I had not known much about Zohran Mamdani’s family who were not in the forefront of his successful campaign for mayor of New York City but his father Mahmood Mamdani is a professor of colonial studies at Columbia University and he was interviewed by Evan Goldstein for The Chronicle of Higher Education after the election.

Long before Mahmood Mamdani’s surname became ubiquitous in national politics, it loomed large in the field of postcolonial studies. In several major books, he explored the enduring effects of colonialism — specifically, how various political and legal statuses, such as “citizen” and “subject” (the title of his 1996 book) explain various inequities and power differentials in postcolonial societies. Last month, Harvard University Press published his new book, Slow Poison. Mamdani tells the story of post-independence Uganda through the lens of two national leaders — Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni — and his own experiences as a scholar at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, in Kampala, and as a member of the country’s minority Asian population.

Mamdani has been on medical leave from Columbia University — “back issues,” he said — though he plans to return to teaching next fall. He does so with trepidation, given some of the provisions of the deal Columbia struck in July with the Trump administration.

For an hour, Mamdani spoke quietly, indulging in long pauses, and discussed the relationship between politics and scholarship, the protests that convulsed Columbia last year, and how the FBI introduced him to the work of Karl Marx.

The elder Mamdani said that he did not want to talk about the mayoral race but was willing to share his views on colonialism and post-colonialism, which in his case had a personal element since he and his family were part of the Asian community in Uganda who were summarily expelled by the brutal dictator Idi Amin in 1972. He said that Amin was a mercenary, a child soldier who was taught to be ruthless and violent by the British, and that his allies while in power were the UK and Israel who were accomplices in his acts of mass murder where he wiped out any opposition.

The whole interview is worth reading as I think it sheds some light on the influences shaping his son as he was growing up. I will just share an amusing anecdote with which the interview begins.

Evan Goldstein: Is it true the FBI first introduced you to Karl Marx?

Mahmood Mamdani: One day there was a knock on the door of my dormitory room at [the University of Pittsburgh], and I open it to these gentlemen in brownish, long coats. One of them says “FBI.” I was so excited because I’d seen this on television. They said they wanted to talk about the march that I had been part of.

Evan Goldstein: This was the civil-rights march in 1965 in Montgomery, Alabama?

Mahmood Mamdani: Yeah, big, big student march. It was organized by SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]. I wasn’t a member of SNCC, but a friend and I were walking opposite the Student Union at Pittsburgh, and we saw SNCC leaders talking about civil rights. And we just had to go in there and listen to them. They said, “Hey, there are buses outside, and we’re going to Montgomery to march.” So we went.

The FBI agents asked if I knew Karl Marx. I said I hadn’t met him. They looked at one another and said, “No, he’s long dead.” It was my turn to be surprised. “Then why are you asking me?” Well, they explained, he believed that rich people’s money should be taxed and distributed to the poor. I said that sounded like a fine idea. The agents eventually decided that I had nothing that would be of interest to them.

It is no surprise that his son became a socialist.