Leading New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s father has been accused of trying to silence an LGBTQ professor in Uganda by padlocking her office, withholding her pay and pushing her out of his department at Makerere University, The Post has learned.
Mahmood Mamdani, 79, blocked Stella Nyanzi, 51, from teaching a course in “Queer African Studies” at the Makerere Institute of Social Research in April 2016, Nyanzi claimed to The Post Thursday.
Mamdani Snr., a professor in the department of anthropology at Columbia University in New York, was also director of MISR in Kampala between 2010 and 2022.
Nyanzi at one point stripped naked, taped her mouth and chained herself to the university’s doors in order to protest the measures taken against her.
“Regarding Prof. Mahmood Mamdani, I did not make it easy for him to taunt, torture and terrorize me,” Niyanzi said, adding she also successfully sued the school.
Nyanzi, who is also a mother-of-three was a well-known advocate for gay rights in Uganda when she started teaching at Makerere, the country’s most prestigious university.
“I was shocked when he [Mahmood Mamdani] misrepresented this course in public media interviews by claiming that I had planned to teach homosexuality to students,” said Nyanzi, who is currently a professor at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.
She claimed to The Post she was subject to detention without trial, trumped up charges, being put on a No Fly List having her bank account frozen and subjected to an involuntary mental exam due to her protest against the university and the government.
Nyanzi has also been convicted and jailed twice for speaking out against Uganda’s longtime president, Yoweri Museveni.
She further accused Mamdani snr. of being a puppet of Ugandan leadership, through Museveni’s wife Janet Museveni, who was appointed Minister of Education and Sports in 2016.
“The failure of Makerere University to protect me from further violation of my contract as a public servant … and the failure to restrain and contain Prof. Mahmood Mamdani were instrumentalizations of dictator Yoweri Museveni’s wife — Janet Museveni,” she alleged to The Post.
For his part, Mahmood Mamdani has said Nyanzi was disciplined because she refused to teach when she was admitted into MISR’s newly created PhD program.
In an interview with Newsweek, he said that she had “adversely affected MISR’s position in the academic world” and would put prospective students off attending the Institute after her wild protest.
“The best students will look for alternative. Donors will look for other places to put their money,” said Mamdani.
“Rather than teach in the PhD program, Dr. Nyanzi should be transferred to any other unit in the university that will accept her.”
The elder Mamdani did not respond to The Post’s request for comment Wednesday.
Nyanzi won a $32,200 judgment against Makerere University in 2020, and they offered to reinstate her position. Nyanzi told The Post that she never received the withheld salary.
“Stella’s win is not hers only, but for all academic staff in Uganda,” said Danson Sylvester Kahyana, a senior lecturer in the literature department at the school to University World News.
“Her case will be referred to again and again in Ugandan legal circles. It should certainly make university administrators more careful with their decisions.”
Zohran Mamdani recently came under fire for posing for a photograph with Uganda’s deputy prime minister Rebecca Kadaga, who is a proponent of harsh anti-LGBTQ policies, including life imprisonment for gay people.
The photo was taken on a family trip to Uganda to celebrate Mamdani’s wedding to Rama Duwaji in July shortly after the progressive’s stunning Democratic primary win. The Democratic Socialist frontrunner claimed he didn’t know the anti-gay government official and had run into her at the airport.
Separately Nyanzi was subject of a closely watched 2019 trial over apparent cyber harassment, which was monitored by the American Bar Association’s Center for Human Rights and the Clooney Foundation for Justice.
Nyanzi, who claimed that she suffered a miscarriage after she was tortured in prison, was also charged with “offensive communication” under the country’s Computer Misuse Act after she referred to the president as “a pair of buttocks” in a post online.
In 2022, she was accepted on a writer-in-exile program run by PEN Germany and says she will not return to Uganda until Museveni, who has been in power since 1986, is out of power.
“For me, as a queer African scholar, the criminalization … of homosexual people (with a maximum penalty of up to 20 years in prison) makes it almost impossible for me to return to Uganda,” she said.
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