The South African ambassador who was expelled from the US and declared persona non grata by the Trump administration was welcomed home on Sunday by hundreds of supporters who sang songs praising him.
Crowds at Cape Town International airport surrounded Ebrahim Rasool and his wife Rosieda as they emerged in the arrivals terminal in their home town, and they needed a police escort to help them navigate their way through the building.
“A declaration of persona non grata is meant to humiliate you,” Rasool told the supporters as he addressed them with a megaphone. “But when you return to crowds like this, and with warmth … like this, then I will wear my persona non grata as a badge of dignity.”
“It was not our choice to come home, but we come home with no regrets,” he said.
Rasool was expelled for comments he made on a webinar that included him saying the Maga movement was partly a response to “a supremacist instinct”.
Rasool said on his return home that it was important for South Africa to fix its relationship with the US after Donald Trump punished the country and accused it of taking an anti-American stance, even before the decision to expel him.
The US president issued an executive order last month cutting all funding to South Africa, alleging its government is supporting the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Iran, and pursuing anti-white policies at home.
“We don’t come here to say we are anti-American,” Rasool said to the crowd. “We are not here to call on you to throw away our interests with the United States.”
They were the ex-ambassador’s first public comments since the Trump administration declared him persona non grata over a week ago, removed his diplomatic immunities and privileges and gave him until this Friday to leave the US.
It is highly unusual for the US to expel an ambassador.
Rasool was declared persona non grata by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, in a post on X on 14 March. Rubio said Rasool was a “race-baiting politician” who hates the US and Trump.
Although Rubio did not directly cite a reason, his post linked to a story by the conservative Breitbart news site that reported on a talk Rasool gave in a webinar organised by a South African thinktank. In his talk, Rasool spoke in academic language of the Trump administration’s crackdowns on diversity and equity programmes and on immigration, and mentioned the possibility of a US where white people soon would no longer be in the majority.
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“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,” Rasool said in the talk.
On Sunday, he said he stood by those comments and characterised them as merely alerting intellectuals and political leaders in South Africa that the US and its politics had changed.
“It is not the US of Obama, it is not the US of Clinton, it is a different US and therefore our language must change,” Rasool said. “I would stand by my analysis because we were analysing a political phenomenon, not a personality, not a nation, and not even a government.”
He also said South Africa would resist pressure from the US, and anyone else, to drop its case at the international court of justice accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The Trump administration has cited that case against US ally Israel as one of the reasons it alleges South Africa is anti-American.
