By: Gillian Schutte
Political philosopher Frantz Fanon’s warning about the colonised intellectual rings true today as Redi Tlhabi navigates her role in South Africa’s media landscape, embodying the complex relationship between power, recognition, and betrayal.
Fanon warned that the colonised intellectual, intoxicated by proximity to power, becomes emissary of the coloniser in her own land. She is rewarded abroad, adorned with credentials, and sent back to discipline her own people in the master’s idiom. The tragedy is not simply betrayal but the psychic disavowal that makes betrayal feel like virtue. Redi Tlhabi now embodies this role with unsettling clarity.
She entered the national consciousness as Redi Direko, working in SABC current affairs between 2002 and 2005, reporting on the fragile birth of the African Union, Sierra Leone’s demilitarisation and Rwanda’s post-genocide transition. By 2005 she had become the voice of Talk Radio 702, hosting a daily show for more than a decade. She chastised politicians and soothed liberal donors, embodying a modern African professionalism that looked critical yet reassured capital. In 2008 she fronted ENCA’s 24-hour launch, becoming the first face to greet viewers on South Africa’s new rolling news channel.
The decisive crucible came in 2009 with The Big Debate. The show carried the hallmarks of artifice: it looked urgent, staged conflict, but was framed for international broadcasters and the donor gaze. Produced by Ben Cashdan, a British-born man who arrived in South Africa in the mid-1990s, attached himself to Mandela’s presidency and whose earlier history remains conspicuously absent, the programme became the perfect grooming ground. Direko, who became Tlhabi after marrying Johannesburg gynaecologist Brian Tlhabi in 2010, mastered the skill of performing defiance while knowing the parameters were fixed. It is the gallant effort of pretending one is resisting when one is already repeating the master’s script.
From there she was export-ready. Al Jazeera gave her South2North. The BBC placed her at Newsday in 2022. National Geographic made her the face of Women of Impact. She moderated for the UN General Assembly, COP summits, World Bank meetings and The Elders. She shared stages with Oprah, Kofi Annan and John Kerry. Her CV accumulated the honours of donor royalty: Section27, Women in Cities International, the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity at Columbia and the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the UN Global Journalists Corps. She became living proof that empire rewards its interpreters.
By September 2023 she was summoned to Washington to testify before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa. She warned of South Africa’s democratic fragility, invoked Russian interference and pleaded with Congress to keep PEPFAR and AGOA intact. These invitations do not arrive from nowhere. They are brokered by Atlantic Council, CSIS, Wilson Center and the donor-contractor nexus of Brussels, Google, Gates and Soros. The prize was her reach: a polished Black South African voice who could reassure Washington that its story would echo back into African homes.
When criticism mounted, Chris Roper came to her defence. Roper, once Mail & Guardian editor and now Deputy CEO of Code for Africa, inhabits the same donor ecosystem. Code thrives on EU, NED, Google and Gates funding. His move was predictable: protect the operator, protect the network. In this system, emissaries are never left exposed.
Her current pulpit is The Readiness Report, a Daily Maverick podcast — the most overtly donor-aligned outlet in South Africa. And it was here, just this week, that her role became unmistakable. She used General Rudzani Maphwanya’s visit to Tehran, where he met Iran’s army chief and condemned the bloodletting in Gaza, as a pretext for imperial ventriloquism. Her tone grew urgent, verging on hysterical. “I want you to hear this. I need you to listen.” She repeated her nausea, threatened to vomit, as though retching could substitute for analysis.
Here the psychoanalytic symptom revealed itself. The nausea, the bodily threat to expel, is the mark of disavowal. She cannot admit that she speaks for empire, so her body stages the denial. It is the unconscious saying what the polished voice cannot: that the script she repeats is indigestible, that it sickens even her, that to carry the coloniser’s message requires constant repression. But rather than confront that truth, she projects the sickness outward, onto DIRCO, onto Iran, onto Russia, onto those who defy Washington.
She warned South Africans against even imagining that Iran could be an ally, or that Russia and China could be trusted partners. BRICS was permitted only “within reason.” Iran was reduced to a caricature of women-killers, erasing the complex reality of a society where women are highly educated and publicly visible. Russia was cast as rogue. The disciplining was unmistakable. South Africans were told to abandon their own agency, to accept the master’s map of the world.
And they have rejected her. Black South Africans have seen through the artifice and turned away. They denounce her with the bitterness reserved for betrayal. They call her an Uncle Ruckus in high heels, a ventriloquist’s doll for empire. They say her words drip with contempt for African intelligence, that her voice no longer belongs to them. Her nausea, her insistence on being heard, her sanctimony — all of it is read as the arrogance of someone who has crossed over. She is mocked, derided, cast out of the circle of respect. In the townships and the streets, in the comment threads and the conversations, the verdict repeats itself: she is no longer one of us.
Fanon warned that colonialism would implant in the colonised a desire for the coloniser’s recognition, and Lacan would call this the ego-ideal: the subject lives through the gaze of the Other. Tlhabi’s entire trajectory bears this mark. She speaks less to South Africans than to Washington and Brussels, performing Africanness for their applause. The contradiction tears her in two — an African body carrying a European superego. Zizek might call this the perversion of ideology: the subject knows the system is violent, knows it erases her people’s sovereignty, yet clings to it all the more because her status depends on it.
History will not absolve her. Redi Tlhabi may remain adored on donor stages, but at home she has become the mirror of Fanon’s most dire warning — the colonised intellectual who betrays her people while convincing herself she is saving them, trapped in a psychic knot where empire is both her master and her mirror.
Fanon’s warning about the colonised intellectual rings true today as Redi Tlhabi navigates her role in South Africa’s media landscape, embodying the complex relationship between power, recognition, and betrayal.
