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IF YOU LIKE ZOHRAN MAMDANI, YOU’RE GOING TO LOVE HIS DAD  
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Kojo Koram
July 3, 2025
Novara Media
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_ What Zohran Mamdani shows is that the tradition his father
represents – a postcolonial critique that is sceptical of moralism,
wary of elite consensus, attentive to material structures – is not
necessarily an anachronism, but can be a blueprint. _

Zohran Mamdani with his father Mahmood Mamdani (far right), his
mother Mira Nair (far left) and his wife Rama Duwaji (second from
right) during a primary election watch party in New York City, June
2025, photo: David ‘Dee’ Delgado/Reuters

 

After years of becoming accustomed to the taste of defeat, perhaps
even starting to enjoy it, the Anglosphere left is on the verge of
seizing power in the epicentre of global capitalism. When
Zohran Mamdani clinched victory
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primary for mayor of New York, it marked more than just a stunning
upset of the establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo and the
most well-financed super PAC
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the city’s political history. It was offered a model of politics
that could capture the imagination of the disenfranchised,
disillusioned and destitute masses of Europe and North America who
have found their cost of living squeezed beyond all limits ever since
the 2008 financial crisis. Mamdani’s politics and persona
synthesised a tech-savvy, cosmopolitan western millennial
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a tradition long marginalised in the Anglosphere: one rooted in the
postcolonial interrogation of power, citizenship and material justice.

In his victory, Zohran is a representative of this much maligned
generation of the millennial left turning away from the safe confines
of liberal identity representation toward a politics of economic
redistribution

In his victory, here was a representative of this much maligned
generation of the millennial left turning away from the safe confines
of liberal identity representation toward a politics of economic
redistribution, equality of citizenry and international solidarity
with victims of colonial violence like the people of Gaza. Here is his
father’s son.

Mamdani is not just a member of the Democratic Socialists of America
(DSA). He is also the son of the influential Ugandan scholar Mahmood
Mamdani
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And whilst we shouldn’t reduce anyone to their parents, there is a
line that connects Mahmood’s writings on the limits of liberal
platitudes of representation in the postcolonial state to his son’s
successful pushing of the millennial left beyond a politics of
representation into material concerns like rent freezes, universal
childcare, free public transport and publicly owned grocery stores.
Viewing Zohran through the lens offered by Mahmood’s work, we can
glimpse what the 20th-century postcolonial tradition still has to
offer a 21st century in which life, even in the imperial metropolis,
has become virtually unliveable for the majority.

Mahmood Mamdani is best understood as part of an older postcolonial
tradition somewhat forgotten in recent years as “decolonisation”
became the buzzword, mainly used to describe diversity, equity and
inclusion (DEI) initiatives, representation in popular culture and
endless arguments about individual experiences of identity. Mamdani Sr
instead follows other postcolonial writers like Walter Rodney, Michael
Manley or Kwame Nkrumah, who saw political freedom for the global
majority as hollow without economic justice.

In his landmark book Neither Settler Nor Native
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the foundational violence of the modern state is the binary of citizen
and subject. Mahmood argued that this binary was crystallised by
colonialism, which relegated vast swathes of the global population to
subjects with no rights or sovereignty. The postcolonial state,
Mahmood argues, continued to be structured along the lines of this
systemic exclusion unless it dismantled the architecture it inherited
from its colonial predecessors. This created permanent minorities, and
the inability to constitute a new political imaginary that Mamdani Sr
saw as crippling the postcolonial state. Particularly incisive was
Mamdani’s critique of South Africa’s move beyond apartheid. Whilst
the rest of the world was dancing with Nelson Mandela and falling in
love with the romanticism of the rainbow nation, Mamdani warned that
in its rush to move on from a period of intense racial violence,
post-apartheid South Africa was minimising the importance of
addressing material harm to celebrate symbolic reconciliation. When it
came to South Africa’s much-lauded Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC), Mamdani saw its focus on a Christian ethics of
forgiveness, compassion and absolution as a material failure that
allowed those who got rich off apartheid to keep their wealth as long
as they apologised: “It [the TRC] identified the victims of South
Africa’s conflict but didn’t focus its energies on tracking down
the beneficiaries of the violence.”

