Mahmood Mamdani
Mahmood Mamdani is an Indo-Ugandan anthropologist, academic, and political commentator. He is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology, political science, and African studies at Columbia University. He also serves as the chancellor of Kampala International University in Uganda, and honorary professor at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town.
He was previously the director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala, Uganda, from 2010 until 2022. Mamdani specialises in the study of African and international politics, colonialism and post‐colonialism, and the politics of knowledge production. He is married to filmmaker Mira Nair. He and Nair are the parents of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Early life and education
Mahmood Mamdani was born on 23 April 1946 in Bombay, India, the year before the end of British Raj. He was raised in Kampala, Uganda, as part of the Indian diaspora in Southeast Africa. Both his parents, a Gujarati Muslim couple, were born and raised in the British territory of Tanganyika. The couple moved to Bombay while his father attended college there. The family returned to Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, when Mamdani was two, and moved to Uganda when he was five or six years old.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, Mamdani first attended a madrasa, and then the Government Indian Primary School. He grew up speaking Gujarati, Urdu, and Swahili. He started studying English in sixth grade. After junior secondary school, he attended Old Kampala Senior Secondary School, where he was secretary of the Do-it-Yourself Physics club.
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. Mamdani graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Pittsburgh 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 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. Soon after, Mamdani learned about Karl Marx's work from an FBI visit.
He attended the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University and graduated in 1968 with a Master of Arts degree in political science and a Master of Arts degree in law and diplomacy in 1969. He obtained his doctor of philosophy degree in government from Harvard University in 1974, under the direction of Karl Deutsch. His thesis was titled Politics and Class Formation in Uganda.
Career
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. He and most Asians were expelled later that year by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin because of their ethnicity; Amin intended to "reclaim" businesses and properties. Mamdani left Uganda for a refugee camp in the United Kingdom in early November.He left England in mid-1973 after being recruited to the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. In Dar es Salaam, he completed writing his dissertation. He was active with anti-Amin groups. In 1979, he attended the Moshi Conference as an observer. He returned to Uganda after Amin was overthrown following the Uganda–Tanzania War in 1979. During this period, he was employed as an intern with the All Africa Conference of Churches, an ecumenical Christian alliance based in Nairobi, Kenya, working at the Church of Uganda's Kampala office.
From 1980 until 1993 he was again employed by Makerere University. 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. He returned to Dar es Salaam. After Obote was deposed for the second time, Mamdani once again returned to Uganda in June 1986.
He was the founding director of the Centre for Basic Research, Uganda's first non-governmental research organisation, where he served from 1987 to 1996.
He was also a visiting professor at the University of Durban-Westville in South Africa, at the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library in New Delhi, and at Princeton University.
In 1996, he was appointed the inaugural holder of the AC Jordan chair of African studies at the University of Cape Town, and in early 1997 became head of the Centre for African Studies. He left after having disagreements with the faculty over the draft of his syllabus for a foundation course on Africa called "Problematising Africa". Mamdani, who labelled the present syllabus as "Bantu studies" was suspended and eventually resigned. "The Mamdani affair" continues to be referenced in debates about the decolonisation of higher education. He later said that there was no personal bitterness, and he had many enduring relationships from his time there. He said it was about differences in perspective, in particular the structure of the curriculum with regard to the study of South Africa as an African country. He was later brought back into the fold as a highly-regarded honorary professor.
In 1999, Mamdani was appointed director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University, a post he held until 2004. He has continued to teach there ever since.
He was the director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala, Uganda, from 2010 until 2022.
he is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology, political science, and African studies at Columbia University.
He also serves as the chancellor of Kampala International University in Uganda.
Research and writing
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.His research as of 2016 took "as its point of departure his 1996 book, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Colonialism". 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 he argued that it took on the form of a "Bifurcated State". This was characterised on the one hand by "direct rule", which was a form of "urban civil power" and focused on the exclusion of natives from civil freedoms guaranteed to citizens in civil society, and on the other hand 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". This state was "Janus faced" and "contained a duality: two forms of power under a single hegemonic authority". 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. In this way both experiences reproduced "one part of the dual legacy of the bifurcated state and created their own distinctive version of despotism". 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. 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.
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". One academic said this was not an advocacy of suicide bombing but an analysis which blamed '"U.S. foreign policy decisions, especially during the Cold War" to "create the kinds of conditions in which militant Islamism and political violence" thrived.
His essays have appeared in the London Review of Books and other publications. According to the CAS, Mamdani's texts "have been core readings for undergraduate and postgraduate studies at UCT and far beyond on the major debates on the study of African history and politics, exploring the intersection between politics and culture, comparative studies of colonialism, civil wars and the state, and genocide in Africa".
Other activities
From 1998 or 1999 to 2002, Mamdani 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.
In May 2011, at the time of the Tahrir Square protests in Cairo, Egypt, Mamdani was invited to give a talk at the American University of Cairo. Addressing students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa in 2012, he compared this with the 1976 Soweto uprising.
In October 2011, Mamdani served as keynote speaker at the inaugural national conference for Students for Justice in Palestine.
In 2017 he was invited to give the TB Davie Memorial Lecture on academic freedom at the University of Cape Town, and his talk, titled "Decolonising the Post-Colonial University" gave rise to much debate.
From December 2017 until March 2018, Mamdani served as Rajni Kothari Chair Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, India. After his term ended, on 4 April 2018 he delivered the annual Rajni Kothari Chair lecture, titled "Thinking of Justice through Africa's Experience in the 20th Century".
He has appeared as an expert in the documentaries Rwanda: The Untold Story, The Dictator's Playbook and How to Become a Tyrant. He appeared in a cameo in the 2012 film The Reluctant Fundamentalist, directed by his wife.
In 2024, he joined the Gaza Tribunal, which aims to "awaken civil society to its responsibility and opportunity to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza."