Mahmood Mamdani

He received a scholarship along with 26 other Ugandan students to study in the United States. He was part of the 1963 group of the Kennedy Airlift, a scholarship program that brought hundreds of East Africans to universities in the United States and Canada between 1959 and 1963. The scholarships were part of the independence gift that the new nation had received. Mamdani joined the University of Pittsburgh in 1963 and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in political science in 1967.

He then joined The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and graduated in 1968 with a Master of Arts in political science and Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy in 1969. He attained his Doctor of Philosophy in government from Harvard University in 1974. His thesis was titled Politics and Class Formation in Uganda.

Mamdani returned to Uganda in early 1972 and joined Makerere University as a teaching assistant at the same time conducting his doctoral research; only to be expelled later that year by Idi Amin due to his ethnicity. He left Uganda for a refugee camp in the United Kingdom in early November just as the three-month deadline was approaching for people of Asian heritage to leave the country.

He left England in mid-1973 after being recruited to the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. In Dar es Salaam, he completed writing his thesis and was active with anti-Amin groups. In 1979, he attended the Moshi Conference as an observer and returned to Uganda after Amin was overthrown following the Uganda–Tanzania War as a Frontier Interne of the World Council of Churches. He was posted with the Church of Uganda offices in Mengo and was assigned to research the former regime's foreign relations. His report was published as a book: Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda.

In 1984, while attending a conference in Dakar, Senegal, he became stateless after his citizenship was withdrawn by the government under Milton Obote due to his criticism of its policies. He returned to Dar es Salaam and was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor for the spring semester in 1986. After Obote was deposed for the second time, Mamdani once again returned to Uganda in June 1986. He was the founding director of the Centre for Basic Research (CBR), Uganda's first research non-governmental organisation from 1987 to 2006.

He is married to Mira Nair, the Indian film director and producer. They met in Kampala, Uganda, in 1989 when Nair was researching for her film, Mississippi Masala. She had read his book The Myth of Population Control while an undergraduate at university and From Citizen to Refugee just before their meeting. They married in 1991 and have a son, Zohran Mamdani, who is running for NY State Assembly in Queens, NY in 2020.

In 1996, he was appointed as the inaugural holder of the AC Jordan chair of African studies at the University of Cape Town. He left after having disagreements with the administration on his draft syllabus of a foundation course on Africa called "Problematizing Africa". This was dubbed the "Mamdani Affair". From 1998 to 2002, he served as president of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. In December 2001, he gave a speech on "Making Sense of Violence in Postcolonial Africa" at the Nobel Centennial Symposia in Oslo, Norway.

In 2008, in an open online poll, Mamdani was voted as the ninth "top public intellectual" in the world on the list of Top 100 Public Intellectuals by Prospect Magazine (UK) and Foreign Policy (US). His essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, among other journals.

In July 2017, Mamdani was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.