‘Binary thinking’: Why Zohran Mamdani’s African identity doesn’t fit US racial boxes

Amid the trees clustered with jackfruit and the boda boda motorcycles weaving precariously around Kampala’s congested roads earlier this year was a campaign poster for Katongole Singh, an immaculately coiffed candidate who positively beamed alongside the president, Yoweri Museveni. With a Sikh Indian surname and an indigenous Ugandan first name, Singh is no rarity in the Ugandan capital, where people of Indian descent have lived for more than 125 years. Many people here boast a multi-hyphenated “African Indian” identity – as indeed does Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the 33-year-old running for mayor of New York City. Mamdani – who made shock waves this summer when he defeated Andrew Cuomo to win the Democratic primary, setting himself up for a likely victory in the mayoral race this November – was born in Uganda, and moved to New York when he was a young boy. In July Mamdani even returned here for his marriage ceremony, a sprawling three-day affair in Kampala. The same month, the New York Times reported that an anonymous source – alleged to be Jordan Lasker, a well-known eugenicist and neo-Nazi – had hacked internal data showing that on an application to Columbia University in 2009, Mamdani had identified his race as both “Asian” and “Black or African American”. The story sparked outrage from some critics who alleged Mamdani was weaponising identity politics in order to gain preferential access to the prestigious university. (He was not accepted.) Mamdani said he had ticked what he described as “constrained” boxes to capture the “fullness of my background”, and that he did not see himself as African American or Black, but as “an American who was born in Africa”. In Kampala, however, it is clear that Ugandans of Indian descent are unquestioningly considered African – both by Black indigenous Ugandans and by themselves. “We have people from India with Ugandan indigenous names, and they speak the Ugandan language,” said Sarah Kirikumwino, a 20-year-old communications student. “They will tell you they actually do not know anything about India because they were born here.” Be that as it may, Indian cultural influence is easy to identify here, not least through food. Near Kampala’s Acacia mall, a Black Ugandan woman selling chai made the sign of the cross before dipping her vegetable samosa into an emerald green chutney. “Asian cuisine such as samosas, chapatis and chai is very well integrated into Ugandan society,” said Aman Kapur, a Kenyan restaurateur of Indian descent, who catered for Mamdani’s wedding. “They were introduced here in the early 19th century by the Asians who were brought in to work.” Mamdani’s mother, the Oscar-nominated film director Mira Nair, is Indian. His father – the post-colonial scholar Mahmood Mamdani – was born to Indian parents in India. Kapoor said Mamdani’s wedding feast was as mixed as the heritage shared between him and his American-Syrian wife, who he met on Hinge: a smorgasbord of Mediterranean, Indian, Pakistani and Ugandan cuisine, including servings of rolex – a staple Ugandan street food of chapati rolled around eggs, which shares the same name as the Swiss watch. The backlash Mamdani faced over his identity reminds Mark Niwagaba – a student at Kampala’s Makerere University – of the “birther movement” conspiracy theory, in which Donald Trump claimed Barack Obama wasn’t a natural born citizen, as the constitution requires of presidents. “Obama’s dad was of Kenyan origin and the mum was Hawaiian – he wasn’t Black enough, and he wasn’t white enough,” the 24-year-old said at an open-mic poetry night at Kardamom and Koffee, a cafe Mira Nair is said to frequent. (Obama’s mother was born in Kansas and studied at the University of Hawaii.) “Mamdani seems to face the same challenge.” The history of Indians in Uganda has not been without strife. South Asian migrants – most of them Indian – were brought into the country by British colonial powers as indentured labourers from 1894. It was Ugandan Indians who built a 600-mile railway that linked Uganda’s side of Lake Victoria to the port of Mombasa in Kenya. Favoured by the British to manage tea and coffee plantations, they quickly established successful businesses and gained affluence while Black Ugandans struggled. Then in 1972, Idi Amin expelled about 50,000 Ugandans of south Asian origin, giving them 90 days to leave. Nevertheless, despite now making up less than 1% of the population, Ugandans of Indian descent remain a thriving community here, contributing 60% of tax revenues. From