Ebrahim Rasool
*Ebrahim Rasool was born on July 15, 1962. He is a Coloured South African politician and diplomat.
Ebrahim Rasool was born in District Six, Cape Town, to a Muslim family of mixed English-Javanese-Dutch-Indian heritage. Since he was classified as Coloured by the apartheid system at nine years old, he and his family were forcefully evicted from the area due to the government declaring the area a "Whites-only" residential suburb. Rasool attended Livingstone High School in Claremont in 1980. He studied at the University of Cape Town and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1983 and a Higher Diploma in Education in 1984.
During this period, he became involved in student politics. He was a teacher at Spine Road High School in 1985. He soon became involved in the anti-apartheid movement. He held senior positions in the United Democratic Front and the African National Congress.
He served prison sentences and was also frequently placed under house arrest. Between 1991 and 1994, he was an assistant to the Rector of the University of the Western Cape and the Treasurer of the ANC's provincial structure. Rasool was elected to the Western Cape Provincial Legislature in 1994 following the country's first democratic election. He served as the MEC for Health and Social Services from 1994 to 1998. In 1998, he was elected Provincial Chairperson of the ANC. He was appointed the MEC for Finance and Economic Development in 2001 until he was the 5th Premier of the Western Cape in 2004. Rasool is married to Rosieda Shabodien. They have two children together.
Following the arrest of gang leader Quinton Marinus, or "Mr. Big," Rasool started receiving death threats allegedly from the Chinese Triads. In 2008, he was recalled from the position of premier by the National Executive Committee of the ANC, as the ANC leadership had disapproved of him giving preference to the large Muslim and Cape Coloured populations in the Western Cape. Lynne Brown, the MEC for Economic Development and Tourism, was designated as his successor. In 2010, before taking up his position as ambassador to the United States, an investigation was launched into allegations that Rasool was paying a political reporter in a mainstream newspaper to write articles that portrayed him favorably. The investigation stalled due to material witnesses refusing to cooperate with the investigation.
Rasool was a special advisor to the President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki before he was elected a Member of the National Assembly in April 2009. President Jacob Zuma appointed him South Africa's Ambassador to the United States in July 2010. He returned to South Africa in February 2015. In April 2018, the ANC National Head of Elections announced Rasool as the party's Provincial Elections Head for the 2019 general elections.
Rasool was 75th on the ANC's national party list for the 2024 general election, but this was not high enough for him to be returned to the National Assembly, given the ANC's decline in electoral support at the election. In March 2025, while serving as Ambassador to the US, Rasool was declared persona non grata by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, expelling him from the United States.
