Belinda Bozzoli joined Parliament as a DA MP in May 2014. I was greatly looking forward to welcoming her. She was – to compress her more complex politics – a social liberal. We had just lost ours in Lindiwe Mazibuko, a personal tragedy for her and a great loss to the party. Lindiwe was leading a critical mass of very talented, aspirational young liberals in the party and now there was a void.
I had known Belinda since the 1980s. We were fellow sociologists, she at Wits and I at the University of Cape Town. We both worked with Blade Nzimande then to establish the first nonracial South African Sociology Association. In Parliament, she now had to square off with Nzimande, who led the ministry responsible for higher education. A former deputy vice-chancellor at one of South Africa’s most prestigious universities, Belinda was masterful at it.