A decade-old interview with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is making the rounds again, and this time it’s his accent generating the attention.
The clip comes from a 2016 interview on South Africa’s Kaya 959 radio station, where Mamdani was helping promote “Queen of Katwe,” the Disney film directed by his mother, Mira Nair. During the conversation, Mamdani discussed differences he observed between nightlife in New York and Kampala, Uganda.
“The difference for me is I’m from Uganda, but I also grew up in New York,” Mamdani said.
He then offered an observation about dancing.
“In New York, you go out, some guys are very hesitant to dance,” he said. “You know, if they’re not grinding, they’re just standing. In Kampala, you will just not find that. People are all dancing. Everybody’s dancing, men, women and it’s fantastic that way.”
The substance of that observation isn’t what sent the clip racing across social media Wednesday.
It was the way Mamdani sounded while saying it.
Conservative commentators accused the mayor of adopting a Ugandan accent that they said sounded markedly different from his usual American speaking voice.
“UNEARTHED: Zohran Mamdani does an obviously fake Ugandan accent while promoting a Disney movie based in Africa,” Benny Johnson wrote on X.
Tara Bull similarly asked, “Anyone else notice Mamdani’s accent change?”
The Daily Wire joined in with, “Nobody does a fake accent better than a Democrat politician.”
Spencer Pratt went considerably further, calling Mamdani a “theater kid commie” and accusing him of “appropriating African culture.”
There is one rather significant complication with that particular accusation.
Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda. He holds Ugandan as well as U.S. citizenship, spent part of his childhood in Africa and moved to New York City when he was 7 years old. In other words, this isn’t a politician with no personal connection to Uganda suddenly adopting an African identity for a radio interview.
Whether his accent noticeably changed during the interview is something listeners can hear and judge for themselves. Declaring it “fake,” however, requires an assumption about why he was speaking that way.
People who grow up around multiple accents can shift pronunciation or speech patterns depending on whom they’re speaking with and where they are. That doesn’t prove that’s what happened with Mamdani in this particular interview, but his background makes the story more complicated than simple cultural impersonation.
Critics nevertheless had plenty of fun with it.
Former Crazy Eddie CFO Sammy Antar framed the controversy around the politics of cultural appropriation, asking when adopting another culture’s accent becomes “cultural appropriation” and when it becomes “authenticity.”
Conservative Brief piled on by asking, “What is with the Democrats and their fake accents?!”
Kevin Smith, host of “Loud Majority Live,” went in another direction, connecting Mamdani’s work on the Disney production to his later criticism of large corporations.
“When did Disney start to suck?” Smith wrote. “When they hired the directors son who had a fake Ugandan accent. He didn’t mind ‘big corporations’ when they were signing his checks.”
Mamdani wasn’t merely hanging around his mother’s movie set.
He is credited as music supervisor and third assistant director on “Queen of Katwe” and also made a brief appearance in the film. The 2016 movie tells the true story of Phiona Mutesi, the Ugandan chess player who rose from difficult circumstances in Kampala to compete internationally.
