I hadn’t been following the recent New York City mayoral election.
Campaigns were run, ballots were cast and the result was announced.
All that I knew was that guy named Zohran Mamdani had won, that he was relatively young, he was a Muslim and he had been born in Uganda.
I was familiar with the name Mamdani. But it was a name I associated with another continent – Africa.
I wondered if he could be related in some way to the Mamdani that I already knew. It turns out that he is. Zohran is his son. His father’s name is Mahmood.
I came across Mahmood Mamdani’s academic work in the mid-2000s when I was researching and writing a thesis on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Many works that I had already read had a good handle on the country overall – on the Mobutu years, the corruption, the decay of infrastructure. Still, I wanted to better understand what was going on in the east of the country, a place where many Rwandans had fled after the Rwandan genocide. I wanted to understand how their arrival had impacted the people who were already there and how this fed into conflict in the east of the DRC.
I turned to Mamdani’s book “When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda” (2002), and particularly the last chapter – Tutsi Power in Rwanda and the Citizenship Crisis in Eastern Congo.
It is dense reading.
Mamdani explains the Banyamasisi of North Kivu, the 1972 Citizenship Decree, the 1981 Citizenship Law, the Sovereign National Conference (1991) and the Banyamulenge of South Kivu. Throughout are themes of nativism, newcomers, citizenship, and strangers.
Mahmood was born in Bombay, India (present-day Mumbai) in 1946. This means he was born just before the Partition.
By the age of 6, he was living in Uganda and this is where he would grow up.
In 1963 he won a scholarship to study in the US.
He earned a BA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1967.
The US was in the convulsions of the Civil Rights Movement. Mamdani was caught up in it too and was imprisoned for his activism.
In 1968 he graduated with a MA (political science) from Tufts University. He earned another MA the following year.
Mamdani decided to return to Uganda in 1972.
Idi Amin had come to power the previous year in a coup d’etat, deposing Milton Obote.
Things were going wrong in Uganda.
But things ratcheted up a notch when Amin decided to scapegoat the Asian community and decided to throw the out of the country.
Many Asian families had been in Uganda for decades. Asians had been brought to over to work on the Ugandan railway in the late 1800s. Asians dominated the Ugandan economy. They were the backbone of small business. There were many Asian-run hardware stores, supermarkets, import businesses and the like.
Amin’s announcement was met with stunned disbelief. But it was no joke. Tens of thousands were to be thrown out of the country.
Mamdani initially went to the UK, but by 1973 he was living in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Tanzania in the 1970s was a one-party socialist state. President Julius Nyerere emphasised citizenship over ethnicity. Nyerere himself belonged to the Zanaki ethnic group, which was a relatively small group. Perhaps coming from a small ethnic group led Nyerere to believe that African politics should not be fought along tribal lines, with the most numerous or powerful dominating those that were smaller. In any case, Tanzania was more stable and less oppressive than Amin’s Uganda.
Amin made many mistakes in his time, but surely one his biggest was allowing Ugandan troops spill over into Tanzanian territory. Uganda’s invasion of Tanzania in 1978 was driven by Amin’s political desperation, border disputes, and his hostility toward Nyerere for supporting Milton Obote. But Nyerere had had enough. He pushed Amin’s troops back over the border and decided to keep going. He decided to carry out a little regime change. Amin was forced to flee, initially to Libya and then to Saudi Arabia.
Throughout Mamdani’s life, his homeland always seemed to be calling him back. After the fall of Amin and the return of Obote for a second time, it seemed that a new dawn could be dawning in the “Pearl of Africa“. So, off Mamdani went again.
It turns out that Mamdani wasn’t a fan of Obote. Mamdani had his citizenship taken away while he was out of the country.
So, back to Tanzania Mamdani went.
After Obote was gone, Mamdani again returned to Uganda.
It is really no surprise that Mamdani has spent most of his academic career focused on the themes of citizenship, ethnicity, nativism and settlers. It was the most natural thing in the world. It was his world. It was his lived experience.
Conflicts in central and East Africa were all about who had the right to be there. Who was legitimate and who was illegitimate? Who should hold power and should be cut off from power? Who was Ugandan, who was Tanzanian and who was Rwandan? Answers seesawed back and forth. The problem was that if you were on the losing side, your fate would often be expulsion. But you were not welcomed in your new home either. You were regarded as a foreigner, a temporary resident who should go back home as soon as it was possible to do so.
An opportunity came up for Mamdani to get away from the East African merry-go-round. He was offered a teaching position in South Africa, at the University of Cape Town.
There in ran into other problems.
He was at the University between 1996 and 1999. He had arrived after the end of Apartheid. He would have expected that he was stepping into a country whose institutions were opening up to new ways of thinking, a university that would be more in tune with the ideas of liberation, anti-colonialism, and political freedom.
