FULL SPEECH: New York Mayor, Zohran Kwame Mamdani | Inaugural Nelson Mandela Global Leadership Forum

The following remarks were delivered by New York City Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani at the inaugural Nelson Mandela Global Leadership Forum, hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation at The Town Hall in New York City on 15 July 2026.

For more than a century, The Town Hall has served as a civic and cultural landmark, hosting artists, activists, political leaders and public intellectuals engaged in some of the defining conversations of their time. It was a fitting venue for the launch of a new global platform dedicated to dialogue, leadership and democratic engagement.

Speaking ahead of International Nelson Mandela Day, Mayor Mamdani reflected on Nelson Mandela's enduring legacy, the importance of solidarity in confronting injustice, and the responsibility of leaders and citizens alike to build societies rooted in dignity, freedom and equality.

Read the full speech below.

Good evening, everyone.

Before I say anything else. Allow me first To say thank you. What a privilege it is to be together to honor the leadership of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

For 27 years, this organization has insisted that Madiba's legacy belongs not only in museums, but in movements for freedom too. Thank you for the work that you have done and all that you are still yet to do.

I want to say thank you as well to Mbongiseni Buthelezi for organizing this evening and for inviting me to speak tonight.

Above all, I would like to recognize a man whose legacy lives on in the millions that he inspired.

Madiba lives in every protest for justice, every call for democracy, every march with a righteous demand.

Madiba lives in every township and slum where dignity remains just out of reach, and he lives in each person who reaches for that dignity, who works all day and then returns home with food for the hungry and medicine for the sick.

Madiba lives each time someone bears witness to oppression or want or misery and does not accept it as inevitable, but rather as something that we each can fight.

So many of us are only where we are today, can only conceive only conceive of the principled as possible.

Because Madiba showed us the path.

By every measure, Madiba was first.

Mzansi's first black president.

South Africa's first head of state elected in a democratic election when he was voted in by South Africans of every skin color.

But for a five year old in 1996 Cape Town who saw Madiba's face on banners waving from building facades, he represented a different kind of first altogether.

Madiba was the first president I ever knew. A man who it seemed had the power to change the world.

It's difficult to explain what that meant as a child, so let me put it this way.

Next to my childhood fridge magnets of David Seaman, Silva and Will Toward, and the entire Arsenal team was a magnet of Madiba in a Bafana Bafana kit.

When I return to those early years of my life.

The lesson I remember most is that justice must be more than an ideal, it must be material.

And I remember a leader larger than life who saw the same world I was just starting to glimpse and was trying, always trying to use his power to change it.

In the years before his death, Madiba was elevated into a pantheon beyond mere mortals.

Today, the Nobel Peace Center describes him as a messiah for millions of people.

If anyone was deserving of such reverence, it was Madiba.

Perhaps it was him that Ricky Rick was thinking about when he wrapped, everything I do they wanna do, everything I say they want to say.

And yet tonight as we gather to recommit ourselves to what Madiba's leadership showed could be made possible, we must also recognize that to treat him as more myth than man is to do him a grave disservice.

It is to sanctify a man who once famously said, I am not a saint unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.

He was a man as subject to self-doubt as any of us.

He was a member of a movement as inclined towards infighting as any collective on a long winding march towards a noble goal.

He was a leader who won seismic victories and yet the struggle to win the South Africa he dreamed of is still there to be won.

What a gift it is that Madiba was flawed like each of us, for it is impossible to emulate a Messiah.

All one can do is worship.

And it is his humanity that allows us to look towards the next generation of leaders and say sincerely, you too can be Madiba.

We are together this evening to launch the Mandela Foundation Global Leadership Forum to continue the struggle for dignity that guided Madiba for nearly a century.

We are together to chart a course through the turbulent waters that lie before us, a global landscape roiled by strong men and corruption, where rights are stolen away in the dead of night and apartheid in different forms endures.

We are together, all of us, searching for answers, seeking to make sense of these fractures, straining to lead amidst upheaval.

Often on occasions like these, the person fortunate enough to stand where I stand now will look out into the audience and ask them to imagine if Madiba was here today.

What he would have said. What he would have done. Why not ask ourselves instead when he was here, what did he say? And what did we say in return?

