He was part of the 1963 group of the Kennedy Airlift, a scholarship program that brought hundreds of East Africans to universities in the United States and Canada between 1959 and 1963.

[11][12] Mamdani returned to Uganda in early 1972 and joined Makerere University as a teaching assistant at the same time conducting his doctoral research; only to be expelled later that year by Idi Amin due to his ethnicity.

He left Uganda for a refugee camp in the United Kingdom in early November just as the three-month deadline was approaching for people of Asian heritage to leave the country.

In 1979, he attended the Moshi Conference as an observer and returned to Uganda after Amin was overthrown following the Uganda–Tanzania War[13] as a Frontier Interne of the World Council of Churches.

In 1984, while attending a conference in Dakar, Senegal, he became stateless after his citizenship was withdrawn by the government under Milton Obote due to his criticism of its policies.

[14] He returned to Dar es Salaam and was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor for the spring semester in 1986.

In December 2001, he gave a speech on "Making Sense of Violence in Postcolonial Africa" at the Nobel Centennial Symposia in Oslo, Norway.

[32] His current research "takes as its point of departure his 1996 book, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Colonialism".

[35] In the post-colonial realm, the urban sphere was to an extent deracialised but the rural one remained subject to quasi colonial control whether at the hands of conservative rulers for whom it provided their own power base or those of radical ones with centralised authoritarian projects of their own.

[37] Mamdani analyses extensive historical case studies in South Africa and Uganda to argue that colonial rule tapped into authoritarian possibilities whose legacies often persist after independence.

[citation needed] They married in 1991 and have a son, Zohran Mamdani, a current member of the New York State Assembly, representing the 36th District in Queens.