{"id":48444,"date":"2026-04-29T00:45:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T00:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/48444\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T00:45:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T00:45:09","slug":"the-mamdani-idea-of-the-british-crown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/48444\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mamdani idea of the British crown"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mayor\u00a0Zohran\u00a0Mamdani\u00a0of New York\u00a0has faced what others might consider awkward moments in office, as when two Islamists, inspired by ISIS,\u00a0tried to immolate\u00a0anti-Muslim\u00a0protesters outside Gracie Mansion.\u00a0He passed it off with aplomb by\u00a0saying<\/a>\u00a0the two bomb-carrying individuals were \u201csuspected of coming here to commit an act of terrorism.\u201d\u00a0In a\u00a0later statement<\/a>\u00a0he acknowledged that the two men had proclaimed \u201ctheir allegiance to ISIS.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That counts for boldness on Mamdani\u2019s part. He is\u00a0considerably more\u00a0comfortable denouncing Israel, defending the \u201cglobalize the intifada\u201d slogan and lamenting anti-Muslim bigotry,\u00a0than he is in acknowledging New York\u2019s history of terror attacks by Islamists.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s\u00a0therefore\u00a0possible\u00a0that when he meets with\u00a0Charles\u00a0III\u00a0and\u00a0Queen\u00a0Camilla\u00a0to lay a wreath at the ceremony for victims of the 9\/11 atrocity,\u00a0the\u00a0Mayor\u00a0might spare a few compassionate thoughts for the\u00a019\u00a0men who gave their lives so that others might die. But if\u00a0so,\u00a0he will be savvy enough to admire them\u00a0in\u00a0camera. We New Yorkers are still a bit sore on the subject, and Mohamed Atta and his\u00a0buddies\u00a0are not, we think, on the right side of history.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But\u00a0perhaps Zohran\u00a0catches\u00a0our mood. Asked by a reporter about his impending meeting with King Charles, he emphasized<\/a>\u00a0that he would be attending the public wreath-laying \u201calongside a number of other elected officials\u201d\u00a0to \u201cpay tribute to the more than 3,000 people who were killed in the horrific terror attacks of September 11, and that will be the extent of my meeting with the King.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

So\u00a0is he meeting the King or just standing somewhere in the King\u2019s proximity?\u00a0Does seeing the King\u00a0across\u00a0the way count?\u00a0That\u2019s\u00a0one way to dampen any awkwardness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The underlying awkwardness has a lot to do with Zohran\u2019s father,\u00a0Mahmood Mamdani, who has served\u00a0as\u202fthe Herbert Lehman\u00a0professor of Government and a professor of anthropology, political science, and African studies at Columbia University. Mahmood is a prolific scholar who\u00a0has published more than a dozen books and\u00a0numerous\u00a0essays.\u00a0I will risk an overly terse summary of his work,\u00a0nearly all\u00a0of which circles a single theme: everything\u00a0bad that has happened in modern Africa is the result of outsiders intervening.\u00a0And high up on list of these nefarious outsiders is Britain.<\/p>\n

The gravamen of this\u00a0indictment\u00a0was the instillation of Idi Amin, who seized power in Uganda in\u00a01971\u00a0and\u00a0the following year\u00a0expelled most of the South Asian Indians in the country.\u00a0The British had originally recruited 32,000 Indians in the Punjab in 1895-1896 to\u00a0help build the Uganda Railway.\u00a0Some stayed and prospered and other Indian immigrants followed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mahmood Mamdani\u00a0was born in Bombay in 1946 but raised by his Muslim family mostly in Uganda.\u00a0Idi Amin\u2019s expulsion of the Indians from Uganda when he was twenty-six was a blow that has shaped his life ever since.\u00a0He recounts his experience in his\u00a02025\u00a0memoir\u00a0Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State<\/a>.\u00a0The book is worth reading for several reasons, not least of which is the light it sheds on the upbringing of Mahmood\u2019s son Zohran, who seems to have fully absorbed his father\u2019s disdain for Britain and Israel.<\/p>\n

Those are the nations that Mahmood chiefly blames for Amin seizing power. The British were unhappy with Milton\u00a0Obate, who had overthrown his predecessor in 1966 and\u00a0established\u00a0a one-party dictatorship, but whose term had been a chaotic lunge into socialism and tribal conflict. Idi Amin, who had\u00a0served in the British colonial army as an assistant cook in 1946 and seen some action in the British attempt to put down the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya in the\u00a01950s and\u00a0trained in Israel as a paratrooper.\u00a0Obate\u00a0named him\u00a0chief\u00a0of the army and air force. The British and the Americans mistook Amin as a potential stabilizing force in country that was having\u00a0a hard time\u00a0finding its footing in the post-colonial era.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They could not have been more mistaken.\u00a0Amin\u00a0emerged\u00a0as a bizarre and bloodthirsty tyrant who surely serves his place in post-colonial African history in the highly competitive ranking of monstrous\u00a0despots.\u00a0Mahmood, however, does not wish to Amin to be written down as an African phenomenon. In a recent\u00a0interview<\/a>\u00a0on Al Jazeera,\u00a0Mahmood explains that:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0Amin was a state terrorist in the service of the British. When he came to power in Uganda Amin\u2019s worst killings were done in the first year after his coup when his advisors were British and Israelis. And the British and the Israelis had slight disagreement on how they should go about\u00a0consolidating\u00a0the coup.\u00a0 And the Israelis were far more compelling in their argument that really you\u00a0have to\u00a0kill not just\u00a0Obate\u00a0but his entire cohort, all those who\u00a0comprise\u00a0his commanders, his military elite, because if you\u00a0don\u2019t, the reckoning will be around the corner. The worst killings that Amin did he did under the British\u00a0and the\u00a0Israelis.<\/p>\n

