Ugandans and other scholars around Africa know very well the Makerere University scholar and lecturer Prof Mahmood Mamdani, the celebrated Director of Makerere Institute for Social Research (MISR).
What they may not know is that the quite reserved researcher’s son Zohran Kwame Mamdani, has been a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) political candidate and has toppled New York Assemblywoman Aravella Simotas in a hotly elected primary election in Queens, New York City.
Mamdani’s primary win, according to our Snoops in America, automatically guarantees him a seat in the state legislature, since no one is registered to run against the Democratic nominee in the November general election.
The young man is a housing counselor and Indian-Ugandan New Yorker. Whereas his father, Prof Mamdani, is renown in Uganda and Africa as a path breaking public intellectual from Makerere University, his son is more internationally known as Mira Nair’s son. Yes, his mother is the internationally-renowned Bollywood film Director and among her many great films is Queen of Katwe, about the young chess “master” Phiona Mutesi from the sprawling Kampala slums.
Zohran Kwame Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda but was raised in New York since he was 7 years old. His family moved to the United States after being expelled from Uganda in 1972 by the late dictator Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada. He has ‘Kwame’ as his middle name, after the first prime minister of Ghana.
Throughout his campaign, he has been advocating for housing as a guaranteed human right and has called for universal, state-wide rent control. His election campaign revolves around these promises, which find great resonance in an expensive area like New York.
“I am running for State Assembly because it’s time to guarantee housing to all New Yorkers as a right, regardless of ability to pay. It’s time to desegregate our schools, fully eliminate cash bail, ban solitary confinement, fund and fix the MTA, end workplace discrimination, and fight for social, racial, economic, and environmental justice for the many, not the few,” Zohran Mamdani said earlier in the campaign.
He graduated from Bronx Science before becoming a housing counsellor to help immigrant families. The 28-year-old is now one of the many DSA-backed candidates to have performed well in Western Queens since the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the congressional Representative in 2018.
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