No doubt the country had and was changing, but perhaps not fast enough for Mamdani.
African independence had been an ever-evolving reality since the 1960s in most of the continent.
Uganda had become independent in 1962, some three decades before majority rule in South Africa.
“African studies” in South Africa tended to focus on black South Africans rather than to issues further north. That’s why Mamdani questioned whether South African intellectuals were interested in anything north of the Limpopo River.
Ultimately, his proposed syllabus was blocked. He pulled up stumps and headed to the US and what he saw as a more open intellectual environment.
After re-reading “When Victims Become Killers“, a few things strike me.
His central argument is that the Rwandan genocide was a “native’s genocide”1
“For the Hutu who killed, the Tutsi was a settler, not a neighbor.”2
He distinguishes between race and ethnicity.
He makes much about direct and indirect rule.
“Direct rule tended to generate race-based political identities: settler and native. Indirect rule, in contrast, tended to mitigate the settler-native dialectic by fracturing the race consciousness of natives into multiple or separate ethnic consciousnesses.”3
Mamdani also makes much of customary laws and native authorities.
When one considered the intellectual milieu that Mamdani came from, this makes perfect sense.
Indirect Rule was a common phrase in British Uganda. It was summed up well by P. E. Mitchell, Governor of Uganda, in his lecture entitled “Indirect Rule“, given to the Uganda Society on 17 July 1936.
He states “The native administration of each area is responsible, to the extent of devolution to it in each case, the collection of revenue, the construction and maintenance of roads, hospitals and dispensaries, schools, farms and so on; the native courts enforce the law – the customary law of the people as modified from time to time, and such local legislation as they may be empowered to enforce, as well as rules and orders made under statutory powers by the native authority. The native treasuries receive revenue from various sources and makes all necessary payments. These activities are all under the general supervision of the British administrative officers.”
But outside of 1 or 2 academic works, I didn’t know much about Mamdani.
So, I checked out a couple of YouTube videos of him being interviewed to get a little more insight into his worldview.
The first was when he attended the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2002 to discuss his book “Neither Settler nor Native“.
In the discussion he says, “Nuremberg…is supposed to have made a sharp break by pinning the responsibility for violence on individuals. The fact that you are a state official cannot absolve you of responsibility. You are individually responsible. I became disaffected by this particular approach….the Human Rights approach. If you look at a Human Rights Watch publication, basically its central focus is not on the context of violence, not on the issues that drive violence but its on identifying perpetrators, naming and shaming them.”
It is true that organisations like Human Rights Watch don’t make value judgements about different political systems, for example. They pursue the much simpler path of trying to identify instances where human rights have been breached and attempt to record and quantify them. For these bodies, all human rights violations are equally grievous. None can ever be justified in their view. The same breach can not judged valid or not valid based on the political intent or motivations of the perpetrators. So, while it is true that the main focus of these organisations is not the political context of conflict, we should not expect it to be. That is more properly the role of academics, political scientists or historians. It doesn’t mean that context is not important. But it is to recognise that different organisations focus on different things. The problem with making judgements about a political program is that it can slide into attempting to justify atrocities. We must remember that the Nazis thought their own political project was sound and could justify their own atrocities.
Mamdani continues, “Nuremberg went on to create hundreds and thousands of courts – patented after the Nuremberg court. It then went on to try them. Eisenhower realised it would take more than 50 years to try all of them. So they kept on thinning the numbers. What Nuremberg never did was to ask “what was the Nazi political project and it never dealt with it. And from that point of view, it failed.”
It is worthwhile recalling that Rwanda had the same dilemma after the genocide there. The authorities held masses of people that they were interested in trying. They faced the same problem as the Allies after World War II. The Rwandan solution was to prioritise. They created different levels of crime, from the most serious to the least. The most serious crimes were reserved for the smallest number of defendants. The largest group of defendants were tried in Gacaca courts. the Gacaca courts had the fewest protections, but they were seen as an expeditious way to deal out justice.
Mamdani continues, “The Nazi political project was shared by the Allies and that political project was to turn Germany into a pure nation, a pure nation rid of its minorities. When the Allies defeated the Nazis and went into Eastern Europe, they began to create pure nations. To ethnically cleanse Eastern Europe of Germans – move them back into Germany. One crime doesn’t wipe out another.”
After World War II, the population transfers that moved Germans from Eastern and Central Europe into occupied Germany involved several distinct groups:
1. Long-established ethnic German communities (the majority). Most of the 12–14 million people expelled after 1945 were Volksdeutsche — ethnic Germans whose ancestors had migrated to Eastern Europe hundreds of years earlier. They often had never lived in Germany, and many did not speak German as their first language.