It is no wonder that\u00a0Mahmood\u00a0has spent his seeking to fix the blame. How could things have gone so wrong?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u00a0was\u00a0British-Israeli\u00a0Machiavellian thuggery that Mahmood now conjures for Al Jazeera listeners.\u00a0But in his books Mahmood tends to\u00a0argue\u00a0a more devious route to\u00a0Africa\u2019s woes.\u00a0In a nutshell: \u201cindirect rule.\u201d This was the British colonial policy of recognizing local indigenous leaders and entrusting them with the responsibility of keeping order, directing public\u00a0works\u00a0and raising (modest) taxes.\u00a0But as Mahmood sees it, indirect rule promoted ethnic division and rivalry and undermined the natural evolution of social unity. Mahmood\u2019s fullest exposition of this thesis is his\u00a02012 book,\u00a0Define and Rule:\u00a0Native as\u00a0Political\u00a0identity. But the idea is the throughline for his oeuvre, as for instance his 1996 book,\u00a0Citizen\u00a0and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism.<\/p>\n

I will hand it to Mahmood that \u201clate colonialism\u201d is an ingenious turn of phrase. It pays homage to the Marxist invective of \u201clate capitalism\u201d and mashes it up with rhetoric of \u201cpost-colonial theory.\u201d\u00a0Plainly this man deserved his seat of honor at Columbia University\u00a0where\u00a0finding new ways to excoriate the oppressors is academic gold.<\/p>\n

Through Mahmood\u2019s eyes, whenever\u00a0bad things\u00a0have happened in Africa, Britain<\/a>\u00a0is always\u00a0somehow to blame. When the\u00a0civil war\u00a0among native peoples\u00a0in\u00a0the Darfur region of\u00a0Sudan\u00a0expanded into\u00a0widespread slaughter by the country\u2019s Arab government, Mahmood hastened to explain that\u00a0the deep cause was British colonialism, which had \u201cartificially tribalized\u201d the population.\u00a0This is one of Mahmood\u2019s theses in his 2010 book,\u00a0Saviors\u00a0and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and\u00a0the War\u00a0on Terror.\u00a0It is\u00a0probably worth\u00a0noting that Britain granted independence to Sudan in January 1956, and the hostilities in Darfur broke out 47 years later, in February 2003.\u00a0Before they left, the\u00a0British planted those seeds of tribal warfare deep, and\u00a0nearly half\u00a0a century later they bore fruit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why exactly\u00a0did\u00a0perfidious\u00a0Albion do this to Africa<\/a>?\u00a0I\u00a0have\u00a0recently been studying Mahmood\u2019s works but have not yet deciphered this. Inducing tribal conflict was, for a time a form of divide and conquer that allowed the British to\u00a0maintain\u00a0racial despotism. But\u00a0apparently\u00a0when they concluded that Empire\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0worth the effort, they left the genie of racial despotism behind. Otherwise, Africa would be a thriving and happy place, where the intermingling of Indians from the subcontinent would have simply enhance the joyous diversity.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

He was discouraged, however, by the 1994\u00a0Rwandan\u00a0genocide. His 2001 book,\u00a0When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda<\/a>\u00a0required\u00a0some trimming of his concept of the inherent benevolence of African peoples. But he succeeded in tracing this disaster too to the legacy of colonialism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I would not want to portray Mahmood\u2019s antipathy as entirely a matter of his views of European colonialism. He plainly has an abundance of enmity for Israel and the United States as well, whose \u201ccolonialism\u201d is mostly metaphoric. And he devoted one whole book,\u00a02004\u2019s\u00a0Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror,\u00a0to denouncing the American \u201cWar on Terrorism,\u201d with nary a word on the British.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What,\u00a0if anything does this have to do with Zohran\u2019s almost\u00a0possible meeting\u00a0with King Charles?\u00a0Perhaps nothing\u00a0at\u00a0all. I would wager that Zohran, growing up in the\u00a0house\u00a0Mahmood, has not only a keen understanding of his father\u2019s views but a deep commitment to most of them. We know this from Zohran\u2019s own open disdain for Israel and his denunciations of what he takes as colonialism. Are his grievances against England as raw as his father\u2019s?\u00a0Hard to say, but\u00a0as\u00a0the\u00a0New York Times<\/a>\u00a0points out,\u00a0\u201cThe king was born in Buckingham Palace, and he is the leader of a monarchy that was at one point the world\u2019s largest colonial power.\u201d\u00a0And Zohran Mamdani might be described as America\u2019s young prince of self-styled \u201cResistance.\u201d\u00a0Two would mix as well as\u00a0vintage wine and Red Bull.<\/p>\n

Mahmood speaking\u00a0on\u00a0Democracy Now<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0his son\u2019s electoral victory\u00a0observed,\u00a0\u201cBeing a minority you are never fully part of society.\u201d\u00a0Zohran\u00a0as the happy outsider installed in one of the most inside jobs in the\u00a0nation\u00a0may enjoy snubbing the king of England\u00a0\u2013\u00a0or vice versa.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor\u00a0Zohran\u00a0Mamdani\u00a0of New York\u00a0has faced what others might consider awkward moments in office, as when two Islamists, inspired by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48445,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[148],"tags":[27864,28789,30196,1419,553],"class_list":["post-48444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-zohran-mamdani","tag-british-royal-family","tag-charles-iii","tag-mahmood-mamdani","tag-new-york","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116485235183089853","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}