The New Yorker:

Mahmood Mamdani, Zohran’s father, just published his twelfth book. The subject? Dictators.

By Jake Offenhartz

On a recent Thursday, the eve of Zohran Mamdani’s first meeting with President Donald Trump, the Mayor-elect stopped by a reading at Book Culture, near Columbia University. The subject of the book was dictators. The author: his dad, Mahmood Mamdani, a leading scholar in the field of post-colonial studies. The elder Mamdani, who wore a maroon scarf looped over a dark blazer, was describing his firsthand experience with authoritarian rule, in Uganda. “Power corrupts, to different degrees,” he said, drawing laughs from the crowd of about eighty. “You have to be on your watch, every minute and every second.” Heads tilted toward the younger Mamdani, who sat on a folding chair in the front row, suited and smiling. “That’s a good place to end it,” the moderator suggested. “With a little warning to the room.” The politician, who had an early flight to D.C. in the morning, greeted a handful of well-wishers, then slipped out quietly.

Mahmood Mamdani, who is seventy-nine, was also having a busy month. Three weeks before his son’s election victory, he released his twelfth book, “Slow Poison,” a political history of Uganda under two dictators, Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni. The book also traces his own upbringing, expulsion, and eventual return to Uganda. “Both Mira and Zohran insisted I insert myself as a character,” he said, referring to his wife, the filmmaker Mira Nair. “I wasn’t totally convinced.” As for the book’s timing, “that is totally accidental,” he said. “I’ve been working on this for ten years.”

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