signs for the billion-dollar Madhuvani group to hotels like the four-star Fairway Boutique hotel – one of Uganda’s first hotels, founded by the Jaffer family – the affluence of Ugandans of Indian descent can be seen across the capital. Many have lived their whole lives in Uganda and are accepted as African. Yashwant Patel, 71, who was born in Kampala and now lives in Birmingham, in England, recalls childhoods spent swimming in Lake Victoria, sprawled across the city of Entebbe, and eating mangoes and guavas. “Nobody looked at us like we were invading the place,” Patel recalls. “On the way to Entebbe … you could buy a whole basketful of mangoes which we would eat. I can still remember the juice! And the mango seeds were of course brought from India. Although I hadn’t been to India, my mother and father would say, ‘this is like being in India!’” Many people here consider Mamdani absolutely African. “Our own son is taking up a big position in the US, and we Ugandans are very happy with that,” said Fred Ndaula, a Ugandan tour guide in Kampala. “They are Ugandans. This is their country.” Identity in the US can be complex, however, and not everyone agrees that Mamdani has the right to claim an “African” identity. “African American” is often used to specify the people of Black African descent who were violently amputated from their history and their ancestry through the transatlantic slave trade. The case of Rachel Dolezal – an academic and former president of a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) – is one infamous example of a white woman who masqueraded as Black until she was exposed in 2015. “This has generated African American resentment, and therefore not a surprise that Mamdani’s attempt to accurately reflect his complex heritage on a form designed for binary Black/white thinking would ruffle many US African Americans,” said Dr Kim D Butler, a Black historian and associate professor at the department of Africana studies at Rutgers University. But Mamdani, she added, “is more closely connected to a specific African country than I have yet to discover for my paternal ancestors, who worked the land of a revolutionary war officer, having left a land whose name we no longer remember these 200+ years.” She added: “‘He’s not really African’ conveys a subtle message we have heard spoken about us – “We’re not really American.” Indeed, Indians from Africa do not always fit easily into US racial categories, notes Amishi Agrawal, an Indian researcher at the University of Oxford who has been working with refugee communities in Uganda. She points to one of Nair’s films, Mississippi Masala, as a reference point. The film follows a Ugandan-Indian family forced to flee Amin’s Uganda for the US, where one of the daughters falls in love with an African American man played by Denzel Washington. The film shows the racism expressed by her family – even as they face racism, too, as immigrants in the deep south. “There’s a lot of complexity around caste and class within the Indian-Ugandan community, as well – and internal racism is, unfortunately, rife,” says Agrawal. Mamdani’s own history is even more complex: his family moved from Uganda to South Africa, where his father, Mahmood, taught at the University of Cape Town. The young Mamdani’s affinity to his African Ugandan identity could be attributed in part to the work and activism of his father, the prolific author of several books including on colonialism, the Rwandan genocide, Darfur and the so-called war on terror. Mahmood picked up that activism after moving to the US, where, inspired by Uganda’s independence movement in the 1960s, he joined the civil rights movement and was involved with the Montgomery bus boycotts. He also named his son Zohran Kwame after Ghana’s first democratic president, the icon of Pan-Africanism Kwame Nkrumah. Historian Shamil Jeppie, who worked with Mahmood at the university, first met Zohran Mamdani as a child there. As an anti-apartheid student activist, Jeppie saw not only how race was weaponised by the apartheid regime, but how centuries of migration and mixing of communities created multi-hyphenated identities and communities like his own that couldn’t be understood in the global north. “‘African’ is not a race,” said Jeppie. “Africa is a continent, a space. It’s not co-terminous with race, language or religion. It is populated by all varieties of languages, religion and ethnic groups.” He says it’s no surprise Mamdani’s identity is too complex to fit neatly into a box on a university application. “‘African’, ‘Asian’, ‘Muslim’ – for us Africans, these are not contradictions at all.”