An Old Clip Of Zohran Mamdani Rapping On South African Radio Is Going Viral

A 2016 radio interview where Zohran Mamdani raps a few of his own bars and breaks down Nigerian dance moves is circulating again, ten years after it happened. The clip comes from a sit down with host Kgomotso Meso on Kaya FM in South Africa, done during the press run for “Queen of Katwe,” and it started making the rounds on X.

 

 

 

The line everybody is quoting is his. He raps that he hates water but he loves love spice, which comes from “#1 Spice,” the song he co-wrote with his creative partner HAB for the film’s soundtrack. Hearing the current mayor of New York deliver it into a radio mic in a much thicker Ugandan accent is doing exactly what you would expect to a timeline.

 

The other clip getting passed around is the dance conversation. Meso asked whether Uganda has a signature dance move, and Mamdani said that having a dance move attached to a song is a big thing, then gave the credit away, saying the Nigerians have really patented that. He used the dance from Yemi Alade’s “Koffi Anan” as his example and said it was popular in Uganda too. He demonstrated a little.
For anyone who missed the “Queen of Katwe” connection, it runs deep. The 2016 Disney film starred Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo and was directed by Mira Nair, who is Mamdani’s mother. He was on that movie in several capacities. He curated and produced the soundtrack and earned a 2017 Guild of Music Supervisors Awards nomination for it, he co-wrote “#1 Spice” with HAB, he is credited as third assistant director, and he appears on screen in a small role. Nyong’o herself shows up in the music video for the song.

The rap career was not a one off either. He and HAB recorded as Young Cardamom and HAB, and their EP has them rapping in six different languages while pulling from their shared Ugandan roots. He later released “Salaam” as Zohran Kwame in 2017, then went by Mr. Cardamom for the 2019 single “Nani,” a tribute to his grandmother with a video starring the actress and food writer Madhur Jaffrey.
When word of his rap past first spread during his mayoral run, the numbers moved fast. According to Luminate, the Young Cardamom and HAB catalog jumped roughly 2,300 percent in United States streams and 1,543 percent globally in a two week stretch, going from under a thousand weekly streams to 15,000 in the U.S. “#1 Spice” carried most of it, surging about 2,600 percent domestically.

The South African leg makes sense in his biography. Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, and after his father Mahmood Mamdani took a post leading African studies at the University of Cape Town, the family lived in South Africa, where he attended St. George’s Grammar School in Mowbray for three years before they moved to New York. So sitting in a Johannesburg studio talking Ugandan and Nigerian music was not a press stop for him so much as a return.

His mother also kept offering him work after Queen of Katwe, including parts in the stage musical version of “Monsoon Wedding” and her television adaptation of “A Suitable Boy.” He turned both down. Politics got him instead, and he became mayor of New York earlier this year.