Subtle magic of an itinerant statesman

Rasool is perhaps one of the few South African political figures able to articulate the global consequences of misused narratives

- Usman Ali

Truth to power: Ebrahim Rasool speaks his truth quietly, yet is heard loudly. Photo: Wikipedia

(Wikipedia)

It began in an unlikely place: a modest lecture hall at SOAS in London, the kind where the air still carries the faint chalk-scent of older debates.

On a grey November afternoon, Ebrahim Rasool stood before a room of students, academics and a scattering of diplomats who had slipped in quietly at the back. His topic, “What can Britain learn from South Africa’s transition from apartheid?” sounded, at first, like a retrospective talk about a distant struggle.

But within minutes, it was clear the room had come for something else. Britain, raw from years of cultural fracture and political fatigue, was listening to a South African speak not about the past but about the mechanics of coexistence in the present.

One attendee whispered afterward that Rasool “seemed to be describing not just South Africa’s journey out of apartheid, but the UK’s journey into something it doesn’t yet have a name for, a society anxious, splintered, unsure how to speak across its differences”.

Rasool wasn’t offering easy moralising. He talked about negotiation as muscle memory, a skill developed in small, unglamorous rooms long before nations sign anything. He spoke about pluralism not as an ideal but as a discipline kept alive only through practice. And he spoke about the ANC’s original genius: its ability to treat diversity not as a burden but as the raw material for political imagination.

London was only the first stop. From SOAS, Rasool moved through the city’s diplomatic ecosystem with a pace that suggested someone increasingly in demand. The next day, he arrived at Chatham House, its polished wood and soft carpets a contrast to the utilitarian SOAS hall. He was there for an on-the-record roundtable, a rarity in an institution famous for its rule of secrecy.