Amid the controversy over New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani‘s race, a woman supported Mamdani identifying himself as an African though not by blood and said the entire Indian diaspora in Africa identifies as African. “…because we are! From! Africa!” the woman, Sophia Babai, wrote on BlueSky. The woman explained that her parents are from the same diaspora as Zohran’s father Mahmood Mamdani and they will always introduce themselves as African, and there is nothing wrong in it. Sophia explained that Americans don’t understand the extent to which the Indian diaspora in East Africa is a separate culture in itself. She said that compared to Indians, they eat different food, follow a different branch of Islam and have a culture of their own, which is not Indian. Their language is stuffed with Swahili and they look different from Indians.
Woman’s post on Gujarati African diaspora in connection with Mamdani went viral
Indian diaspora in Africa identify as Africans, the woman said.
“It is also just incredibly funny seeing white Americans claim that Zohran can’t identify as African because he isn’t Black, like sir ma’am where do you think white people came from,” the woman said explaining how a group called Lohana who are believed to be from Lahore ended up in Guajarat and Punjab and later converted — tracing the roots of Mamdani’s family. “Every Gujarati African I have ever met identifies as African first, and probably Indian second but possibly not Indian at all. Indians certainly consider us African, to a point where more traditional Indians will not intermarry with us, even if they are ethnically and religiously identical,” the woman explained. The post came in reaction to a major row over Zohran Mamdani claiming himself to be African-American or Black in the application for Columbia University. Though he did not get into Columbia, the revelation that he attempted at a faulty racial identity triggered a political storm, though Mamdani said he was not aiming to gain anything but was trying to capture his diverse background as he was born in Uganda.
