25 Facts About Mahmood Mamdani

Mahmood Mamdani, FBA was born on 23 April 1946 and is an Indian-born Ugandan academic, author, and political commentator, based in New York City.

Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a Professor of Anthropology, Political Science and African Studies at Columbia University, and was previously the director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research from 2010 until February 2022.

Mahmood Mamdani serves as the Chancellor of Kampala International University, Uganda.

Mahmood Mamdani was born in Mumbai and grew up in Kampala.

Mahmood Mamdani received a scholarship along with 26 other Ugandan students to study in the United States.

Mahmood Mamdani was part of the 1963 group of the Kennedy Airlift, a scholarship program that brought hundreds of East Africans to universities in the United States and Canada between 1959 and 1963.

Mahmood Mamdani was among the many students in the northern US who made the bus journey south to Montgomery, Alabama, organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in March 1965, to participate in the civil rights movement.

Mahmood Mamdani called the Ugandan Ambassador in Washington, DC, for assistance.

Mahmood Mamdani then joined The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts and graduated in 1968 with a Master of Arts in political science and Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy in 1969.

Mahmood Mamdani attained his Doctor of Philosophy in government from Harvard University in 1974.

Mahmood Mamdani's thesis was titled Politics and Class Formation in Uganda.

Mahmood Mamdani returned to Uganda in early 1972 and joined Makerere University as a teaching assistant at the same time conducting his doctoral research; only to be expelled later that year by Idi Amin due to his ethnicity.

Mahmood Mamdani left England in mid-1973 after being recruited to the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

Mahmood Mamdani was posted with the Church of Uganda offices in Mengo and was assigned to research the former regime's foreign relations.

Mahmood Mamdani's report was published as a book: Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda.

Mahmood Mamdani returned to Dar es Salaam and was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor for the spring semester in 1986.

Mahmood Mamdani was the founding director of the Centre for Basic Research, Uganda's first research non-governmental organisation from 1987 to 2006.

Mahmood Mamdani left after having disagreements with the administration on his draft syllabus of a foundation course on Africa called "Problematizing Africa".

In 2008, in an open online poll, Mahmood Mamdani was voted as the ninth "top public intellectual" in the world on the list of Top 100 Public Intellectuals by Prospect Magazine and Foreign Policy.

Mahmood Mamdani's essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, among other journals.

Mahmood Mamdani's works explore the intersection between politics and culture, a comparative study of colonialism since 1452, the history of civil war and genocide in Africa, the Cold War and the War on Terror, and the history and theory of human rights.

In Citizen and Subject, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the post-colonial state cannot be understood without a clear analysis of the institutional colonial state.

Mahmood Mamdani is married to Mira Nair, an Indian film director and producer.

Mahmood Mamdani had read his book The Myth of Population Control while an undergraduate at university and From Citizen to Refugee just before their meeting.

In July 2017, Mahmood Mamdani was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.