We need not travel far to find the answer. Open these doors, walk 2 minutes to the B or D at 42nd Street, and take the train to 125th. Walk 10 minutes and you'll find yourself in front of CUNY's Aaron Davis Hall.

It was there on June 21st, 1990. Only 4 months after he had been released from Robben Island that Madiba arrived for a town hall with ABC News' Ted Koppel.

The eyes of the world had been firmly fixed upon Madiba since he had emerged from prison that February, just as they had been for decades. Yet for the first time he could look back and answer whether he was everything he had been made out to be.

There were many interested in making clear that he was not. The couple had disguised an ambush as a town hall. And the audience, as well as joining by satellite from South Africa, sat questioners he had pre-selected, each poised to attack and isolate Madiba.

Ken Adelman, a conservative pundit who would later become one of the loudest advocates for the invasion of Iraq, interrogated Madiba on the relationship he held with world leaders that the United States considered foes. Madiba refused to take the bait, responding, one of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies.

Koos Van der Merwe, a leader of the South African Conservative Party, lectured Madiba as if he was an unruly schoolboy, saying, leave the violent campaign alone. Come and sit down, become a normal person and talk. And lastly, forget communism. Madiba smiled. Then in Afrikaans he replied. I am happy to know you. I hope that one day we shall have the opportunity to discuss the affairs of our country.

You can imagine how the rest of the 80 minutes unfolded again and again. Madiba was condescended to and painted as a terrorist, a violent extremist, an obstacle to peace. After each hostile question, Ken twisted the knife, waiting to see if Madiba would bleed. And each time Madiba answered the questions asked of him calmly and slowly.

And then an hour into the event, Koppel returned to a question about Madiba's support for the Palestinian cause. Did that solidarity, he asked, mean Madiba was willing to alienate the Jewish community? It was a question so contrived that Madiba had to ask Koppel what exactly he meant. It is also a question that frankly rings familiar. One that I have been asked in similar forms many times myself, whether opposing Israeli war crimes and violations of international law somehow makes you hateful towards a people.

Madiba refused the premise. Instead, he flipped it into a different kind of question. About whether a politics of universalism can exist if it is riddled with exceptions. Whether any of us are free if some of us are not. Towards the end of his answer, he said, you can call it being political or a moral question. But anybody who changes his principles depending on with whom he is dealing. That is not a man who can lead a nation.

History. Hypocrisy rather, political convenience. These forces possess a gravitational pull. So often it is easier to make a concession, to relinquish a long held belief, to abandon a principle than to hold firm. That was true when the world asked Madiba to compromise on apartheid.

It was true when many asked him to abandon the Palestinian struggle for freedom. And it remains true today. But in that moment as Ted Koppel pressured him under bright lights, Madiba showed us the power of solidarity, universal and unyielding.

Solidarity extended to all. Solidarity even when the injustice is contested. Solidarity even when there are many who seek to deny what you know to be true. Solidarity, as Pope Francis told us, is uncomfortable. Solidarity, as Madiba showed us for 95 years, is not just a value, it is a strategy.

In his demand of solidarity from himself and from each of us, Madiba becomes more than a man, more than a Messiah. He becomes a mirror. When we hear his refusal to abandon those with whom he shared common cause, do we recognize ourselves?

When we hear his willingness to lose power before he loses himself, do we recognize ourselves? When we hear his devotion to solidarity, not as an abstract concept, but as a call to action, do we recognize ourselves? Or do we recognize only the version of Mandela that asks nothing of us?

Too many do. I think of the Tories in the United Kingdom who described Madiba upon his passing as a true global hero despite having spent the 1980s opposing sanctions, opposing the ANC, opposing his release.

I think of those at the highest levels of our federal government who claimed to venerate Madiba but kept him on terrorist watch lists until 2008 when he was 90 years old.

I think of the jailers who abused Madiba who left him with eyesight permanently damaged from working in a lime quarry without protection, and then still attended his funeral.

I think of each of these people, each of these moments of hypocrisy. And I find myself at a loss. And then I remember Madiba. A man with the capacity to forgive. A man who extended solidarity to all.

