Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia College professor, attracts on his experiences of exile and statelessness in Uganda to look at how colonial legacies proceed to form political energy.
Chloe Aftel
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Chloe Aftel
Mahmood Mamdani is commonly 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 as a consequence of political turmoil in East Africa in the course of the Seventies and 80s.
“We have been migrants, and beneath the colonial system, migrants have been outlined as non-Indigenous,” Mamdani stated.
That meant individuals like him have been by no means made to really feel totally at house in Uganda and have been stripped of core rights. These experiences formed a lifelong quest to know, 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, Sluggish Poison, focuses on the making of the Ugandan state publish 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 intractable colonial legacy handed down from the British.
Talking to 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 complete 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.
