The US is expelling South Africa’s ambassador to Washington, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio describing him as a “race-baiting politician”.
In a post on X, Rubio accused Ebrahim Rasool of hating the US and President Donald Trump, and said the ambassador was “no longer welcome in our great country”.
The office for South Africa’s president on Saturday called the decision “regrettable”, adding that the country remained committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship with the US.
The rare move by the US marks the latest development in rising tensions between the two countries.
While lower-ranking diplomats are sometimes expelled, it’s highly unusual in the US for it to happen to a more senior official.
In his post on Friday, Rubio linked to an article from the right-wing outlet Breitbart that quoted some of Rasool’s recent remarks made during an online lecture about the Trump administration.
At the event, Rasool said Trump was “mobilising a supremacism” and trying to “project white victimhood as a dog whistle” as the white population faced becoming a minority in the US.
“We see it in the domestic politics of the USA, the Maga 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,” he said.
He suggested that South Africa was under attack because “we are the historical antidote to supremacism”.
In response, Rubio called Rasool “PERSONA NON GRATA”, referencing the Latin phrase for “unwelcome person”.
Ties between the US and South Africa have been deteriorating since Trump took office.
An executive order last month – which froze US assistance to South Africa – cited “unjust racial discrimination” against white Afrikaners, largely descended from Dutch settlers who first arrived in the 17th Century.
It references a new law, the Expropriation Act, that it claims targets Afrikaners by allowing the government to take away private land.
“As long as South Africa continues to support bad actors on the world stage and allows violent attacks on innocent disfavoured minority farmers, the United States will stop aid and assistance to the country,” a statement from the White House said at the time.
South Africa’s 2022 census noted that white people – including Afrikaners – made up 7.2% of the population. However, according to a 2018 land audit by the South African government, white farmers owned 72% of the country’s individually-held farmland.
South Africa’s government, which is made up of 10 parties led by the African National Congress (ANC), said earlier that the US president’s actions were based on “a campaign of misinformation and propaganda aimed at misrepresenting our great nation”.
It added no land had been seized without compensation and said this would only happen in exceptional circumstances, such as if land was needed for public use and all other avenues to acquire the land had been exhausted.
A fact sheet from the White House states the country “blatantly discriminates against ethnic minority descendants of settler groups”.
Rasool – who previously served as US ambassador from 2010 to 2015 – was himself forcibly removed from his home in Cape Town’s District Six as a child after it was declared a white area under the Apartheid government.
He would later describe the eviction as a significant moment in his upbringing which guided his future.
Rasool became Pretoria’s ambassador to the US again in 2024.
Unnamed sources in the South African government told online news site Daily Maverick at the time that he was thought to be well placed to deal with a Trump administration because of the experience and contacts he had acquired during his first stint as ambassador.
