Prof Mahmood Mamdani

Professor Mamdani received his PhD from Harvard University and taught at the University of Dar-esSalaam. He is the founding director of the Centre for Basic Research in Kampala, Uganda (1987–96). Mamdani was president of the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa from 1999 to 2002.

He is the author of veritable and widely cited African Studies classics such as When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, nativism and genocide in Rwanda (Princeton 2001); and Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism (Princeton 1996), which was awarded the Herskovitz Prize of the African Studies Association and named one of Africa’s greatest books of the 20th century.

His texts have been core readings for undergraduate and post-graduate studies at UCT and far beyond on the major debates on the study of African history and politics, exploring the intersection between politics and culture, comparative studies of colonialism, civil wars and the state, and genocide in Africa.