02 ISSUE IX
NOVEMBER 2025
NOVEMBER 2025
The Ugandan Lesson
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for an affordable, multiracial New York draws on East African leftist traditions and lessons from the expulsion of Asians from Uganda in the early 1970s to guide his politics.
By Anneeth Kaur Hundle
I’ve argued elsewhere that Zohran Mamdani, at the time of writing, New York City’s mayor-elect, has primarily been understood as South Asian and Muslim, but his Asian African identity, as well as his Ugandan heritage, has been less legible, especially, and not surprisingly, in the US.
Image by GETTY Images.
By now, we know a bit more about Zohran’s Ugandan Asian heritage from his paternal line: his paternal ancestors were Gujarati merchants who arrived in coastal East Africa approximately 200 years ago. As I argue in my book, INSECURITIES OF EXPULSION, we think about Asian or Indian presence in East Africa and Uganda, especially, we typically associate Uganda with the military dictatorship of Idi Amin and his expulsion of the entire Uganda Asian community in 1972.
But what’s less evident is that there were historical attempts to both imagine and build something like a political and economic system of multiracial democratic socialism–socialism in the sense of ownership of the means of production among workers and peasants–in postcolonial Uganda. Of course, it was not achieved. But it is worth taking stock of what did happen, and to consider how imaginaries and practices of democratic socialism (that are still multiracial) might persist and might even be global or transnational.
Of course, in postcolonial contexts, any project of democratic socialism coincides with decolonization—undoing colonial capitalism and the system of racial exploitation that accompanied it. What made the situation in postcolonial Uganda unique was that the British imperialists never developed it into a full-fledged settler colony with a European settler class. I’m simplifying the colonization of diverse groups of Indians and Africans greatly here, but I’ll note that it was mostly Indian (Gujarati) merchants who were incorporated into an “intermediary” urban class that purchased and traded agricultural products from laboring African peasants. By independence, and based on legally defined political identities, there was enormous racial and class disparity between the majoritarian Black African and minority Asian community, leading to racial tensions.
Ideally, decolonization plus democratic socialism would have required: fending off the forces of neocolonialism and imperialist intervention, introducing Africanization and socialist reforms to ensure proper access to racially-defined job opportunities and wealth redistribution, investing in home-grown cooperative and collectivization schemes and the social welfare functions of the state, and developing a multiracial notion of citizenship that would dispense of fixed racialized notions of indigenous and immigrant identities and become inclusive of Asians in a Ugandan or African identity.
Both European and later American imperialism and neocolonialism continued to profoundly impact Uganda’s postcolonial trajectory. The first Ugandan President, Milton Obote, introduced some left-leaning political and economic reforms but was unable to unify diverse political interests in the new nation. He eventually enacted emergency powers, suspended the constitution, deposed the Kabaka of the Buganda Kingdom and built up the military to maintain power. With imperialist support, the stage was set for Idi Amin’s 1971 military coup and a more fully-fledged project of postcolonial fascism, including the expulsion of the Asians. Amin’s anti-Asian rhetoric was wildly popular: he accused the Asians of exploiting Africans, of failing to integrate with Africans, and even of failing to intermarry with Africans. Amin directed what remained of capitalist production and its profits (and expropriated Asian property and assets) back to the state, military and businessmen, rather than the common Ugandan peasant or worker.
A form of Pan-Africanist politics based on fixed and essentialist notions of Blackness, African indigeneity, and nativist nationalism became dominant.
Coming to Yoweri Museveni and the National Resistance Movement (NRM), which have governed Uganda since 1986: there were important experiments in forming a new Constitution and civilian government, socialist and Pan-Africanist experimentation, and democratization. But what followed was the neo-imperialist introduction of structural adjustment programs in Uganda, the NRM’s embrace of neoliberal reforms, increasing militarism, and yet again, the creation of another authoritarian and repressive regime.
What is significant about Museveni and the NRM is that they invited Ugandan Asians to repossess their property and resettle, joining the NRM in a project of bringing peace, prosperity and development to Ugandans. But Asians returned as economic citizens, and not as political citizens. I understand this as a politics of racial non-reconciliation, a kind of strategic economic arrangement to woo private business interests in the name of economic development and the maintenance of political power.
Still, many Ugandan Asians continue to stake a political claim to their Ugandan-ness. When I was at Makerere University from 2013 to 2015, I worked with Mahmood Mamdani (Zohran’s father) to assist him with getting an organization called the Asian African Association off the ground. The point of the organization was for its membership (South Asians living in Uganda and invested in having a future in Ugandan society) to integrate lessons learned from the expulsion—particularly those about social integration with Africans. I recall that Zohran attended one of our meetings. He offered an excellent analysis of the ways that racial tensions in Uganda were still connected to crony capitalism and class politics, especially collusions between key Ugandan Asian businessmen and the NRM. This was still prior to the rise of popular musician and political leader Bobi Wine, who has inspired Ugandan youth to resist Museveni and the NRM through the populist “People Power” movement and now National Unity Platform political party.
In the years since, Museveni has won yet another election and state resources continue to be expended on militarizing state and society, the courting of foreign investors to privatize land and resources, repressing political dissidents, and criminalizing Ugandans involved in opposition parties and movements. Proletarian, bread-and-butter struggles also continue, as do struggles for women’s and LGBT rights, and even anti-police brutality protests inspired by the global and Pan-Africanist mobilities of Black Lives Matter. I would argue that even though the NRM has co-opted the language of African liberation, Pan-Africanist empowerment and even Bandung-era Afro-Asianism, an imaginary of actual-existing African socialism and democracy persists in Uganda and among those in exile--even if multiracialism remains in question.
Zohran’s political campaign to make New York City an affordable city—across the color line—is rooted in both the leftist and multiracial imaginaries of his father’s generation of East African intellectuals and political activists, as well as in lessons learned from the Ugandan Asian expulsion. Namely, this is a refusal to be completely victimized by the expulsion, but to take the roots of populist anti-Asianism – Indian or Asian racial and class privilege – in Ugandan society, seriously. We can see this in the very effective ways he has built power through a massive multi-racial volunteer base, as well as grassroots solidarity with unions and diverse community-based organizations with varying political interests. We can contrast the implicit anti-authoritarian politics of Zohran’s campaign with the politics of someone like Kash Patel, the current FBI director in the Trump administration. Patel is also of Ugandan Asian and Gujarati descent, but sees South Asian Americans as victims of reverse racism in the US, and as model minorities. He likely sees Ugandan Asians as uncomplicated victims of Idi Amin’s expulsion, although I haven’t had a chance to interview him yet! He even has allegiances to Hindu nationalism in India and among the South Asian diaspora, which propagates anti-Blackness and hate against religious minorities.
Beyond New York City and the United States, Mamdani’s campaign has the power to resonate globally—an oppositional populist and pragmatic force against many global projects of ethnoreligious supremacy, nativist nationalism and neoliberal capitalist authoritarianism—from India to Uganda. His campaign might even find its way back to Uganda, where popular imaginaries of actually-existing decolonization and democratization persist despite different sources of neo-imperialism and state violence. They are especially sustained by popular culture in the form of music, poetry, dance, fashion—the world of aesthetics and performance. So we might not yet know what the lived practice of democratic socialism means substantively , whether in New York City or Kampala, but we are starting to experience it in our hearts and bodies. It feels like the joyful and creative practices of co-resistance that happen when people with unequal histories of colonial, racial and capitalist exploitation come together to begin forging a common vision and a possible shared future.
Anneeth Kaur Hundle is AN Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.