2. Recent German settlers brought in during Nazi occupation. A smaller portion were people who had moved east during the Nazi period (1939–1944) under Hitler’s resettlement and Germanisation policies, especially into areas of Poland and the USSR. These were more likely to have been born in Germany before moving.
3. Germans from prewar German territories lost after 1945. Millions came from regions that had been part of Germany until 1945 (East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania). Although these people were “from Germany,” their homes became Polish or Soviet territory after the war.
I was largely unaware of this aspect of post-war German history.
The approach to move Germans to Germany was generally shared by Allied powers. But it was carried out mostly by East European governments.
Mamdani’s comment that “the Nazi political project was shared by the Allies” needs to be unpacked a bit. If he means that they generally wanted to see modern nation-states in Europe (that is to say one people in one territory), well possibly. But the term “Nazi political project” has other connotations. Of course the Nazis wanted get rid of Germany’s minorities, but they wanted to use extermination to achieve it. The Allies never signed up to this. They went to war with Germany and fought against it.
He says that 1648 Treaty of Westphalia was the beginning of the liberal nation-state and that “the illiberal nation-state had begun in 1492. In 1492 in the Iberian Peninsula mobilised behind a banner of religion, one territory, one people; creates a nation-state, a Christian nation-state, decides to cleanse all religious minorities. Jews and Muslims in particular and at the same time launches a colonisation experiment – the Discovery of the Americas.”
Mamdani explicitly links the beginning of an illiberal nation-state with European colonialism. But, is he conflating tow different things? Are they one and the same?
He says, “In my view America is the genesis of what we call settler colonialism and the American model was exported all around the world. In America you have 2 kinds of minorities that have run the course of history of the modern American state – the American-Indian and the African-American. Each had a different significance for our contemporary era. the American Indians were the people on that land when the settlers conquered it. First, they tried to eliminate as many Indians as possible. This was the first recorded genocide in modern history. Then with the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln generalised the solution of reservations. They herded American Indians into separate territories. For the Nazis, this was the inspiration. Hitler realised 2 things. One, that genocide was doable. It was possible to do genocide. That’s what Hitler realised. The second thing Hitler realised is that you don’t have to have a common citizenship. You can differentiate between people. The Nuremberg Laws were patented after American laws.”
Abraham Lincoln did play a role in formalising the reservation system. He signed legislation. He approved treaties. During the Civil War, he supported the use of reservations to pacify tribes, especially in the Great Plains, to prevent conflicts that could draw military resources away from war. He considered that Homestead expansion towards the west was inevitable.
In his message to Congress in 1862, he said “The Indian Tribes are now to be moved…to such reservations as the Government shall determine. this will avoid collision and bloodshed between the two races, and it will secure their own safety as well as the safety of the settlements.”
He saw reservations as a tool to protect both peoples.
Treaties in the U.S. were negotiated by the executive branch of government, typically by officials acting under the authority of the President.
Two-thirds of the Senate also had to vote for them in order that they be ratified.
The House of Representatives is not directly involved.
Native American treaties were normally initiated by presidents, the Department of War or the Department of the Interior.
He largely delegated routine treaty negotiation to commissioners.
Still, Lincoln didn’t merely sign off on Native American treaties. he was aware of them, appointed commissioners and oversaw the system.
Let’s look at Mamdani’s claims about settler violence in North America being the “first recorded modern genocide”.
There had been large-scale killings before in history.
There were the Assyrian conquests in the 8th-7th centuries BCE and the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in the 6th century BCE.
There were the Mongol invasions in the 13th century CE and the European religious wars from the 15th to the 17th century.
Some observers, like Mamdani draw a line around the year 1492 – which kicked of the Discovery of the Americas.
To many, this is beginning of the “modern era”. This era is thought to be marked by global exploration, the rise of science, centralised states, the rise of capitalism and European imperialism.
The claim that there were no genocides pre-1492 seems highly suspect. There were previous attempts to wipe out groups “in whole or in part”, as in modern definitions of genocide. The UN Genocide Convention definition includes the category of religion.
But if you draw a line around 1492, then genocide, or at least “modern genocide” appears to be strongly correlated with European colonialism.
There was significant population reduction in the Caribbean in the 1490s-1530s. Under the Spanish, the Taíno of Hispaniola went from numbering in the hundreds of thousands to a few thousand in the space of a few decades. Some have described it as genocide.
The Conquest of Mexico (1519-21) exhibited mass death, possibly with genocidal features.
There was the Conquest of Central America (1520s-1550s) which impacted on the Maya and the Conquest of the Andes (1530s-1570s) which impacted the Incas.
