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One of the most headline-making names of 2026 is Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor of NYC, and his political and social stances.
While a lot is known about his mother, Mira Nair, the acclaimed filmmaker, not many people are familiar that his early political awareness came from his own father.
Mahmood Mamdani, often referred to as just the mayor's father, was a prominent scholar before his son's career.
Mahmood Mamdani's academic work
Born in Mumbai, Mahmood's academic work examines colonialism and anti-colonials in Africa and calls out structural power imbalances.
The 80-year-old, Ugandan citizen of Indian origin, was twice rendered stateless due to political turmoil in East Africa during the 1970s and 80s.
"We were migrants, and under the colonial system, migrants were defined as non-Indigenous," Mamdani told NPR, meaning people like him were never fully welcomed in Uganda and were stripped of basic rights.
Mamdani has been a professor of government in the department of anthropology at Columbia University since 1999.
His book, Slow Poison, focuses on the making of the Ugandan state post British colonialism and the two autocrats that largely shaped it.
He also served 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.
Mahmood Mamdani's first-ever US visit
Mamdani was one of 23 Ugandan students in the 1963 group of the Kennedy Airlift, a US-funded scholarship programme that brought hundreds of East Africans to universities in the US and Canada between 1959 and 1963.
He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Pittsburghin 1967.
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Mahmood Mamdani's introduction to Karl Marx
During his initial stay in the US, he participated in the civil rights movement in the 1965 march and was jailed.
When he contacted the Ugandan ambassador in Washington DC for assistance, he was asked why he was "interfering" in foreign country affairs, to which he replied that he was participating in a freedom struggle.
Following his arrest, he learnt about the work of Karl Marx when two FBI agents paid him a visit to question his attendance in the mach and during the questioning, asked him whether he liked Marx, with whom he was not familiar before.
Mahmood Mamdani's advanced studies
Mamdani attended the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University and graduated with a Master of Arts degree in political science in 1968 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.
