New York City's top candidate for mayor was an SA schoolboy

The charismatic and likeable millennial who is most likely to become the city's first Muslim and South Asian mayor went to an Anglican school in Little Mowbray, Cape Town, as a young boy.

- By Rebecca Davis

He is being hailed as the potential saviour of left-wing politics in the US - and he spent some of his formative years in Cape Town's southern suburbs.

Zohran Mamdani (33), who won the race for the Democratic nomination as the mayor of New York City in an extraordinary upset over establishment politicians on Tuesday, 24 June, was raised in Uganda and South Africa before his parents moved to the US.

Mamdani's father is well-known Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani, who arrived at the University of Cape Town shortly after the transition to democracy and tried to spearhead a process of academic decolonisation that was so intensely resisted by the university's old guard that the episode is known to this day in academic circles as the "Mamdani affair".

His mother is the director Mira Nair, renowned for films including Monsoon Wedding and Mississippi Masala.

At the age of five, Zohran was enrolled at the co-ed St George's Grammar School in Little Mowbray, Cape Town.

"We can place Zohran Kwame Mamdani at St George's Grammar School during the years 1996, 1997 and 1998, corresponding to Sub A, Sub B and potentially Standard 1 as the grades were known then," the school's head, Julian Cameron, said on Wednesday.

"We wish Mr Mamdani well in the contest to be mayor. In terms of thoughts from the school around his potential new role, our school motto is 'Virtute et Valore', which we translate to 'The courage to do what is right'.