The US is expelling South Africa’s ambassador to Washington, with the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, accusing the envoy of hating the US and Donald Trump.
“South Africa’s ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country,” Rubio posted on X on Friday.
Rubio accused ambassador Ebrahim Rasool of being “a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS”, referring to Trump by his White House X account handle. “We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered persona non grata.”
Neither Rubio nor the state department gave an immediate explanation for the decision. However, Rubio linked to a Breitbart story about a talk Rasool had given on Friday as part of a South African thinktank’s webinar in which he spoke about actions taken by the Trump administration in the context of a US where white people would soon no longer be a majority.
Rasool pointed to Elon Musk’s outreach to far-right figures in Europe, calling it a “dog whistle” in a global movement trying to rally people who see themselves as part of an “embattled white community”.
He must leave by 21 March, a state department spokesperson said on Saturday.
Rasool is a former anti-apartheid campaigner who served time in prison for his activism and went on to become a politician in the African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela, the country’s first post-apartheid president.
The expulsion of an ambassador is a very rare move by the US, although lower-ranking diplomats are more frequently targeted with persona non grata status.
In response, South Africa’s presidency said in an online post that it had noted the “regrettable expulsion of South Africa’s ambassador” and urged everyone to maintain the “established diplomatic decorum” on the matter.
It is the latest development in rising tensions between Washington and Pretoria. In February, Trump froze US aid to South Africa, citing a law in the country that he alleges allows land to be seized from white farmers.
Last week, Trump further fuelled tensions, saying South Africa’s farmers were welcome to settle in the US after repeating his accusations that the government was “confiscating” land from white people.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that “any farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to citizenship”.
One of Trump’s closest allies is the South African-born billionaire Musk, who has accused the South African president Cyril Ramaphosa’s government of having “openly racist ownership laws”.
South Africa was ruled by white Afrikaner leaders during apartheid, which violently repressed the country’s black majority, including forcing them to live in segregated townships and rural “homelands”. Afrikaners are descended mainly from the Dutch, who began colonising South Africa in 1652, as well as French Huguenot refugees sponsored by the Dutch.
More than three decades after white minority rule ended, South Africa remains hugely unequal, with land and wealth still largely concentrated among white people who make up 7% of the population, about half of whom are native Afrikaans speakers, while black people are 81%.
However, some white South Africans claim they are discriminated against, often citing the country’s affirmative action laws.
During a G20 event in South Africa last month, Ramaphosa said he had a wonderful call with Trump soon after the US leader took office in January. But relations later “seemed to go a little bit off the rails”, he said.
In Friday’s webinar, Rasool, speaking by videoconference, used academic language to talk about the Trump administration’s crackdowns on diversity and equity programmes and immigration.
The South African ambassador said: “The supremacist assault on incumbency, we see it in the domestic politics of the USA, the Maga movement, the Make America Great Again movement, as a response not simply to a supremacist instinct, but to very clear data that shows great demographic shifts in the USA in which the voting electorate in the USA is projected to become 48% white.”
With Agence France-Presse and Associated Press
