did not share Mahmood’s enthusiasm for justice and instead asked him angrily: “What are you doing interfering in the internal affairs of a foreign country?”
It was a good question. Mahmood Mamdani was taking advantage of the kindness of the country that had welcomed him and enabled him to attend a first-class university by decrying that country for its oppression. And while there were numerous injustices involved in segregation, it was ironic that he was joining protests for a group of people who generally had a higher standard of living than most of his own countrymen back in Uganda enjoyed.
Mahmood Mamdani thought his action was part of a global struggle for justice. “‘This is not an internal affair,” he told Asea. This is a freedom struggle. How can you forget? We just got our freedom last year’, was my response. I had learnt that freedom knew no boundary, certainly not that of colour or country.” In a different interview, he recalls being even sharper with the hapless envoy: “What? We just got our independence! This is the same struggle. Have you forgotten?” Nevertheless, Asea got Mahmood Mamdani out of jail after one night.
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“Two or three weeks later,” however, Mahmood Mamdani discovered that the matter was not closed. “I was in my room. There was a knock at the door. Two gentlemen in trench coats and hats said, ‘FBI.’ I thought, ‘Wow, just like on television.’ They sat down. They were there to find out why I had gone—because this turned out to be big—it is after Montgomery that King organized his march on Selma.”
They wanted to know who had influenced me. After one hour of probing, the guy said, “Do you like Marx?”
I said, “I haven’t met him.”
Guy said, “No, no, he’s dead.”
“Wow, what happened?”
“No, no, he died long ago.”
I thought the guy Marx had just died. So then, “Why are you asking me if he died long ago?”
“No, he wrote a lot. He wrote that poor people should not be poor.”
I said, “Sounds amazing.”
I’m giving you a sense of how naïve I was. After they left, I went to the library to look for Marx. So that was my introduction to Karl Marx.
Mahmood Mamdani claimed that the feds had unwittingly introduced him to Karl Marx. He began working hard to make up for his former ignorance: “Then, of course, I took a class on Marx. Couldn’t just get Marx out of the library. But, basically, it is the US—the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement—which gave me a new take on my own experience, and on the Asian experience in east Africa. It gave me a way of rethinking my own experience of growing up in east Africa and growing up in an Africa with a lens crafted by the civil rights movement.”
The die was cast. Mahmood Mamdani was now embarked upon the pathway that would lead him to become an internationally renowned leftist academic, and his son the first Marxist mayor of New York City. Ironically, his introduction to Marxism came while he was benefiting from the generosity of the nation that was Marxism’s most formidable target and foe.
