After his victory, Zohan Kwame Mamdani, elected mayor of New York, gave one of those speeches that aspire to posterity. They are a genre of American rhetorical art, but, unlike his classics, Mamdani did not use the usual suspects (Lincoln, Washington…), but instead chose to renovate the bench. He cited the socialist Eugene Debs, the Indian leader Jawarhalal Nehru (“sometimes there comes a moment, like tonight, when we move from the old to the new”), New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and his rival’s father, Governor Mario Cuomo, who wrote the phrase: “Campaign in verse; govern in prose.”
The appeal to Debs with which he opened his words was consistent with what happened next. “I’m Muslim. I’m a democratic socialist. And I won’t apologize,” he said. Debs is the most popular socialist in American history. He ran for president five times, the last of which from prison. The quote Mamdani used – “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity” – dates back to when he was awaiting imprisonment for criticizing his country’s role in the Great War.
“Unlike Mamdani,” explains Michael Kazin, author of American dreamers (American Dreamers; no Spanish translation), on “how the left changed the United States,” “Debs preached socialism instead of working to reform capitalism.” In Run, Zohran, run (run, Zohran, run; no Spanish translation), his book on Mayor-elect Theodore Hamm’s campaign describes Debs as “(Senator) Bernie Sanders’ hero,” who is, in turn, the one who inspired Mamdani in 2016 to enter politics. “His debt to Sanders is greater,” warns Kazin. “Debs started out as a Democrat, but once he became a socialist, he committed himself to building that radical party and not to compromise with the majority formations”.
“McCarthyism banned (in the 1950s) the word socialist. No one defined themselves that way, until Sanders. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comes from him, and Mamdani comes from her”, recalls Hamm, who defines the young politician as “a voracious reader, without university studies, but with a profound knowledge of various intellectual traditions”.
In American history, La Guardia is the great mayor of the New Deal and for many the best in the city’s history, including Mamdani, who promised in his speech that his program (“rent freezes, free buses and universal child care citywide”) would live up to that of his hero. “Even though he stopped being mayor in 1945, he is still a role model,” says Terry Golway, author of the latest biography on the councilor, I have never been involved in politics (I have never been involved in politics). “He had influential friends. Mamdani, at the moment, does not have them. Although La Guardia’s great advantage was his excellent relationship with the then US president, Franklin Roosevelt. Obviously, Mamdani has an opponent in the White House, who will also make things difficult for him.” Trump has promised that he will hinder the young mayor’s career in every way possible. Socialist (“communist,” he prefers to call it), immigrant, pro-Palestinian and descendant of the foreign intellectual elite, he represents almost everything the president hates.
“His father is, without a doubt, one of his great intellectual references,” Hamm clarifies. Mahmoud Mamdani is a professor at Columbia University. Decolonization Expert, just published A slow poisonwhich speaks of the “forging of Uganda”, the country in which he grew up and which he was forced to leave together with 70,000 other Asians during the bloody dictatorship of Idi Amin. Subsequently, as he told in 2022 in London Book Reviewhe was one of those who decided to return. In 1989 he met his future wife, the Indian director Mira Nair, there while she was looking for locations for the film. Mississippi Masala. Their only child was born in Kampala. He often quotes the following teaching from his mother: “If we don’t tell our stories, no one will.”
Mandela and Harry Potter
The family lived in South Africa in the years immediately following the end of apartheid. In his Democratic primary victory speech, Zohran quoted Nelson Mandela: “It always seems impossible until you do it.” When the boy was seven years old they moved to New York. In the prologue to an essay by his father on the Rwandan genocide, he recounts in 2001 that at the age of eight the boy had made “the transition from the image to the written word”. The more Harry Potter books he read, the more curious he became about what I was writing.
The thinkers Edward Said and Mona and Rashid Khalidi (author of Palestine. 100 years of colonialism and resistance) were a regular presence in the Mamdani household. Zohran then studied Africana studies at Bowdoin College in bucolic Maine after being rejected by Columbia. In college he founded a branch of the organization Students for Justice in Palestine, and his criticism of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza defined his campaign. He graduated with a thesis on Rousseau and on the postcolonial studies reference Frantz Fanon, author of The dispossessed of the land.
He later moved to Uganda, where he tried his hand as a rapper. He abandoned the hip hop for politics in a decision that on January 1st will lead him to be the first Muslim and socialist mayor of New York. In his victory speech it was clear that the hip hop He didn’t let him: a student of the golden era of the genre, he wanted to stand out even by pronouncing it with the rhythm of a rapper.
