Resurfaced Mamdani Interview Ignites Internet Frenzy Over Alleged ‘Fake’ Ugandan Accent

Ten years ago, Zohran Mamdani was not running America’s largest city. He was sitting behind a microphone in South Africa, talking about Kampala nightlife, dance floors and a Disney movie directed by his mother.

Now that old interview has returned with an entirely different audience. A 2016 appearance by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on South Africa’s Kaya FM resurfaced this week, sending conservative social media into overdrive as critics accused him of adopting a “fake” Ugandan accent.

The interview was recorded while Mamdani was promoting Queen of Katwe, the Disney film directed by his mother, Mira Nair.

But the viral controversy comes with a wrinkle that has largely disappeared from the online mockery: Mamdani was actually born in Uganda, spent part of his childhood in South Africa and has maintained unusually deep personal and professional ties to Kampala.

There is also another curious detail. When essentially the same interview became a political talking point in 2025, critics described Mamdani as using a “fake South African accent.” Now, some of the same broader political circles are describing it as a fake Ugandan accent.

That discrepancy may be the most revealing part of a controversy built almost entirely around how one man sounded.

A decade-old conversation suddenly sounds different to political ears

During the Kaya FM conversation, Mamdani discussed cultural differences he said he noticed between New York and Kampala, particularly when people went out dancing.

“The difference for me is I’m from Uganda, but I also grew up in New York,” he said before describing New Yorkers as more hesitant on the dance floor.

“In Kampala,” he added, people were far more likely to simply dance.

The interview attracted relatively little political attention when Queen of Katwe arrived in theaters in 2016. Mamdani was then in his mid-20s and years away from becoming a nationally recognizable politician.

That changed as his political profile exploded. Conservative personalities including Spencer Pratt, Benny Johnson and Tara Bull circulated the video this week while accusing Mamdani of altering his voice for the South African interview.

Other commentators used the clip to revive a familiar accusation in American politics: that politicians sometimes modify their speech depending on the audience.

The criticism spread quickly enough to turn a promotional interview for a decade-old movie into another online referendum on Mamdani’s authenticity.

Yet nobody circulating the video has produced linguistic evidence establishing that the accent was fabricated. That matters because Mamdani’s background is considerably more complicated than the viral clips suggest.

Calling Uganda an adopted culture leaves out a major piece of his biography

Mamdani was born in Kampala in 1991 to filmmaker Mira Nair and scholar Mahmood Mamdani. He later spent part of his early childhood in Cape Town before his family settled in New York when he was seven. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018 while retaining Ugandan citizenship.

His ties to Uganda continued long after childhood. Associated Press interviews conducted during his mayoral rise found Ugandan journalists who remembered Mamdani from a teenage internship at Kampala’s Daily Monitor.

His family has maintained a home in Kampala, and Mamdani returned to Uganda during his 2025 mayoral campaign for celebrations surrounding his marriage.

Even after becoming mayor, Mamdani has publicly described that identity in unmistakable terms.

“I’m so proud to be a son of Africa,” he said during a July 2026 interview released by New York City’s mayoral office, explaining that being born in Kampala gave him a lifelong understanding of himself as both Ugandan and African.

That does not settle the narrower question of whether his speech pattern during the 2016 interview sounded natural or exaggerated. People can debate what they hear.

It does, however, make accusations that he was simply “appropriating African culture” harder to square with the basic facts of his life.

Africa was not a promotional theme invented for Queen of Katwe. It was part of his upbringing.

And the South African element matters too. Mamdani’s father taught at the University of Cape Town from 1996 to 1999, placing the family there during Zohran’s early childhood before they moved to New York.

That makes the current fight particularly strange: critics have alternately identified the same voice as a phony South African accent and a phony Ugandan one.

His ‘Queen of Katwe’ role went considerably deeper than a family cameo

The resurfaced clip also revived criticism of how Mamdani became involved with Queen of Katwe.

Mamdani himself joked about the family connection during the interview, saying that “nepotism and hard work go a long way” while discussing creating music for his mother’s project.

The joke gives critics plenty of material. His mother was, after all, the director. But describing Mamdani merely as the director’s son who received a token Disney job leaves out what he actually did.

He served as a music supervisor, worked as a third assistant director, appeared briefly in the film, and helped shape a soundtrack intended to capture contemporary Kampala rather than rely on generic Hollywood ideas about “African music.” His third-assistant-director credit remains listed among the movie’s production credits.

Mamdani was also performing at the time as Young Cardamom, collaborating with Ugandan rapper HAB. Their song “#1 Spice” appeared on the Queen of Katwe soundtrack, while reporting surrounding the movie’s release described Mamdani as drawing inspiration directly from Kampala’s music scene while curating tracks for the film.

The movie itself was hardly disconnected from his family’s life in Uganda. Nair had been based in Kampala for decades after first working there on Mississippi Masala.

She later founded the Maisha Foundation, which began running filmmaking programs in Kampala in 2005 and has trained hundreds of emerging filmmakers.

Queen of Katwe told the true story of Phiona Mutesi, the Kampala chess prodigy who rose from Katwe to international competition. Disney describes the movie as the story of a Ugandan girl whose life changes after discovering chess.

So while Mamdani’s family connection to the director is undeniable, so is the family’s longstanding connection to the place the movie was portraying.