Mamdani’s progressive vision for New York shaped by childhood in Uganda, mentors say

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By Elias Biryabarema

KAMPALA (Reuters) -When Zohran Mamdani inveighed against inequality and corruption during his underdog bid for New York City mayor, Joseph Beyanga at Uganda’s Daily Monitor could hear echoes of conversations almost 20 years earlier with the then-intern on the newspaper’s sports desk.  

“Mamdani would sit with me in the production room. He would always ask me, so who is affected by this one? Who pays the price?” Beyanga, the Daily Monitor’s media manager, told Reuters. 

“He was always interested in how the big picture affects the everyday person,” Beyanga said. 

The 34-year-old Mamdani’s resolutely progressive message, focused on lowering the cost of living and addressing inequalities through direct government interventions, propelled him to victory in an election on Tuesday that drew the highest turnout since 1969 in the most populous U.S. city.  

YOUNG MAMDANI LIVED ‘IN A SIMPLE WAY’ DESPITE PRIVILEGE 

The son of a Ugandan academic of Indian origins and an Indian-American filmmaker, Mamdani was born and spent several years as a child in Uganda’s capital Kampala, where the family lived in an affluent suburb near the shores of Lake Victoria. 

He also spent stints in South Africa, India and the United States, where his father Mahmood teaches at Columbia University.

While his immediate surroundings in Kampala’s leafy Buziga neighbourhood bore little resemblance to the stark poverty of the city’s vast slums, mentors from his intern days said the 15-year-old Mamdani already had a fierce interest in questions of economic injustice rooted in his experiences in Uganda.

“Living in Uganda, where we have problems of inequality and corruption – that must have made an impression on him,” said Mark Namanya, who was a sports editor at the Daily Monitor.     

Mamdani has acknowledged in the past that his upbringing was “privileged” and denied any tension between that and his leftist policy positions. 

Beyanga said that during Mamdani’s internship, he would eat lunch at a makeshift canteen that served steamed plantains and maize meal porridge to the city’s working classes and liked to ride bodas, or motorbike taxis, around town. 

“He liked life lived in a simple way, nothing exaggerated,” Beyanga said. 

MAMDANI HAD STRONG FEELINGS ON POLITICAL SUBJECTS 

Mamdani’s father had known hardship. In 1972, Mahmood Mamdani and his family were among tens of thousands of people of Asian descent whom Uganda’s dictator Idi Amin expelled from the country, accusing them of exploiting the economy. 

Mahmood fled to Britain before returning to Uganda after Amin’s fall. 

Despite his young age, Mamdani had strong feelings about major geopolitical topics, Beyanga and Namanya said. 

Namanya recalled one conversation about foreign aid, a subject at the centre of U.S. political discussion this year following U.S. President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). 

While liberals condemned the Trump administration’s moves to slash aid to poor countries, the young Mamdani had a sceptical view of foreign assistance rooted in leftist critiques of the system as benefiting donor countries at the expense of their purported beneficiaries, Namanya said. 

“Zohran was the first person, which is odd because I was older than him, to explain to me how aid to African countries was a sham,” he said. 

Hannington Muhumuza, a music producer who worked with Mamdani on the soundtrack of “Queen of Katwe”, a 2016 film by Mamdani’s mother Mira Nair about a girl living in a Kampala slum who becomes a successful chess player, said Mamdani knew the harsh reality of what life was like for many poor Ugandans.

“He has been to all the places, the ghettos, he knows how really life is and how really the average Ugandan is living,” Muhumuza told Reuters.

“For him, it was always about… how can he uplift them. How can he be a part of their life and impact them in a positive way… That is something that I really noticed about him.”

(Writing by Aaron RossEditing by Gareth Jones)