What Zohran Mamdani Knows About Power
One of Mamdani’s most poetic campaign themes is “public excellence” – the idea that socialists should not compromise on quality of life concerns. In recent months, Mamdani has tried to reframe his suspicions of the police as a human resources issue, an obstacle to excellence: Rank-and-file police officers are regularly asked to handle distressing situations that fall outside their scope, such as dealing with the homeless and the mentally ill. He hopes to relieve them of these tasks by creating a Ministry of Community Safety, although, by his own admission, certain details “remain to be determined”. At the urging of a Times interviewer, in September, Mamdani half-apologized for his old tweets about the NYPD, but he rejects the idea that his views have evolved. “The principles remain the same,” he told me. “There are also lessons you learn along the way.”
Many of Mamdani’s critics question whether someone of his age and experience will be capable of running the country’s largest city. New York has a budget of one hundred and sixteen billion dollars, three hundred thousand employees and a police department larger than the Belgian army. For more than a century, people have wondered whether the city is ungovernable; With the exception of Fiorello La Guardia, who benefited from New Deal money, every idealistic leader who was elected mayor left City Hall in one way or another. “The good mayor turns out to be weak or stupid or ‘not so good’…or people become disgusted,” muckraker Lincoln Steffens wrote in 1903. A City Hall veteran recently told me: “You constantly make bad decisions that you know are bad decisions. You are presented with two bad options, and you have to choose one, and that’s your day.”
If Mamdani is elected, the NYPD may well continue sweeping homeless encampments and forcibly removing protesters who block bridges or roads; he has not yet ruled these things out. (“His administration will not seek to criminalize peaceful protests or poverty,” a Mamdani aide said.) At a recent public safety forum sponsored by the political journal Vital city, he was asked about police involuntary detention of mentally ill people. “It’s a last resort,” Mamdani said. “It’s something that…if nothing else can work, then it’s there.”
Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991. That was the same year his mother, filmmaker Mira Nair, released “Mississippi Masala,” about a romance between a plucky Ugandan Indian exile (Sarita Choudhury) and a cramped black carpet cleaner (Denzel Washington) in a small Mississippi town. While looking for a place to dramatize her protagonist’s childhood in Uganda, Nair found an airy hilltop property in Kampala, overlooking Lake Victoria. The house appeared in the film and Nair and her husband, Mahmood Mamdani, bought it. Zohran spent his first five years there, playing in the lush gardens under the jacaranda trees. In a 2002 profile of Nair, John Lahr wrote that the director’s “talkative, doe-eyed son” was known by “dozens of coins, including Z, Zoru, Fadoose and Nonstop Mamdani”. (Mamdani’s staff still call him Z today, although recently some have begun, as a wink, to call him Monsieur.)
Nair met Mahmood while she was researching “Mississippi Masala.” The daughter of a dour Indian civil servant, she studied at Harvard, and by her thirties she had attracted attention for films that examined life on the fringes of Indian society: among cabaret dancers, street children, visiting emigrants. Mahmood was born in Bombay in 1946 and raised in Uganda, a member of the Indian diaspora that emerged in East Africa during the British colonial period. In 1962, the year Uganda became independent, Mahmood received one of twenty-three scholarships to America offered to the new country’s brightest students. (Barack Obama’s father had come to study in the United States three years earlier in a similar program for Kenyan students.) He returned home after studying abroad and, like the protagonist Nair later imagined for “Mississippi Masala,” was exiled during Idi Amin’s 1972 expulsion of some sixty thousand Asians from the country. The event became the focal point of Mahmood’s writings on the pains of decolonization; for Nair, it became the backdrop for a love story. “He’s kind of a left-hander,” Nair told his collaborator, Sooni Taraporevala, on the day they planned to meet Mahmood for an interview.
In 1996, Mahmood published his groundbreaking work, “Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism,” which described the persistence of colonial structures in independent African nations. He dedicated it to Nair and to Zohran who, he wrote, “takes us daily on the path of his discovery of life”. Three years after the book’s publication, Columbia offered Mahmood a tenured professorship. The family moved to New York, to a college apartment in Morningside Heights, where they often entertained Edward and Mariam Said and Rashid and Mona Khalidi for dinner. “For Zohran, they were ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts,’” Mahmood told me in an email.
In the fall of 1999, Mamdani’s parents enrolled him in the Bank Street School for Children, a private school. The first year, he felt left out: “he was constantly told that I spoke English very well,” Mamdani remembers. But eventually he settled into a typical Upper West Side childhood: Absolute Bagels, soccer at Riverside Park, listening to Jay-Z and Eiffel 65 on his Walkman on the way to school. In 2004, Mahmood took a sabbatical and the family returned to Kampala for a year. One day, Mahmood went to Zohran’s school to see how his son was adjusting. “He’s fine except I don’t always understand him,” Zohran’s teacher told him. On the principal’s orders, the teacher asked all the Indian students to raise their hands. Zohran had kept his and, when pushed, protested: “I’m not Indian! I’m Ugandan!”
Mahmood Mamdani, Mira Nair and Zohran in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991.Photography courtesy of Mira Nair
One Saturday morning this summer, I met Mamdani outside the Bronx High School of Science, his alma mater, to walk with one of his favorite former professors, Marc Kagan, who happens to be the brother of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. Kagan, the author of “Take Back the Power” — an account of his years as a radical organizer in the city’s transportation union — taught social studies at Bronx Science for ten years. He inspired fervent admiration among his students, some of whom (including Mamdani) called themselves Kaganites. In her lectures, Kagan explained how race, gender, and class shaped world events. “We have moved away from the historical theory of great men,” said Kagan, a bespectacled, gray-bearded man in his sixties, as we walked across the courtyard below the school. Mamdani caught my attention and attacked me. “There’s only one,” he said, nodding to Kagan.