It was only through that solidarity that South Africa could envision a future different than the past. It is only through that solidarity that we can do the same.

Three days from now, the world will mark Nelson Mandela Day. Children in elementary schools will make presentations, world leaders will issue statements, and millions will come together to honor Madiba's legacy. We will mark Mandela Day here in New York City too.

New Yorkers across the five boroughs will reflect on Madiba's endless march towards freedom. We will think of organizations like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice who came together for the first time the week of the Ted Koppel town hall to show in fact how many Jewish New Yorkers stood in solidarity with Madiba and to hold a Shabbat service that raised $50,000 for the anti-apartheid struggle.

And as we remember Madiba the man, we'll ask ourselves a harder question. Who are we treating today the way Madiba was treated before history declared him a Messiah?

For every kind word of praise we now use to describe Madiba, who is being described today the way Ted Koppel described him then?

Who else has seen their humanity made conditional, has been told their freedom can wait? Who else is leading a cause that we will glorify in retrospect, but is being vilified in the present?

Who else needs our solidarity? I think of Omar El Akkad who wrote a book titled One Day everyone will have Always Been Against this. That sentence captures one of history's cruelest, most familiar habits. Eventually, almost everyone claims they opposed apartheid. Eventually, almost everyone claims they stood with Madiba, that they stood with Dr. King.

Eventually Almost everyone will claim they oppose so much of the injustice that they justify today. But justice is not measured by where we stand after history has issued its verdict. It is measured by where we stand when the verdict is still being rendered.

Why must we wait until 1000 more parents bury their children? Until even more lose their limbs, their homes, their futures to come together and insist upon Palestinian freedom. Why must Doctor Hussam Abu Safiya wait more than 18 months for freedom in Israeli detention, a detention that continues to this day, after the world watched him be kidnapped as he left his hospital, watched as he was wasting away in prison.

Why must we wait as Umar Khalid enters his 6th year of captivity in Dili? A political prisoner jailed under the same manufactured charges of terrorism that were once leveled against Madiba. Why must we wait to stand steadfast alongside immigrants being targeted and preyed upon?

Whether it was Joan Sebastian Guerrero, shot in the head by ICE in Biddeford, Maine on Monday. Or Amaramiro Emmanuel and Ekpenyong Andrew, two Nigerians killed last week in South African streets where xenophobia builds.

Why must we wait to practice solidarity until it no longer costs us anything? The responsibility of answering those questions honestly and fully rests upon each of us. It is a responsibility of drawing solidarity further into our lives, our politics, the way we walk through the world.

This is no easy task. The world we live in is designed to pull us apart. Profit motives and algorithms are engineered to turn us against one another. The few with much exploit the many with little. We continue to reckon with genocide in Gaza and war across the globe, and as always, there is money to be made and power to be won in demonizing the poor and stoking the fires of racial animus.

These are all forces designed to separate us from one another, to turn away from each other. But were these not the same conditions that Madiba overcame? When Madiba arrived on windswept Robben Island, his connection to the outside world severed. Was that conducive to solidarity?

When Madiba endured decades of racial domination and dehumanization, was that conducive to solidarity? When governments and corporations marshaled extraordinary wealth and power to preserve apartheid, was that conducive to solidarity? The truth is that solidarity is perhaps best nurtured by the conditions that seek to destroy it.

Workers rise up when bosses restrict their rights. Citizens link arms when authoritarians impose brutal crackdowns. Every struggle for a better future began at a moment when that future felt forever out of reach.

As Doctor King said the night before he was killed, only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. Surely now it is dark enough. But surely together in this room we can see the stars. Those small pockets of light that are working people standing side by side to demand dignity, that are demonstrators marching through the heat and cold to call for an end to war, to suffering.

There are those with hardly anything to their name, still opening their hands to extend what little they have to those with even less. Solidarity is not perfection. Solidarity is not purity. Solidarity is people choosing one another sometimes even over themselves.

Solidarity, my friends, so often feels impossible. Like something only a mythical figure could make real. And yet as Madiba reminds us through the life he lived, Through the leadership he showed. And through the words he spoke, It always seems impossible until it's done.

Let us do it together.

Thank you very much.