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 the tensions within families, and in the invisible structures that determine who has power and who does not.
Everyone participates in it. Everyone has an opinion about it. But very few understand that politics is not opinion — it is a science. It has laws, it has logic, it has contradictions, and it moves not according to sentiment, but according to material conditions and the balance of forces.
That lesson has remained with me because it captures, with precision, the current moment.
The appointment of Roelf Meyer as South Africa’s Ambassador to the United States by President Cyril Ramaphosa has triggered a wave of commentary — much of it loud, confident, and profoundly disconnected from the scientific logic of politics.
It is commentary driven by moral posturing, selective memory, and, in some instances, a refusal to engage the material realities that define our global position.
There are those who reduce this appointment to a question of symbolism. They invoke apartheid as though history were static, as though individuals are permanently fixed in the roles they once occupied, untouched by the very processes of contradiction and transformation that define political development.
In doing so, they mistake posture for principle and sentiment for analysis.
But politics does not operate on sentiment. It operates on necessity.
South Africa exists within a global system structured by uneven power, where the United States remains a central node of economic, financial, and ideological influence.
Trade, investment, and geopolitical positioning all converge in Washington.
To engage this terrain requires more than comfort. It requires clarity. It requires an understanding that diplomacy is not a theatre of moral exhibition, but an arena of struggle in which national interests must be advanced with precision.
At a time when figures such as Donald Trump have sought to construct a reactionary and deliberately distorted narrative about South Africa — portraying transformation as persecution and justice as instability — the question before us is not whether we approve of the messenger. The question is whether the messenger can confront power with credibility.
Roelf Meyer is not an accidental choice. He is a strategic deployment.
He embodies contradiction not as confusion, but as movement. He emerged from within the apartheid system — a system designed to entrench minority domination — and became part of the very process that dismantled it.
Alongside leaders such as Nelson Mandela, he participated in negotiations that transformed a potentially catastrophic conflict into a democratic breakthrough.
This is not a weakness. It is political capital, because Meyer can do what few others can.
He can stand before sceptical and even hostile audiences and speak with an authority that is neither theoretical nor borrowed. He can say: I was part of that system. I saw its limits. I participated in its end. And I stand here not to defend it, but to explain why it had to fall.
He can further assert that South Africa’s transformation agenda is not a project of revenge, but one of reconstruction.
That policies such as Black Economic Empowerment are not instruments of reverse oppression, but deliberate interventions aimed at bridging an economy historically divided between privilege and exclusion — between what has often been described as the first and second economies.
That what is misrepresented as instability is, in truth, the difficult but necessary work of restructuring one of the most unequal societies in the world.
This is what gives diplomacy its force: not abstract argument, but lived authority.
AfriForum unsettled
It is precisely for this reason that organisations such as AfriForum find themselves unsettled by this appointment.
Their discomfort is not rooted in principle, but in disruption. Meyer complicates their narrative.
He cannot be easily reduced, easily dismissed, or easily instrumentalised in the construction of a distorted international image of South Africa. He is, in himself, a rebuttal.
And critically, even the most hostile occupant of the White House — regardless of disposition or ideological inclination — will still be compelled to accept his credentials.
This is not a matter of goodwill. It is the structured reality of international relations.
States do not engage because they agree; they engage because they must.
South Africa does not choose the terrain on which it must struggle. It chooses how to fight on that terrain.
Transformation in South Africa is not a moral appeal seeking approval from external powers. It is a material project aimed at restructuring patterns of ownership, access, and opportunity that were historically engineered along racial lines.
It is the continuation of struggle — no longer waged through insurrection, but through policy, negotiation, and strategic engagement within a global system that remains deeply unequal.
In this context, the deployment of Roelf Meyer is neither contradiction nor compromise. It is coherence.
It reflects a political maturity that understands that history is not a burden to be hidden, but a resource to be used. That those who have traversed the full arc of South Africa’s transition — from oppression to negotiation to reconstruction — carry a credibility that cannot be manufactured.
We are not sending an ambassador to be liked. We are sending one to be effective.
And in politics, effectiveness is not measured by applause. It is measured by outcomes.
That lecture in 2008 ended with a warning that has only grown sharper with time: those who treat politics as opinion will always be surprised by its outcomes. Those who understand its logic, however, are rarely surprised — they are prepared.
The current debate reveals a simple truth. Many still speak about politics. Far fewer understand it.
History does not wait for understanding. It moves — with or without it.
Mafika Damane Sangweni is an ANC member of the Professor Sibankulu Branch
in Newcastle.
INSIDE POLITICS