In terms of settler colonies, Hispaniola was a settler colony early on, but switched to slave labour.
Many Spaniards settled in Mexico, but they never outnumbered the indigenous population – even to this day. So it did not constitute demographic replacement.
In Central America, Spaniards never fully displaced the indigenous majority.
In the Andes, colonialism was largely extractive. The region remained overwhelmingly indigenous.
There were settler colonies in Argentina, Uruguay in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Many Portuguese settled in Brazil, but it was not a demographic replacement settler colony.
It is likely that we can find multiple examples of genocide in Latin America between 1492 and 1607 (the founding Jamestown). What probably did make the U.S. unique was the degree to which it was a settler colony. European settlers came to strongly outnumber the indigenous population – all over the continent. Was it an exporter of settler colonialism? When you look at Australia, which was settled from 1788 onward, the U.S. was not the directing power. Britain was. Likewise, in New Zealand, India and parts of Africa, Britain was the colonial power. Canada is an interesting case. It too developed a reservation system. Being located so close to the U.S., it would have no doubt been aware of the U.S. system. But it too was initially under British control. I will have to do more research to find out whether the U.S. system really was the inspiration for reservations in British colonies around the world, or whether the idea came from Britain, or whether it developed within the various colonies themselves. It is interesting that the earliest American colony predates the Cape Colony (southern Africa) by 45 years. It was founded in 1652 by the Dutch.
Mamdani continues, “The U.S. invented the model that we call today the two-state solution. The American state and alongside it – several Protectorates with degrees of autonomy but no independence…The African-Americans were not part of separate states. The African-Americans were part of a one-state solution”. They were oppressed terribly within a single state. But the thing is, the American Indians, by being is separate states were perpetually fragmented, isolated. Up to today the African-American, horribly oppressed, but had the possibility of building alliances with other oppressed peoples.”
This is where I think Mamdani makes his most insightful observation.
Native Americans were put on to separate parcels of land. The ideal was that each group would have its own land. They were fragmented. And separate. African Americans were not placed into their own state. They remained in the same state as whites.
Abraham Lincoln does appear to have been more concerned with the plight of African-Americans than with that of Indians. Slavery and the Civil War was, far and away, the main focus for Lincoln. He spent more time on it. He devoted more of his mental energy to it.
Lincoln saw Indians as being on the periphery of the Civil War.
There was no transformative legislative project to raise the status of Native Americans in the same vein as Emancipation. Lincoln viewed slavery as a denial of freedom and of equality under law while he tended to view Native Americans in more paternalistic terms.
Both Mahmood and Zohran lived in Uganda and South Africa, but their individual experiences were different.
Mahmood lived through the waning days of the Uganda Protectorate.
He lived through Obote I. The first Obote era began as a parliamentary democracy. But it shifted towards authoritarianism from 1966 onward. Obote suspended the constitution and abolished Bugandan autonomy.
Mahmood also experienced the Amin era. Amin’s regime was a personalised, military dictatorship. He came to power in a coup and ruled by decree. There was no functioning legislature. There were high levels of repression and many disappearances. The army was purged along ethnic lines.
Mahmood witnessed Obote II. The elections in which Obote returned to power were widely considered fraudulent. This era was marked by the civil war with Museveni’s NRA and widespread human rights abuses in the Luwero Triangle.
Zohran didn’t experience any of this first-hand. The only Ugandan President he lived under was Yoweri Museveni. Museveni’s regime was initially reformist. There was a focus on reconstruction. His “non-party” movement potentially masked an emerging authoritarian control.
Zohran was born in 1991 and lived in Uganda in the 1990s. This coincided with most reformist period of the Museveni regime and the most liberal period in Uganda since independence.
In 2005 the constitution was amended to allow Museveni to seek additional terms as President. In 2017 it was amended to remove the presidential age restriction.
Electoral commission commissioners are appointed by the President.
There were around 30 districts in the 1990s. today, there are more than 135. This may allow for the dilution of opposition strongholds.
Rival candidates for the presidency often face repression. Kizza Besigye has, in the past, been placed under house arrest and charged with treason.
Co-opting potential rivals into the NRM is not unheard of. There are many ministerial posts that can be handed out. There has been a substantial increase in the number of ministries over time. In 1986, there were just 48 ministries. Today there are 32 Cabinet Ministers and 50 Ministers of State. To critics, this may resemble a patronage network.
Both Mahmood and Zohran lived in South Africa. But it was Mahmood who experienced professional frustration and was ultimately blocked from introducing his chosen course syllabus.
Zohran is currently the toast of the town as the new Mayor of New York City and may well end up becoming more influential than his father. But to me, Mahmood has had the more colourful past.
Australia and the World Past and Present 
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