Mahmood Mamdani on energy and belonging : NPR

Mahmood Mamdani is usually described as the daddy of Zohran Mamdani, NYC’s subsequent mayor. However lengthy earlier than his son’s political ambitions, Mamdani was a outstanding scholar whose work examined colonialism and anti-colonialism in Africa.

That scholarship is rooted in his personal expertise as a Ugandan citizen of Indian origin who was twice rendered stateless attributable to political turmoil in East Africa through the Nineteen Seventies and 80s.

“We had been migrants, and underneath the colonial system, migrants had been outlined as non-Indigenous,” Mamdani stated.

That meant individuals like him had been by no means made to really feel totally at dwelling in Uganda and had been stripped of core rights. These experiences formed a lifelong quest to grasp, as he places it, “who belongs, who doesn’t, and the way it has modified over time.”

Mamdani has been a professor of presidency within the division of anthropology at Columbia College since 1999.

His newest ebook, Gradual Poison, focuses on the making of the Ugandan state put up British colonialism and the 2 autocrats that largely formed it. Mamdani argues that Idi Amin and the present president Yoweri Museveni, who has been in energy since 1986, inherited and ruled inside an inside an intractable colonial legacy handed down from the British.

Chatting with NPR’s Leila Fadel, Mamdani mentioned the ebook and the parallels between his experiences in exile and his son’s quest to problem concepts of energy and belonging within the nation’s largest metropolis.

Take heed to the total interview by clicking on the blue button above.

The radio model of this interview was produced by Milton Guevara and the digital model was edited by Majd Al-Waheidi.