By R.W. Johnson
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoralty race has been enthusiastically greeted by South African lefties on the rather slender grounds that Mamdani spent a few years in Cape Town – and because they would like to able to vote for someone like him locally. Imran Buccus went so far as to say it was inspirational to see leaders like Brazil’s Lula (actually Luiz Lula da Silva) and the UK’s Jeremy Corbyn and that South Africa needed role models like that.
This was rather curious: Lula went to jail for corruption after his first presidential term and Corbyn has been expelled from the Labour Party for anti-semitism but perhaps our local Left takes such things in its stride. Meanwhile, of course, Mamdani is being heralded by some as the future of the US Democratic Party, a sort of antidote to Donald Trump.
In fact this is all rather naive. New York city is overwhelmingly Democratic, so much so that Republican candidates are usually no-hopers there. This enables Democrats of the Bernie Sanders/Alexandra Occasio-Cortez wing of the party to get elected there. But for the Democrats to have any hope nationally they need to look to far more centrist candidates who are competitive even in states won by Trump. And having just watched two female candidates (Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris) get beaten by Trump, the Democrats are in no mood to take risks with marginal candidates of any kind.
And Mamdani is certainly marginal in that sense. He’s a Muslim and a pretty recent immigrant to America. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a Ugandan Asian of radical views. While a professor at UCT he was regarded by many as an anti-white racist and he certainly clashed with his white colleagues whom he accused of conducting “Bantu Studies”.
In some of his articles he wrote strongly in support of Robert Mugabe’s so-called “land reform” programme (ie. the seizure of white-owned farms), although the Zimbabwean economy has never recovered from that disaster. His migration to the land of the mighty dollar was greeted with cynicism by some.
Meanwhile, the question is whether Zohran Mamdani can make a success of his mayoralty. Despite his sweeping electoral success, the odds are rather against him. For a start many of his election promises really depend on whether the New York Governor, Kathy Hochul, is willing to give a green light to them. Hochul is much more centrist than Mamdani and she is also electorally quite vulnerable, so she will be extremely cautious about going along with “socialist” initiatives of any kind. She has to worry about the often conservative voters of up-state New York, which Mamdani doesn’t.
Moreover, Mamdani enthusiasts seem to have forgotten that New York has recently had the experience of a mayor from the radical Left, Bill de Blasio, and that did not go well at all. But de Blasio started with the same blaze of fashionable publicity as Mamdani. He had had a successful career in New York – he had been the city’s Public Advocate – and was endorsed by Hollywood personalities like Alec Baldwin, Sarah Jessica Parker, Susan Sarandon and Harry Belafonte, and he was sworn into office in 2014 by Bill Clinton, no less. De Blasio’s programme was very similar to Mamdani’s – he bewailed “the tale of two cities” in New York and proposed to tax the rich a lot more in order to redistribute to the poor.
De Blasio had fewer vulnerabilities than Mamdani. He was a New Yorker through and through, he was careful to keep onside with the Jewish community, attacking BDS and the Muslim Congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, for anti-semitism, and he spoke Italian, which that community liked. But he quoted Marx and Che Guevara, which went down poorly with many Hispanics, as did the fact that he and his then wife had honeymooned in Cuba. The fact that his wife was black went down well with Afro-Americans.
De Blasio had campaigned on a promise to stop the police using stop-and-frisk, though the police union insisted that this policy was crucial to containing crime. In office de Blasio also diverted some of the police budget to other matters and made critical remarks about the police. When two policemen were killed, the police union blamed de Blasio and when he attended the funeral all the policemen present turned their backs on him. This recurred again on later occasions. Meanwhile he had attracted criticism for handing his wife several high profile city jobs, though she had not been elected to anything. He also received criticism for not clearing snow rapidly enough and for mishandling the Covid-19 epidemic.
De Blasio then decided to run for President while still mayor. This was disastrous. Many polls actually gave him 0% and the City handed him a bill for $475,000 for costs of his campaign charged to the City. He then withdrew from the presidential race but ran for Congress instead – but his polls remained at rock bottom. Ultimately he withdrew saying he was finished with electoral politics, though it would be fairer to say that electoral politics was finished with him.
Mamdani too has made promises which have incurred the opposition of the police union. One lesson of de Blasio is that it is very hard for a New York mayor to succeed if the police distrust or dislike him. If, in addition, as is the case with Mamdani, he is distrusted by much of the Jewish community and the business community, it is all but impossible to imagine that he might succeed.
However, let us return to the question of whether Mamdani or someone like him could succeed in South African politics. Imran Buccus assumes that such a person would have a career on the Left but that it unlikely. Both the MKP and EFF are authoritarian parties with leaders who cannot be displaced. Neither of them have any Indians in leading positions, both of them are extremely corrupt and neither allows much, if any, space for democratic debate. In addition the MKP is openly against constitutional government and wants to install traditional African leaders in positions of power. Neither is a home for any democratic socialist.