The TRC, for all its moral symbolism and global acclaim, delivered
what Mahmood Mamdani called “a diminished truth”
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In its eagerness to inaugurate a new era of peace, the Commission
narrowed the parameters of truth-seeking. It focused almost
exclusively on investigating acts that were illegal under apartheid
– torture, extrajudicial killings, and other direct forms of state
violence – but left untouched the legal but equally devastating
apparatus of forced removals, land dispossession and economic
exploitation. South Africa changed the laws of racial segregation but
left intact the economic structures that had produced and sustained
it.

This is the crucial insight that Mamdani Sr brought to the analysis,
not just of post-apartheid South Africa but of the postcolonial state
in general: that justice cannot end with liberal representation or
recognition of harms. It must continue into the realm of
redistribution. It must look at how society divides those who belong
from those who don’t – not just through overt political violence,
but through economic structures that appear neutral, legal, even
benevolent.

It is this lineage that Zohran Mamdani taps into, consciously or not.
His campaign was not about adding one more brown face to the
managerial class. It was not about securing a “seat at the table”
or breaking a “glass ceiling.” It was about transforming the table
itself. His policies are not just bold. They are, in a deeply
Mamdanian sense, attempts to reconstitute the very terms of
citizenship. Who gets to live in the city? Who gets to belong? Who
gets to flourish?

By echoing the postcolonial tradition of his father for the new
millennium, Zohran Mamdani is not just the anti-Trump. He is also the
anti-Obama.

By echoing the postcolonial tradition of his father for the new
millennium, Zohran Mamdani is not just the anti-Trump. He is also the
anti-Obama. Obama was always keen to fold his story into the
triumphalist promise of the American dream, distancing himself from
any suggestion that he sought to challenge the given structures of the
land of the free. Obama’s narrative was America’s apotheosis:
finally, even the Black man could be included in the American dream.
Mamdani Jr is telling his audience to wake up – the dream isn’t
real. Obama often stressed that he wasn’t anything as scary as a
Muslim or a socialist he was accused of being. Mamdani Jr is both, and
embraces it. Obama used the story of his African father to craft a
narrative of individual uplift, a personal ascent from the “dreams
of my father” to the country’s highest office through personal
excellence. Mamdani Jr uses the story of his African father to situate
himself in a tradition of collective struggle and political critique.
In doing so, Zohran Mamdani reactivates a decolonial grammar of
justice that, in the west, has been buried under the rubble of liberal
multiculturalism and corporate diversity schemes.

What Zohran Mamdani shows is that the tradition his father represents
– a postcolonial critique that is sceptical of moralism, wary of
elite consensus, attentive to material structures – is not
necessarily an anachronism, but can be a blueprint for the future.
Zohran understands how to use social media to spread Mahmood’s
critique beyond the classroom or conference: that the project of ma
was not about dividing society into the righteous and the wrong, but
about imagining a different kind of society altogether.

As we teeter on the edge of ecological collapse, fascism and economic
despair, the Anglosphere left must ask itself whether it wants to
shore up a dying system or build something new. In Zohran Mamdani’s
victory, we see the first serious effort in a long time to do the
latter.

_Kojo Koram is a reader in law at Birkbeck College, University of
London and the author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of
Empire._

_Novara Media [[link removed]] is an independent media
organisation addressing the issues that are set to define the 21st
century, from a crisis of capitalism to racism and climate change.
Within that context our goal is a simple one: to tell stories and
provide analysis shaped by the political uncertainties of the age,
elevating critical perspectives you’re unlikely to find elsewhere.
Driven to build a new media for a different politics, our journalism
is always politically committed; rather than seeking to moderate
between two sides of a debate, our output actively intends to feed
back into political action._

* Zohran Mamdani
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* Mahmood Mamdani
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* Mira Nair
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* postcolonialism
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