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 in the Democratic 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 in 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 and a tradition long marginalised in the Anglosphere: one rooted in the postcolonial interrogation of power, citizenship and material justice.
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. 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, Mahmood argues that 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”. 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. 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 decolonisation 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.
BBC
Claudine Beard
