There is no gainsaying the fact there is something – a lot, even – wrong with politics in America. In this sense, Zohran’s victory in his party’s primary election is as much a symptom as it is a cause of this malady. A Democratic Socialist, he continues to espouse views that resonate with the left of his party, but may have led to the alienation of working class voters nationally that underpinned Mr Trump’s two victories at the presidential polls.
Zohran Kwame Mamdani’s victory in the primary election to pick the Democratic Party’s candidate for New York’s mayor in elections to be held in November, has been extensively parsed for its significance. The unusual circumstances of politics in the US, today, made the level of interest in the outcome of the primary election inevitable. The new depths to which politics in the world’s leading economy now reach, make the discerning and correct interpretation of trends there, at least for the Democratic Party, an existential obligation.
Yet, of the many possible narratives around the surprise candidate, one has, thus far, been left to dry. On 4 August, 1972, Idi Amin Dada, the buffoon who was then Uganda’s head of state, announced that all non-citizen Asians (about 50,000 to 80,000) had 90 days to leave the East African country. Most South Asians (Pakistanis and Indians, largely) had arrived East Africa as indentured labourers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As forced labour, they helped build much of the sub-continent’s infrastructure. And after that, much of its trade, services, and manufacturing activity.
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The Amin government was certain that the only reason that an ethnic group, making up about 1 per cent of his country’s population, could control the “commanding heights” of the economy, was because it was “sabotaging” Uganda. Farther, as holdovers of colonial rule, did hidden advantages from when Uganda was dominated by British colonialists not explain this sub-groups’ exceptional success? Then again, what better mantra than a “Uganda for Ugandans” to rally the nativist political base just after independence, and as the new country struggled to get a handle on its myriad challenges? Uganda went on to take over the businesses of the departing “saboteurs,” handing them over to Amin’s über-patriotic supporters and military officers.
This is where the narrative takes a fork in the road. Down one path went the old Asian businesses, recently taken over by the new would-be Ugandan middle class, and along with them, what remained of the Ugandan economy. Up another, no less difficult path, went the expelled Asians – to the United Kingdom, Canada, India, etc. And, in those places, we now have overwhelming evidence of the industry of this folk. Most (including, Mahmood Mamdani – Zohran’s father – who was conducting his doctoral research as a teaching assistant in Makerere University before ending up in a refugee camp in the United Kingdom in early November 1972, after Amin’s decree) did not need Uganda to go on to greater heights.
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Like the proverbial lizard that finds accommodation only after the wall yawns, President Donald Trump has thrived in this wedge. Come November, this might just count sufficiently in Zohran’s loss of the mayoral office. But even his victory will not be enough consolation for those who worry that the Trump presidency may inflict irreparable damage on the US.
Did Uganda, on the other hand, need them? This query could be posed much differently. Would Uganda have benefited from better management of its South Asian population in the 1970s? Without any question, yes. The trajectory of Zohran and other scions of the East African diaspora argues no less. There is a strong case for claiming that these successes required a specific nutritive medium – political, social, economic, and cultural – that was available in the East African Asians’ places of exile, and which most African countries are still struggling to find, more than half-a-century after the Ugandan exile.
This latter argument, incidentally, is the one underlined by discussions in the United States of America around Zohran’s victory. There is a lot about politics in the US today that reminds one of Uganda in the early 1970s. Donald Trump’s buffoonery, for one, simply rivals Idi Amin’s. The American president may never bestow on himself the honorific, “Conqueror of the British Empire”, as did Amin. But that is only because Britain’s cachet no longer has that fine ring to it. Donald Trump, though, has tried to ride roughshod on non-Americans, as apocryphal tales of Idi Amin suggests he did to the few UK subjects he could find in Uganda on his way to granting himself that honour.
What to make of Zohran’s victory, then? There is no gainsaying the fact there is something – a lot, even – wrong with politics in America. In this sense, Zohran’s victory in his party’s primary election is as much a symptom as it is a cause of this malady. A Democratic Socialist, he continues to espouse views that resonate with the left of his party, but may have led to the alienation of working class voters nationally that underpinned Mr Trump’s two victories at the presidential polls. Andrew Mark Cuomo, the losing politician in the primary, may not exactly reek of Tammany Hall politics, but his endorsement by Democratic Party grandees, in spite of the cloudy circumstance under which he left office as governor of New York in 2021, underlines the extent to which urban machine politics and the patronage systems that it breeds could drive a wedge between a party and its electorate.
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Like the proverbial lizard that finds accommodation only after the wall yawns, President Donald Trump has thrived in this wedge. Come November, this might just count sufficiently in Zohran’s loss of the mayoral office. But even his victory will not be enough consolation for those who worry that the Trump presidency may inflict irreparable damage on the US.
Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.
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