"The anomaly is best explained by the politics of his father, Mahmood Mamdani. The apple, it seems, did not roll especially far down the postcolonial hillside. Mahmood, professor of government and anthropology at Columbia University, has long styled himself as the left's answer to VS Naipaul. Where the Nobel-winning curmudgeon surveyed postcolonial Africa with disdain, revelling in the wreckage of independence, Mamdani presents a more forgiving view: pathos instead of pity, paradox instead of despair."
"Mamdani's own life, as this combined history and memoir suggests, has been a minor epic of exile and return. Raised in Kampala, he grew up in the insulated world of Uganda's Indian community, living above society rather than in it. His was a landscape of Indian schools, Indian mosques and Indian cricket pitches. Interracial marriage was rare to the point of nonexistent."
Mahmood Mamdani interprets postcolonial failures as the result of structural disadvantages handed down by colonialism, favoring pathos and paradox over despair. He experienced life as a Ugandan Indian raised in a segregated community of schools, mosques and cricket pitches, where interracial marriage was virtually nonexistent. A scholarship to Pittsburgh led to political science and a Harvard doctorate rather than engineering. Returning to Uganda in 1972 coincided with Idi Amin's expulsion order that forced approximately 80,000 south Asians to leave within 90 days, casting Indians as the visible face of colonial rule.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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