Truth to power: Ebrahim Rasool speaks his truth quietly, yet is heard loudly. Photo: 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.
The session, titled “South Africa’s Pluralist Foreign Policy in a Changing World,” was less a speech than a quiet tutorial in global navigation. Rasool explained the emerging Government of National Unity as something more than a coalition of necessity; he framed it as a forced return to the pluralist instincts that had shaped South Africa’s transition but had since been sidelined.
Foreign policy, he argued, must follow the same trajectory. In a world defined by geopolitical realignment, South Africa was discovering that it could neither lean entirely toward the West nor shelter wholly within the Global South. It had to play a more intricate game, one that held principles, interests and history in balance.
He spoke about the skill required to manage relations with China and the United States simultaneously, to remain credible in Palestine while deepening ties with Europe and to be taken seriously across the African continent.
His voice remained steady: “We are entering a time when nations will have to become each other’s contingency. Each other’s insurance.” In the room, pens paused mid-sentence. It was a line that carried the weight of someone who has lived long enough in diplomacy to understand its fragility.
The third act of this itinerary took place under far brighter lights. On Piers Morgan Uncensored, Rasool found himself in one of television’s most confrontational settings. Morgan pressed him on his criticism of Donald Trump’s repeated claim that a “white genocide” was underway in South Africa. Was it not dangerous, Morgan asked, to call Trump’s rhetoric supremacist?
Rasool didn’t match the hostility. He simply said: “I was put in jail by supremacists. When I hear the dog whistle, I understand it.” The studio air shifted. It was a reminder that some arguments are not abstract, they are memories disguised as analysis.
But the conversation also revealed something deeper: Rasool is perhaps one of the few South African political figures able to articulate the global consequences of misused narratives. His critique was not about Trump as an individual but about the choreography of fear manipulated across continents.
This theme carried into Istanbul, where Rasool appeared at the TRT World Forum — a gathering focused on the “Global Reset” and the collapse of old orders. Here, he was asked directly: Why is South Africa such a central fixation for Donald Trump and his circle?
His answer held none of the self-dramatisation common in political commentary. Instead, he connected the dots: MAGA supremacism in the United States, far-right populism in Europe, Zionist extremism in Israel and the residual white nationalism still present in South Africa. These movements, he argued, intersect in a shared storytelling economy, one that uses South Africa as a laboratory of white fear.
He then traced the punitive measures the Trump administration had taken against South Africa: the abrupt withdrawal of development assistance, the quiet death of AGOA’s preferential treatment and the 30% tariffs on South African exports. These actions were not random, he said; they were the foreign-policy expression of a domestic populist agenda.
But what set Rasool apart in Istanbul was not the critique; plenty of people criticise Trump but the strategic architecture he laid out in response. He outlined five scenarios through which nations might navigate a capricious superpower: Mutuality, Surrender, Retaliation, Appeasement and Contingency.
Contingency was his focus: “Insurance,” as he put it in both Istanbul and London. It meant diversifying alliances, deepening multilateral networks, strengthening African regional autonomy and preparing, not panicking, for cycles of unpredictability.
A diplomat later said, half amused and half admiring, “Rasool talks like institutions still matter and yet he knows exactly how brittle they’ve become. That combination is rare these days.”
Finally, Rasool took part in the TRT G20 Roundtable. While others debated abstract shifts in global order, Rasool pointed out a quieter reality: African nations, despite sitting on “mountains of coal,” had done more to meet global climate commitments than most wealthy countries.
He wasn’t boasting; he was reframing Africa as a moral centre of gravity in an era of dislocation.
Put together, these moments form a sketch of a political figure who seems to be thinking in longer, steadier lines than those dominating today’s politics.
He is not a firebrand, nor a technocrat. He is neither nostalgic nor nihilistic. His worldview blends Islamic ethics anti-apartheid activism, interfaith work, community memory and years of navigating the jagged edges of American politics.
In South Africa, where public discourse has thinned under the weight of scandal cycles and factional suspicion, Rasool’s tone feels oddly out of time and perhaps because of that, newly relevant.
He doesn’t offer slogans. He doesn’t flatter despair. He speaks as someone who has lived through collapse before and learned that societies can only be rebuilt through dignity, imagination and disciplined coexistence.
Whether Rasool has a role to play in South Africa’s political future is not this article’s question. What matters is that his voice reopens
a set of inquiries the nation has neglected: What does leadership sound like when rooted in memory rather than improvisation? What becomes of a democracy that forgets how to hold tension without fracture?And what might it mean, in this fractious age, to once again listen to those who speak softly but carry long, hard-won experience?
In a country searching for moral ballast, one wonders whether Rasool’s voice is merely timely or necessary.
Usman Ali is a charity consultant and former head of marketing and fundraising at MADE in Europe, as well as VP Higher Education at NUSUK (2010-2012). Based between Istanbul and Manchester, he advocates for equality and community integration.