In today’s political landscape, few figures embody the fusion of imported radicalism and homegrown extremism more vividly than Zohran Mamdani.

His rise is not an isolated phenomenon. It’s the product of a layered history that stretches from the British Empire’s colonial machinations in East Africa to the ideological battleground of New York City. Understanding his ideological roots reveals not only where this movement came from but where it may be heading.

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The story begins in colonial Uganda, where the British cemented their rule by granting privileged status to Indian merchant communities, including Mamdani’s ancestors. They served as intermediaries between imperial rulers and native Africans, a structure that divided society into privileged urban elites and disenfranchised rural subjects.

Mahmood Mamdani, Zohran’s father, was born in 1946 in Bombay to Gujarati Muslim parents who belonged to this colonial-era trading elite. Raised in Kampala, he grew up surrounded by both the privileges and tensions of this imperial arrangement.

When Uganda gained independence in 1962, the colonial system’s ethnic hierarchies persisted, laying the groundwork for instability. A decade later, this tension exploded when Idi Amin expelled 80,000 Asians, including the Mamdani family, confiscating their property and forcing them into exile.

In 1973, Mahmood chronicled this experience in his memoir From Citizen to Refugee, portraying the expulsion as both traumatic and historically inevitable—a reckoning with the legacy of colonial intermediaries. The family’s displacement became a defining element of its identity, planting seeds of grievance and radical critique that would shape future generations.

Mahmood Mamdani responded to exile not by retreating but by turning his experience into a sustained critique of Western civilization. He returned to Uganda in 1986 to challenge “Eurocentric” academic structures, working to dismantle what he viewed as lingering colonial intellectual dominance.

Zohran was born in Kampala in 1991 into a household steeped in anti-colonial discourse, his middle name honoring Kwame Nkrumah, the pan-African revolutionary.

In 1996, Mahmood published Citizen and Subject, a purported analysis of how indirect........

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