During a lively conversation among my small circle of friends about the implications of the president’s victory for US president Donald Trump and his Republican Party, one of them posed a question that made us think about our own country and its politics.
“Had Mamdani stood for mayor of, for argument’s sake, Johannesburg, would we have accepted him even though he was not born in this country?” the friend asked.
Mamdani, for those who may have missed the big story, is a Ugandan-born young politician who, this past week, was elected the next mayor of New York City despite strong opposition from Trump and some of the US’s prominent billionaires who poured millions of dollars into television commercials and other forms of advertising in a bid to stop him.
He represents all that the right-wing-leaning US political establishment seemingly fears. He calls himself a democratic socialist, is Muslim and was born in Kampala, an African city.
His campaign, which had at its core the call to make New York City more affordable to ordinary residents, has had the super-rich fearing they are about to be super-taxed.
Hence the hysterical anti-Mamdani adverts and statements which sought to portray him as both a die-hard communist and a religious fundamentalist who was out to destroy the “free world’s greatest city”, New York.
So even though the 34-year-old has lived in New York since he was seven and is a fully fledged US citizen, there were those who labelled him a foreigner who has no business entering that country’s politics, let alone wanting to be mayor of the Big Apple.
Despite all these odds, which included that country’s long history of anti-socialist and anti-Muslim propaganda, Mamdani secured a comfortable victory, which many see as representing a huge rejection of Trump’s brand of politics in that country’s most consequential city.
After leaving Kampala, and before moving to New York, Mamdani and his parents – renowned academic Mahmood Mamdani, his father, and filmmaker Mira Nair, his mother – settled briefly in Cape Town, where his father worked as a University of Cape Town professor.
It wasn’t a happy stay for Mamdani senior at a university that, in the mid-1990s, was still struggling to come to terms with the fact that a university in SA should, by definition, be an African institution.
What if Mamdani senior’s experience here had been so pleasant that he decided to stay and raise his family as a South African? Would we have accepted Mamdani’s forays into politics and enthusiastically celebrated his victory in the campaign for mayor?
Implicit in my friend’s question is the accusation that SA has grown increasingly unwelcoming of foreign-born nationals, if not downright xenophobic.
He raised the question in the context of the ongoing public debates about undocumented immigrants and their right, or lack thereof, to access public health facilities, schools and other government services.
He pointed to incidents in parliament where representatives of academic institutions were hounded for having foreign nationals among their staff and said this indicated a growing intolerance towards foreigners, whether they are here legally or not.
But the other friends in the group objected, pointing to a long list of prominent individuals in history – be they in politics, sports, entertainment and elsewhere – who settled in the country and became accepted as some of SA’s finest sons and daughters.
Yet, even with that rich history, there is no denying that a foreign-born national today would find it harder to partake in our politics – or that of any other country he or she does not come from – than the likes of unionist Clements Kadalie (born in present-day Malawi) and ANC president Chief Albert Luthuli (born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe) found in the 1920s and 1950s, respectively.
And this is not just a South African phenomenon. As the world economy struggles to distribute wealth more evenly, the poor in different countries find themselves competing with one another for scarce job opportunities and limited public services. This situation is then manipulated by political entrepreneurs who exploit such divisions to attract votes through selling hatred and fear to different segments of society.
As we have witnessed it over and over again, that type of divisive politics may deliver votes for the politicians but seldom brings tangible benefits to the poor. Just look at Trump’s America – all the anti-immigrant rhetoric, the excessively high tariffs for trading partners and other “Americans first” policies have not delivered for the average working-class American family.
Hence, to me, instead of speculating whether Mamdani would have been voted mayor had he stood for elections in one of our cities, what we should be doing is to study his politics closely. His politics suggest a viable alternative to the politics of divisions that have become synonymous with Trump’s America. They suggest a world that welcomes and accepts the contribution of all towards a society’s development and welfare, as long as all those seeking to contribute abide by that society’s laws and rules.
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