On a recent Thursday, the eve of Zohran Mamdani’s first meeting with President Donald Trump, the Mayor-elect stopped by a reading at Book Culture, near Columbia University. The subject of the book was dictators. The author: his dad, Mahmood Mamdani, a leading scholar in the field of post-colonial studies. The elder Mamdani, who wore a maroon scarf looped over a dark blazer, was describing his firsthand experience with authoritarian rule, in Uganda. “Power corrupts, to different degrees,” he said, drawing laughs from the crowd of about eighty. “You have to be on your watch, every minute and every second.” Heads tilted toward the younger Mamdani, who sat on a folding chair in the front row, suited and smiling. “That’s a good place to end it,” the moderator suggested. “With a little warning to the room.” The politician, who had an early flight to D.C. in the morning, greeted a handful of well-wishers, then slipped out quietly.
Mahmood Mamdani, who is seventy-nine, was also having a busy month. Three weeks before his son’s election victory, he released his twelfth book, “Slow Poison,” a political history of Uganda under two dictators, Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni. The book also traces his own upbringing, expulsion, and eventual return to Uganda. “Both Mira and Zohran insisted I insert myself as a character,” he said, referring to his wife, the filmmaker Mira Nair. “I wasn’t totally convinced.” As for the book’s timing, “that is totally accidental,” he said. “I’ve been working on this for ten years.”
On the day of the reading, the author consented to a brief tour of the Morningside Heights apartment where he and Nair have lived since 1999. “This is Zohran’s bedroom, untouched by displacement,” he said, pushing open a door to a tidy, dormlike sleeping quarters. A shelf over the bed held sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, boyhood guidebooks (“The Way Things Work”), and a worn copy of “The Marx-Engels Reader.” A portrait of a teen-age Zohran, by the Pakistani painter Salman Toor, hung from a wall, along with a sign that read “Hippies use side door.” Asked about its significance, the father shrugged.
In house slippers, Mahmood shuffled toward a spacious study, where he is now working on his next book. “It is about Israel and Palestine to a significant extent,” he said. He is currently on medical leave from Columbia for back problems. Despite misgivings over the university’s settlement with Trump, he plans to return to teaching soon. “I’m not intimidated easily,” he noted. In the book, he describes fleeing Uganda in 1972, as Amin ordered the expulsion of the country’s Indian minority. More than a decade later, when Mahmood was teaching at a university, he was recruited by Museveni to serve as the country’s inspector general. The offer was rescinded, the author writes, after he requested “a whole range of reforms.”
Lately, he has been considering the challenges of wielding municipal power. “Zohran is not a head of state—he’s the head of local government, which means the alliances he builds are going to be critical,” Mahmood said. He has found that the Mayor-elect can be “sensitive” about unsolicited advice, at least when it comes from his father. Over all, the scholar has been impressed by his son’s political instincts. “I’m struck by his determination to say, ‘Yes, this is what I am: a Muslim from Africa of Indian descent.’ ” A student assistant, working in the other room, was summoned to provide the Wi-Fi password. “It’s probably Zohran1991 or Zohran91,” Mahmood said. “Since he appeared, everything began to rotate around him.”
Like many fathers and sons, they occasionally have political disagreements. “The first one I remember was when I wrote ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,’ ” the author recalled, referring to his 2004 book on the rise of political Islam. Zohran, then a teen-ager, felt that his father’s analysis was overly historical, and that it ignored the popular understanding of certain weighted terms. “He queried me pretty hard,” Mahmood said. “We talked about it, but I’m not sure we agreed.”
The family remains close. They still eat out together in Manhattan, though they are joined now by security and, often, scores of adoring supporters. Even during the campaign, the candidate and his wife, Rama Duwaji, came by “at least one night every week,” Mahmood said, occasionally staying in the childhood bedroom to avoid the schlep back to Astoria. If the couple decides to move into Gracie Mansion, in Yorkville, the commute will be much shorter, he noted.
From the study, Mahmood walked down a long hallway lined with family photos and took a seat in an airy living room overlooking the Hudson River. Since the election, he has tried to maintain his routines: hour-long walks in the park each morning, writing, exercise. “I am not easily distracted,” he said. Still, the new level of fame has taken some getting used to. Recently, he and his wife walked out of a movie theatre to find a crowd of bar patrons applauding them. “One person must have pointed us out and suddenly there were fifty to a hundred people clapping while having their drinks,” he recalled. “That was strange.” There have been other unexpected developments, too. “My agent tells me that sales of three books have gone up since the primary,” the author said. “And one has been reprinted.” ♦
