Mahmood Mamdani (Zohran Mamdani’s Father)

Some Lesser Known Facts About Mahmood Mamdani

• Mahmood Mamdani was born in Mumbai and raised in Kampala, Uganda.

• Both his parents were Gujarati Muslims, born and raised in the British territory of Tanganyika (now Tanzania).

• Before the birth of Mahmood, his parents moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) because his father attended college there.

• In 1948, when Mahmood was two years old, his family moved to Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika.

• In 1951, when Mamdani was five years old, his family moved to Uganda.

• Mamdani first attended a madrasa and then a Government Indian Primary School in Uganda.

• Mahmood grew up speaking Gujarati, Urdu, and Swahili, and began reading English in sixth grade.

• While studying at Old Kampala Senior Secondary School, he served as secretary of the Do-It-Yourself Physics club.

• In 1963, Mahmood was one of 23 Ugandan students group of the Kennedy Airlift, a US-funded scholarship program that brought hundreds of East Africans to various universities in the United States and Canada between 1959 and 1963.

• In March 1965, he was one of the many students from the northern USA who travelled by bus to Montgomery, Alabama, to support the civil rights movement organised by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

• He was also arrested in the movement. In jail, he was allowed to do only one call, so he called the Ugandan ambassador for help. Instead of helping him, the ambassador asked him why he was interfering in another country’s internal matters.

• In 1972, Mahmood returned to Uganda and started working as a teaching assistant at Makerere University in Kampala. He was also conducting his doctoral research.

• In November 1972, Mamdani and other Asians were expelled by then-Ugandan dictator Idi Amin due to their ethnicity. He left Uganda and started living in a refugee camp in the United Kingdom.

• In the mid 19733, he left England after getting a job at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. He also finished his PhD dissertation. There, he became involved with groups that opposed Idi Amin.

• In 1979, when Amin was removed from power in the Uganda–Tanzania War, he returned to Uganda. During this time, he worked as an intern with the All Africa Conference of Churches, a Christian organisation based in Nairobi, Kenya, and worked in the Church of Uganda’s office in Kampala.

• From 1980 to 1993, he was again employed at Makerere University.

• His wife, Mira Nair, is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker who focuses largely on South Asian and Indian stories. They first met in Nairobi, Kenya, and then again in Kampala, Uganda, in 1989 when Nair was doing research for her film, Mississippi Masala (1991). They got married in January 1991 and welcomed their son in October 1991.

  

• In 1984, Mahmood became stateless as his Ugandan citizenship was withdrawn by the Milton Obote government for opposing the government’s policies. So he returned to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

• In 1986, when Milton Obote was removed from his power, Mahmood returned to Uganda in June 1986.

• In 1987, Mahmood Mamdani became the founding director of the Centre for Basic Research (CBR), Uganda’s first non-governmental research organisation. He has worked there till 1996.

• In 1996, he became the first person to hold the AC Jordan Chair of African Studies at the University of Cape Town.

• In early 1997, he was appointed as the head of the Centre for African Studies. However, he left the university after his disagreements over his draft syllabus for a course called ” Problematising Africa with some of the white faculty members.

• Mamdani criticised the syllabus and called it “Bantu Studies,” and referred to the limited, biased education given to Black people. Because of these disagreements, he was suspended and later resigned. This incident was known as “the Mamdani affair,” and it is still discussed today in debates about decolonising education.

• In 1999, Mahmood and his family moved to the USA and settled in New York. In the same year, he was appointed as the director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. He held this position till 2004.

• From 1999 to 2002, Mamdani served as president of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa.

• From 2010 to 2022, he was appointed as the director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) in Kampala, Uganda.

• In 2017, Mahmood served as Rajni Kothari Chair Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, India.

• In July 2017, Mamdani was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), which is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

• On 28 May 2018, on the occasion of Africa Day, Mamdani was appointed as the honorary professor at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town.

• As of November 2025, Mahmood serves as the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology, political science, and African studies at Columbia University.

• Mamdani and his wife live in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in Manhattan, close to Columbia University.

• Mahmood Mamdani serves as the chancellor of Kampala International University in Uganda and an honorary professor at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town.

• Throughout his life, Mahmood has focused on settler colonialism and human rights, as well as Marxism and the history of war and genocide in Africa. He is a prominent scholar in postcolonialism and has written several books.

• His latest book, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State, was published in October 2025. In this book, Mamdani wrote about the postcolonial history of Uganda by comparing the leadership of Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni, and how their differing style of rule shaped the country.

• His son, Zohran Mamdani, was elected as the Mayor of New York City in November 2025.