South Africa's expelled US ambassador says he has 'no regrets'

S'thembile Cele, Bloomberg News on Mar 23, 2025

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The South African ambassador expelled from the U.S. returned to his home country, saying he has “no regrets” about the comments that led to him being told to leave.

Ebrahim Rasool was welcomed back on Sunday by throngs of supporters when he arrived at Cape Town international airport. “I will wear the badge of persona non grata with dignity, knowing that I have done the right thing,” he said, in comments broadcast live on national television.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier this month in a post on X that Rasool is “no longer welcome” in the country after he made comments about President Donald Trump, escalating a running feud between Washington and Pretoria.

Relations between South Africa and its second-largest trading partner have soured since Trump falsely accused the southern African nation of unlawfully seizing land from the white minority. The South African authorities have not confiscated any private land since the end of apartheid in 1994.

“Sometimes you must get some distance between a moment designed to humiliate you and the anger that would come from it and then expressing yourself,” Rasool said on Sunday, as he asked for a “week or two” to consider his response to the events.

Rasool said the U.S. under Trump has changed. “It is not the U.S. of Obama, it is not the U.S. of Clinton, it is a different U.S. and therefore our language must change,” he said.

“Not only to transactionality but also a language that can penetrate a group that has clearly identified a fringe white community in South Africa as their constituency surrounded by a white diaspora in the White House. That is what we are up against.”

The diplomatic episode is only the latest in a bitter, racially charged feud between the two countries, spurred in part by Trump’s South African-born billionaire adviser Elon Musk, who has spread the conspiracy theory of a “genocide” against South Africa’s White farmers.

That led to a White House executive order halting U.S. foreign assistance to South Africa and declaring that the U.S. refugee system would give priority to Afrikaner “victims of unjust racial discrimination.”

Rasool said he would be meeting with South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa on Monday to report on the actions that led to his dismissal as well as his view on relations between the two nations.

South Africa should consider forfeiting trade deals and ties for the duration of the Trump term if it meant compromising its values, said Rasool, who also served as South Africa’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2010 to 2015. While Africa’s most industrialized economy is not a global economic or military superpower, it occupies the role of being a “moral superpower,” he said.

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