On the rampage against South Africa, Trump administration kicks out ambassador

South Africa's Ambassador to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool. | AP

WASHINGTON—On Friday, March 14, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio kicked out South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool. The language Rubio used in expelling Ambassador Rasool was crude in the extreme.

Evidently Rubio and Trump do not agree with the maxim of Otto von Bismarck, the creator of modern Germany: “Always observe the amenities: Even a declaration of war should be phrased politely.” In a social media post, Rubio called Rasool a “race-baiting politician who hates America and POTUS.”

Some speculate that the expulsion came as a result of criticisms Rasool had made of the MAGA movement in the United States—criticisms widely shared worldwide and within the United States itself. But it is also likely that the Trump administration is gunning for South Africa for other reasons, as well.

Target: South Africa

Trump’s DOGE chief Elon Musk has been ramping up accusations against his native country in recent weeks, saying it is discriminating against white farmers in its land ownership laws. He refers to a recent Expropriation Act passed by the government aimed at addressing the holdovers of apartheid, in which 75% of the country’s private land is still owned by the tiny 7% of Afrikaners. Musk calls it a “genocide of white people in South Africa,” echoing white supremacist conspiracies like the “great replacement theory.”

Picking up the U.S. far-right’s long commitment to denigrating post-apartheid South Africa, Trump has cut off all U.S. aid bound for the country and offered refugee status and a “rapid pathway to citizenship” for white farmers. After decades of racist rule, this revision of history is turning perpetrators into victims.

Then there are also South Africa’s international ties which are at odds with the Trump administration’s imperial agenda. The country has significant trade ties with China and is a key partner in the Belt and Road Initiative and in the BRICS group of nations.

South Africa has also had a long-term friendship with socialist Cuba, a country that Trump, and especially Rubio with his family’s Cuban exile background, heartily detest.

More immediately, U.S. anger is also probably related to the fact that South Africa has taken the Israeli government to the International Criminal Court, specifically with the charge of genocide in Gaza. This intervention by South Africa has been getting support from other countries as different as Ireland and Cuba, with the list growing. The United States is one of Israel’s closest supporters in the Gaza matter and has made threats against the personnel of the International Criminal Court, including sanctions.

Who is Ebrahim Rasool?

Rasool is an African National Congress politician classified in uniquely South African terminology as both a “Coloured” and a “Cape Malay.” This requires some explanation. When the Dutch set up their initial settlement on the location of the modern city of Cape Town, their initial idea was simply to provide ships sailing to and from the valuable Dutch colony of Indonesia with a place to stop and take on fresh water, food, and other supplies.

On the return trip, Netherlanders who had been living in Indonesia brought with them slaves, servants, employees, and even some high-born refugees from their colony, and settled them in the Cape Town area, where they were employed by the settler population in food production, domestic service, and all sorts of other occupations. Because these people spoke languages roughly grouped as “Malay” and they lived at the Cape, future generations in South Africa have referred to them as “Cape Malays.” They also brought Islam with them, and eventually, the first mosques.

This population mixed with the original inhabitants of that part of Southwestern South Africa, namely the speakers of the Khoisan languages, whose numbers had been greatly reduced and whose community institutions had been disrupted by violent repression and introduced diseases, with Europeans and with other Africans, thus forming the social category called “Coloured.”

This population picked up a simplified version of Dutch as their language, and this developed into today’s Afrikaans. Some of the earliest written texts of Afrikaans, using Arabic script, were put out for use in the Islamic worship services of this “Cape Malay” population. Those are the origins of Rasool and of quite a few other important figures in South African politics, literature, and cultural affairs.

Many such people have shared a birthplace in the famous “District Six” near downtown Cape Town with Rasool and his family. District Six is nostalgically remembered by many as an oasis of multiracial cooperation and freedom, as well as cultural and especially musical creativity, in the otherwise racially divided and white-dominated country. This is where Ebraham Rasool was born, as were many other important political activists, including the writer and anti-apartheid militant Alex La Guma.

But at the end of the 1960s, the fascist apartheid government declared that District Six would be for white people only, even though just a tiny proportion of its population was white. Then, the police and the bulldozers moved in. By 1973, in spite of strong resistance by the inhabitants, District Six was only a memory. The Rasool family was pushed out, along with thousands of their neighbors, to the barren Cape Flats area to the Southeast.

After the apartheid regime was ousted in the elections of 1994, the new government headed by Nelson Mandela made strong efforts to remediate the injury that had been inflicted on the former inhabitants of District Six.

This is the history that caused Rasool and many, many others to denounce racism everywhere they see it, whether in South Africa or Israel or the United States of America.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Emile Schepers

Born in South Africa, Emile Schepers is a veteran civil and immigrant rights activist. He has a doctorate in cultural anthropology from Northwestern University. He is active in the struggle for immigrant rights, in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, and several other issues. He writes from Northern Virginia.