By Mafika Damane Sangweni
In 2008, as a first-year student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, I entered a lecture hall carrying what many young students mistake for understanding — confidence shaped more by opinion than by knowledge.
The room was alive with certainty. We were ready to speak, to argue, to assert.
Then an elderly professor, composed and deliberate, posed a question that would unsettle that confidence in ways I only came to appreciate with time.
“What is the one subject that everyone believes they understand, yet very few truly do?”
Answers came quickly: Economics, law, philosophy. Each response was delivered with conviction. The professor listened patiently, then, after a pause long enough to expose our haste, she said quietly:
“Politics”.
Silence followed — not agreement, but discomfort.
She explained that politics lives everywhere: in the price of bread, in the allocation of land, in the routes of buses, in
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