When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani referred to the African National Congress’s (ANC) Freedom Charter as a key inspiration during his inaugural address, it prompted a pointed question: Will New York City undergo “South Africanization” under his watch? If Afghanistan is famously referred to as the graveyard of empires, South Africa surely qualifies as the laboratory of empires. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the phenomenon of toppling…