Mahmood and Zohran Mamdani. Two generations. One question: Can power repair injustice?

What the critics say

Slow Poison is Mahmood Mamdani’s firsthand report on the tragic unraveling of his country’s struggle for decolonialisation. (Source: amazon.in)

Reactions have been sharp. In The Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan called Slow Poison “an apologia for Uganda’s Idi Amin, a bloodthirsty tyrant like few others in modern history,” faulting Mamdani for treating Amin’s atrocities as “palatable…in the service of a fledgling post-colonial nation.” Yet Mamdani’s intent, as he explains, is not to excuse but to historicise, to show how colonial patterns of rule survived independence and still shape African states.

A different reading came from Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker, who placed Slow Poison alongside Howard W French’s The Second Emancipation, a study of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. Sanneh called Mamdani’s book an “acerbic sequel” to French’s work. Where French recreates the optimism of the independence era, Mamdani examines the turmoil that followed. Together, they trace the continent’s trajectory from the dream of self-rule to the realities of authoritarianism and economic dependency.

An intellectual legacy

Zohran Mamdani celebrating his primary election victory in New York, joined by his parents. Renowned scholar and Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mira Nair, and his wife, Rama Duwaji. (Reuters)

For Zohran Mamdani, that intellectual legacy is personal. Born in Kampala and raised in New York, he carries a middle name, Kwame, chosen in honor of Nkrumah. His mayoral platform emphasises housing justice, public transit, and economic equality, but observers note echoes of his father’s preoccupation with power and belonging. As the mayoral candidate, he is promising to make “the city work for everyone.”

That convergence of politics and scholarship has become strikingly visible in recent weeks. As Zohran Mamdani faced Islamophobic attacks on the campaign trail, amplified by rivals such as Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa,  his defense of his faith echoes the analytical stance his father once took in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. In that 2004 work, Mahmood Mamdani dismantled the binary that separated “good” from “bad” Muslims in Western political thought.

Two decades later, his son faces that same binary in practice, as a Muslim candidate navigating New York’s political mainstream. The younger Mamdani’s call to reject “the tolerance of indignity” resonates as a lived continuation of his father’s critique of empire, suggesting that for both men, the struggle against prejudice — whether colonial or civic — is inseparable from the project of justice itself.

While his father has published a book re-examining the failures of African Independence, the son is campaigning to reform a 21st century metropolis still struggling with its own inequities. One writes about dismantling colonial hierarchies, the other tries to confront urban ones. Both, in different languages, ask the same question: how power might be used to repair, rather than reproduce, injustice.

References

Mahmood Mamdani, Slow Poison (Belknap Press, 2025);
Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal, Oct 15 2025;
Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker, Oct 6 2025.