What does it mean to be African in the 21st century?
For much of modern history, the answer seemed straightforward: Africa was a continent, and Africans were those who lived within its geographical boundaries. But history has always been more complicated than maps. Africa has travelled across oceans. It has survived slavery, colonialism, migration, and displacement. It has become not only a place of origin but also a global inheritance.
Zohran Kwame Mamdani’s story captures this transformation.
Born in Uganda, raised partly in South Africa, named after Ghana’s first post-independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah, and now serving as mayor of New York City, Mamdani represents a new generation whose identities cannot be contained within a single national category. He is not simply an American with African origins. He is what the late African intellectual Ali A. Mazrui called an American African.
The concept is more than a description of migration. It is a way of understanding the changing relationship between Africa and its global diasporas.
In the last week of July 2026, the noted American political analyst Charles M. Blow interviewed Mamdani. During the conversation, Blow raised a question that went beyond biography:
“You have described yourself not as an African American but as an American who was born in Africa. You were born in Uganda; you stayed there until you moved to Cape Town, South Africa. Your middle name is Kwame. I think you’re the first Kwame I’ve ever met who is not black. How has your African origin impacted your life and worldview?”
Mamdani’s answer was a simple but historically profound declaration of belonging:
“I am so proud to be a son of Africa.”
Mamdani’s words carry the memories of those who were taken from Africa, those who migrated from Africa, and those who continue to build bridges with Africa. He added: “I have a middle name Kwame because my father named me after Kwame Nkrumah. [Nkrumah] was a pan-African leader and the first leader of Ghana post-independence. I always grew up with the notion of what it meant to be not only Ugandan but also African.”
The above words illuminate a distinction that Mazrui spent a good deal of time exploring: the difference between African Americans and American Africans.
The great majority of African Americans are products of what Mazrui described as the Diaspora of Enslavement. Their ancestors were transported across the Atlantic through one of history’s greatest crimes: the Middle Passage. Their identity was forged through the experience of forced displacement, racial domination, resistance, and the struggle for recognition in the Americas.
American Africans, by contrast, are largely products of the Diaspora of Colonization and post-colonial migration. They are Africans who moved to the Western Hemisphere in more recent historical periods. They may be citizens of the United States, Canada, Brazil, or other countries of the Americas, but their relationship with Africa remains immediate. They or their parents or grandparents may have been born on the continent. Their relatives may still live there. Their languages, cuisines, names, and cultural practices may remain connected to African societies.
The distinction does not suggest that one identity is more authentic than another. Rather, it recognises that different historical journeys produce different forms of African consciousness.
Mazrui, Africa’s great conceptualiser, coined the term American African precisely because he understood that Africa’s global presence could not be captured by existing categories. For him, Africa was not merely a geographical location. It was also a cultural experience carried by peoples dispersed throughout the world.
Few individuals embodied this concept more fully than Mazrui himself. Born in Mombasa, Kenya, educated in Africa, Europe, and North America, and for decades one of the most influential African intellectuals in the United States, he lived simultaneously in multiple worlds. He was African by heritage, global by imagination, and American by professional life.
The intellectual significance of this concept was reflected in the volume The American African: Essays on the Life and Scholarship of Ali A. Mazrui (2018), which I co-edited with my Kenyan colleague Kimani Njogu. The title was not simply a tribute to Mazrui. It captured the very category through which his life and scholarship could best be understood. He was a bridge between continents, between traditions, and between different historical experiences of Africanness.
Mamdani’s biography similarly challenges conventional assumptions about identity. A person can be Ugandan by birth, South African by experience, American by citizenship, and African by consciousness. These identities do not cancel one another. They enrich one another.
This is precisely why the concept of the American African is increasingly relevant today.
Earlier generations of African migrants often faced a difficult choice. To become American frequently meant gradual separation from Africa. Languages disappeared. Cultural practices weakened. Memories faded across generations.
Globalisation has transformed this process.
The children and grandchildren of African migrants now live in a world where Africa remains immediately accessible. Digital technology has created a new Afro-Atlantic network. A family in New York can communicate daily with relatives in Kampala. A community in Washington, DC can follow political developments in Addis Ababa instantly. Music, ideas, food, and conversations move across oceans with unprecedented speed.
The Atlantic, once a space of forced separation, has become a space of renewed connection.
This transformation also challenges older understandings of Pan-Africanism. The founders of Pan-African thought, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore and Kwame Nkrumah, imagined solidarity among people of African descent across colonial and national boundaries. But they lived in a world where communication depended on ships, newspapers, and political conferences.
Today, the African diaspora exists within a global public sphere.
The struggle therefore continues, but it has entered a new arena.
The struggle against slavery became the struggle against colonialism. The struggle against colonialism became the struggle for independence and racial equality. The struggle of the present also includes questions of belonging, representation, inequality, and the right of individuals to inhabit multiple identities without being forced to choose only one.
Zohran Mamdani’s significance lies not simply in his personal biography or political career. It lies in what his life symbolises. He represents a historical development that Mazrui anticipated decades ago: the emergence of a global African consciousness that transcends borders without abandoning roots. As Mazrui eloquently put it in his renowned TV documentary, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (1986): “[Very long ago] we were all in one village called Africa. Our village was the world. It was all we knew. But now we are scattered so widely that the sun never sets on the descendants of Africa. The world is our village.”
Seifudein Adem is a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Research and Education, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan.
