Muslimah Today, Durban’s only conference for Muslim women, hosted by ILM for Women, a division of the Institute for Learning and Motivation – South Africa (ILM-SA) takes place Saturday 29 August, 9am-4.30pm, at the NMJ Islamic Centre. Speakers include award-winning author Shubnum Khan and Ebrahim Rasool (ER), the former premier of the Western Cape.
Rasool – a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle – worked alongside Nelson Mandela during South Africa’s transition to democracy, engaging religious communities and laying groundwork for negotiations. He later served twice as South Africa’s Ambassador to the USA — the second time ending when the Trump administration declared him persona non grata for condemning supremacist policies. The Springfield Weekly Gazette (SWG) caught up with him ahead of his appearance at Muslimah Today.
SWG:Your convictions during the anti-apartheid struggle cost you your job, imprisonment, and years underground. Where did you find the resolve to keep going, even when the cost was so personal?
ER:There can be no faith without sacrifice. For me, this became real when freed from fear. Pain became palatable and sacrifice a bearable burden to my family. And so, imprisonment with its interrogations, dismissal as a teacher, and family harassment by the security police, are moments, not of humiliation and defeat, but of growth, resilience, and living out your faith.
SWG: You worked alongside Nelson Mandela during the transition to democracy, engaging religious communities and laying groundwork for negotiations. What did that experience teach you about the role faith communities can play in a fractured society?
ER: I was fortunate to live through the last era of apartheid, the transition to democracy, and the first generation of free governance. I anticipated faith communities healing a broken nation. However, they themselves needed healing from complicity in apartheid, silence against tyranny, and even those resisting apartheid needed healing from its brutalities.
SWG: Your Muslimah Today talk is titled “Standing Firm: When your convictions cost you everything.” Was there a moment recently — not just in the struggle years — where holding your convictions came at a real cost?
ER: The most recent moment of sacrifice was as ambassador when faced with Trump’s outright lies about SA’s ‘white genocide’, the demand to withdraw our charge of genocide against Israel, and punitive measures (tariffs, trade conditionality, and aid withdrawal) against South Africa. I faced a crossroads: silently smile through all of these, or bear witness to the truth? I chose to identify Trump’s instinct for white supremacism. That earned me a label of persona non grata. But I was prepared in a previous moment with a choice of silence or opposition in the face of the ANC being ruled by a morally suspect person, Jacob Zuma. I chose opposition and was recalled as Premier of the Western Cape.
SWG: You and Rosieda will be doing a joint session on marriage and family. What does it take to build a partnership strong enough to survive imprisonment, exile, public office and everything in between?
ER: The most enduring marriages are those between equals, as the guarantor of sustainability, with love, happiness, endurance, and mutual growth, rather than submissiveness with surrender of one to the objectives and the activities of the other. I married Rosieda as an equal human being, an equal activist and leader, equally busy with her life, and therefore, we learnt to negotiate how to complement each other and not subtract from each other and the family. This creates the endurance needed through trials and tribulations.
SWG: You seem to always be on the move. Do you ever relax, and if so, what do you do to unwind?
ER: The crucial relaxation is the relaxation at every moment of your life: don’t take yourself too seriously, you are simply an instrument of the Divine, whose design will continue with or without you! Ironically, then you find time for other modes of relaxation: like rugby; reading; cooking; long walks with Rosieda; and swimming in the ocean.
Tickets for the Muslimah Today Conference are R320 and pensioners’ and students’ tickets are R220. Tickets include lunch, refreshments, stationery and a goodie bag. Please visit www.ilmsa.co.za/MT for bookings. Queries may be WhatsApped to 0670568975.
