NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani Urges Leaders to Apply Mandela’s Principles to Today’s Injustices
- By Remmy Bahati
- 14 hours ago
- 5 min read
NYC (GAB) — New York City Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani invoked Nelson Mandela’s resistance to apartheid and support for Palestinian freedom as he urged political leaders and the public to extend solidarity to people confronting injustice today, even when doing so carries political or personal costs.
Delivering a lecture at the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Global Leadership Forum in New York City, Mamdani argued that Mandela’s legacy should not be confined to museums, commemorative speeches or a sanitized account of history. Instead, he said, it should guide contemporary movements for freedom, democracy and human dignity.
“Madiba lives in every protest for justice, every call for democracy, every march with a righteous demand,” Mamdani said, referring to Mandela by his clan name. “Madiba lives each time someone bears witness to oppression, or want, or misery, and does not accept it as inevitable, but rather as something that we each can fight.”
Mamdani, who spent part of his childhood in Cape Town, described Mandela as the first president he remembered and a leader who helped shape his early understanding of political power.
“For a five-year-old in 1996 Cape Town, who saw Madiba’s face on banners waving from building facades, he represented a different kind of first altogether,” Mamdani said. “Madiba was the first president I ever knew, a man who, it seemed, had the power to change the world.”
He said one of the central lessons he carried from those years was that justice must produce tangible improvements in people’s lives.
“The lesson I remember most is that justice must be more than an ideal; it must be material,” Mamdani said. “And I remember a leader, larger than life, who saw the same world I was just starting to glimpse and was trying, always trying, to use his power to change it.”
Dr. Mbongiseni Buthelezi, chief executive officer of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, also reflected on Mandela’s ability to draw strength from profound personal loss. While imprisoned, Mandela was denied permission to attend the funerals of his mother and his eldest son, Thembekile.
“What is always remarkable is that he also used that sadness to find strength, to find a way to carry on and to find a way of keeping fighting,” Buthelezi said. “Always use those moments of sadness to find strength to carry on, to build a better future.”
Buthelezi said Mandela demonstrated the same resilience during South Africa’s HIV and AIDS crisis, when he used the Foundation to help bring together civil society organizations demanding access to antiretroviral treatment and government officials who had not been working with them.
“What he did was turn that sadness into a motor,” Buthelezi said, describing Mandela’s efforts to help the opposing sides find a way forward.
Throughout his address, Mamdani cautioned against elevating Mandela into a flawless historical figure whose example appears impossible for ordinary people to follow. Although Mandela is now revered around the world, Mamdani said his humanity, including his doubts and imperfections, makes his leadership more instructive.
“To treat him as more myth than man is to do him a grave disservice,” Mamdani said, quoting Mandela’s observation: “I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”
Mamdani grounded much of his argument in Mandela’s June 21, 1990, appearance at CUNY’s Aaron Davis Hall, four months after his release from prison. During the televised town hall moderated by ABC News journalist Ted Koppel, Mandela faced hostile questions about the African National Congress, its armed struggle and his relationships with leaders considered adversaries of the United States.
When questioned about those relationships, Mandela rejected the expectation that the ANC should adopt Washington’s worldview.
“One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies,” Mandela said during the 1990 forum, as quoted by Mamdani.
Mamdani characterized the program as “an ambush” in which Mandela was repeatedly treated as a terrorist, violent extremist and obstacle to peace. He said Mandela nevertheless responded to the attacks calmly and refused to abandon the movements and people with whom he shared common cause.
The mayor focused particularly on Koppel’s questioning of Mandela’s support for Palestinians and whether that position risked alienating the Jewish community.
Mamdani said the question was familiar to him because he has faced similar suggestions that opposition to Israeli government actions is equivalent to hostility toward Jewish people.
“It is also a question that, frankly, rings familiar, one that I have been asked in similar forms many times myself, whether opposing Israeli war crimes and violations of international law somehow makes you hateful toward a people,” Mamdani said.
Mandela rejected that premise and instead defended a consistent application of political principles.
“You can call it being political, or a moral question, but anybody who changes his principles depending on with whom he is dealing? That is not a man who can lead a nation,” Mandela said in the exchange quoted by Mamdani.
Mamdani presented Mandela’s response as an example of solidarity that did not depend upon whether a cause was popular or politically convenient.
“Solidarity, as Madiba proved for 95 years, is not just a value. It is a strategy,” Mamdani said. “In his demand of solidarity from himself and from each of us, Madiba becomes more than a man, more than a messiah: he becomes a mirror.”
The mayor also examined the contrast between the hostility Mandela faced during the anti-apartheid struggle and the nearly universal praise he received later in life. He cited British conservatives who called Mandela a “true global hero” after his death despite having opposed sanctions against apartheid South Africa, the ANC and Mandela’s release during the 1980s; noted that the United States kept Mandela on terrorism watchlists until 2008, when he was 90, and that some of his former jailers attended his funeral despite the mistreatment he endured in prison.
Those contradictions, he said, should lead the public to consider which people and movements are being vilified today but may be celebrated after history vindicates them.
Mamdani cited author Omar El Akkad’s book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, to describe how individuals and institutions often claim to have opposed injustice only after the risks of doing so have disappeared.
“Eventually, almost everyone claims they opposed apartheid,” Mamdani said. “Eventually, almost everyone claims they stood with Madiba, that they stood with Dr. King. Eventually, almost everyone will claim they opposed so much of the injustice that they justify today.”
Mamdani applied that argument directly to Gaza, asking how many more Palestinian parents must bury their children before the international community unites in demanding Palestinian freedom. He also called attention to the continued Israeli detention of Palestinian doctor Hussam Abu Safiya and the imprisonment of Indian activist Umar Khalid, whom he described as a political prisoner jailed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government under terrorism charges.
His call for solidarity also extended to immigrants facing government enforcement in the United States and African migrants confronting xenophobic violence in South Africa.
“Why must we wait to stand steadfast alongside immigrants being targeted and preyed upon?” Mamdani asked. “Why must we wait to practice solidarity until it no longer costs us anything?”
He acknowledged that building solidarity is difficult in a political and economic environment shaped by inequality, war, authoritarianism and technology that can intensify social divisions. But he argued that solidarity can be strengthened by the very conditions intended to suppress it, pointing to workers organizing against restrictions, citizens resisting authoritarian crackdowns and demonstrators demanding an end to war.
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