What then of the ANC ? During the struggle there was a sprinkling of influential Indians in Congress ranks. Many of them, like Mac Maharaj and the Pahads, were Communists. But once the ANC returned from exile it rapidly became clear that while the ANC might retain places for a few “historic” Indian members, it had no welcome at all for Indians who now wished to clamber aboard. It was pathetic to see the results in Durban, where I was at the time. There were many politicised Indians who had played prominent roles in the Natal Indian Congress and the UDF. They were often far better educated than their African peers and many of them found it easy to visualise themselves as cabinet ministers under the new dispensation. Jerry Coovadia, for example, was widely touted as a minister of health, while Farouk Meer was mentioned in connection with several ministries. They all quickly found the door slammed in their face. They were astounded, deeply disappointed and very hurt.
I remember discussing the situation with my former student, Kumi Naidoo. Kumi was quite able, had been active in the struggle, and had doubtless returned to South Africa with hopes of a political career too. He pointed out that the Indian community was at its largest and most powerful in KwaZulu-Natal but even in that province there were virtually no Indians in front rank positions in either the ANC or IFP. There had been a closing of ranks and the Indians had been cold shouldered.
This should not have been a surprise. The ANC is and always has been, an African nationalist party. Moreover, as it got closer to power there were more and more ambitious Africans pressing for positions – and they were little inclined to make way for Indians, perhaps particularly not in KwaZulu-Natal where the scars of 1949 never quite fade away. It has, of course, always been politically incorrect within the ANC to admit the reality of Indian-African divisions – the ANC liked to believe this was all due to white manipulation. But anyone who has lived or grown up in KwaZulu-Natal knows better than that.
Only one Indian politician was smart enough to quit the NIC and declare that the time for ethnically defined political associations was over. This was Mewa Ramgobin who, as a result, became an ANC MP. I had known Mewa since we were students together and knew him as an exceptionally ambitious and conceited man. He was certainly not content to remain a humble MP. But to meet with him in Parliament was to be part of a hilarious charade. Each time a minister passed nearby Mewa would fall into the most abject supplication, pouring out compliments and praise. Then, as the minister passed by, he would revert to his normal furious dismissal of all the ANC ministers as blockheads far below his own level. It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that Mewa never rose beyond the MP level. Yet in his comic opera way he embodied all the contradictions of the Indian community.
The other striking case was Frene Ginwala whom I had known in Oxford and who was one of the most powerful – and certainly the most able – members of the exiled ANC. Frene did not suffer fools gladly and she had a powerful ego: her resolute refusal to back down had twice caused Julius Nyerere to throw her out of Tanzania. She seemed destined for high cabinet rank, but in fact the ANC decided that it could not allow a lot of African men to be ordered around by a bossy Indian woman, so she had to put up with being Speaker. It was deeply unfair and I’m sure she was livid at this result. And if that could be done to a woman who had dedicated her whole life to the struggle, a fortiori it could be done to any other Indian with political inclinations.
So what that left was what we saw under Zuma’s presidency where a number of wealthy Indians played a substantial but shadowy role, receiving favours in return for backing Zuma. But even they must have burned to see a family of foreign Indians, the Guptas, who had played no struggle role at all, creaming off most of the profits from Zuma’s headlong racketeering.
So the question is, if Mamdani were to seek a political career in South Africa, where would he fit in as a democratic socialist ? The only party that had a space for such folk was the old Liberal Party. Some of its members would have been free marketeers but probably an equal number would have called themselves democratic socialists for their liberalism was more about race than the economy. And that situation continues in a minor key within the South African liberal tradition.
To which one can add the fact that the Democratic Alliance is quite clearly the most non-racial party in its voter support and in its parliamentary recruitment, so that Indians, Coloureds and Africans all play highly significant roles in the party. Despite it’s being labelled a “white” party a minority of its voters are actually white.
To be sure, the DA is a centrist, not a Left party but the fact is that the Indian community in South Africa tends to be centrist. This is not surprising. Under apartheid the Indian community enjoyed the highest rate of upward social mobility of any group, through Herculean efforts to pull itself up by its own bootstraps. And that pattern has continued in the post-apartheid period so that an increasing proportion of that community are middle class and sometimes quite affluent. The same is true, of course, of Mamdani’s own family and of East African Asians in general.
So the most likely answer to the question of what would happen to Mamdani were he still in South Africa is that he would probably be making a political career within the DA. He might even make a greater success of that than Mamdani himself seems likely to do in New York.
Featured image: Zohran Mamdani at a rally in New York in 2024. (Wikimedia Commons)