SOUTH AFRICA: RELATIONS WITH USA CONTINUING DOWNHILL
Highlights:
Trump Administration expels the highly incompetent Ebrahim Rasool, who served as South Africa’s Ambassador to USA.
AfriForum propagandists continue to sabotage USA-South Africa relations.
Leo Brent Bozell III, has been nominated as US Ambassador to South Africa. If this nomination is confirmed, then US-South Africa relations will deteriorate at break-neck speed given Bonzell’s past as a notorious pro-apartheid activist in the 1980s, and his current gig as a fanatical pro-Israel advocate.
With South Africa’s ambassadorial post in Washington DC still vacant, President Cyril Ramaphosa has appointed former ANC politician and businessman Mcebisi Jonas as his Special Envoy to USA to repair relations with the Trump Administration.
A white South African Ambassador may possibly be in the offing.
Yet another write-up on South Africa. Just when I try to move on, another international relations drama involving that “rainbow nation” pulls me back in. Since the publication of my second article on the rapidly deteriorating diplomatic relationship between United States and South Africa, a few things have happened. I’ll start from where I left off.
On 15 February 2025, there was a well-attended rally in front of the United States Embassy in the South African capital city of Pretoria. The rally attendees were Afrikaners who wanted to “appreciate” Trump for signing an executive order offering (unwanted) asylum that would enable them to transition from landowning Afrikaners in South Africa to landless Amerikaner refugees in the United States. While not interested in leaving their tropical paradise to become refugees abroad, those Afrikaners at the rally were excited that Trump noticed that they even exist.
The attendees reiterated their grievances over the discriminatory “affirmative action” laws of South Africa, which in my humble opinion, have done nothing for ordinary blacks while alienating large segments of the white populace.
Once they were past espousing reasonable grievances about “affirmative action”, the attendees shifted with haste to the business of identifying themselves as unreconstructed apartheid nostalgics with a melodious rendition of the national anthem of their dear departed apartheid state.
Watching the video of such a wonderful rendition, I sort of understood why they mourn their loss. The apartheid state had attended to the needs of its pale-skinned citizens, reserving 87% of South Africa’s total landmass for the exclusive use of whites, which meant that large swathes of the country were completely off-limits to blacks. Inside those reserved white areas were exquisite cities, towns and suburbs with superb infrastructure comparable to any first world European nation.
Whenever more land was needed to expand white settlement, the autocratic government of the apartheid state promptly sent heavily militarized policemen to use extreme violence to force thousands of recalcitrant non-whites out of their districts to make way for civil construction companies to demolish squalid shelters to create room for the building of excellent suburbs for the “more deserving” white citizens.
If the non-white area in the process of being converted to a white suburb had been inhabited by black Africans in the past, then new infrastructure was also built to extend previously non-existent telephone services, electricity, water supply and other amenities.
It was all understandable because the apartheid South African state claimed blacks could only be “citizens” of the tiny Bantustan pseudo-nations that it had created between 1956 and 1977 on tiny patches of South African territory. To the dismay of the apartheid regime, only a small fraction of the black population ever agreed to resettle permanently in those Bantustans despite several forced relocations.
The vast majority of blacks continued to live and work in squalid, segregated semi-urban black townships located within South Africa proper. The apartheid state declared them “foreign guest workers”.
Since they were “foreigners” underserving of government-provided basic amenities, blacks resident in South Africa proper had to contend with open sewers, little or no electricity, no proper water supply systems and extreme police violence that made the authorities of Jim Crow Southern USA appear to be angels in comparison.
To the best of my knowledge, no segregationist state government in Jim Crow Southern USA ever emulated South African apartheid leader Daniel F. Malan in assuming temporary dictatorial powers in order to use extreme violence to suppress peaceful demonstrations against racial discrimination. In the years following the end of Malan’s tenure as apartheid leader, subsequent anti-apartheid demonstrations would mostly assume the form of outright riots.
I am unaware of any segregationist state government in USA that followed the example of apartheid leader Balthazar Johannes Vorster in enforcing strict media censorship within South Africa. Vorster banned books, including those written by dissident Afrikaner writers such as André Brink and Breyten Breytenbach.
Under Vorster’s rule, English-language South African media was harassed incessantly for refusing to adhere to stringent censorship laws. White newspaper journalists such as Laurence Gandar and Benjamin Pogrund were arrested and prosecuted for publishing news reports about appalling conditions inside blacks-only prisons, which included lurid tales of assaults on prisoners, sodomy and unhygienic conditions in prison cells.
Vorster also dispensed with American segregationist pretense of fair court trials by allowing apartheid state police force to detain, without trial, “anyone who might endanger the maintenance of law and order.” The police was not under any obligation to provide any information about the identity of any anti-apartheid activist being detained, why that person had been arrested, and where he or she was being detained.
Even the worst segregationist state government in Jim Crow Southern USA was still obliged to serve electricity and water to segregated black neighbourhoods, which often had to make do with public facilities and infrastructure that were vastly inferior to those in white neighbourhoods.
Segregationist authorities in Southern USA were mostly relaxed or indifferent to black education in segregated schools and often left black administrators of such schools to manage them as they pleased. To comply with the laughable Separate But Equal legal doctrine, segregationist Southern US authorities would occasionally provide meagre funds to those black-only schools.
The apartheid South African state was neither relaxed nor indifferent to black education. Not satisfied with segregated schooling, the apartheid regime frequently intervened to inhibit black education whenever it was possible. One intervention too many was the spark that ignited the civil unrest by black African schoolchildren, known as the Soweto Uprising of 1976.
Right from the inception of the apartheid state under the Malan regime (1948-1954), the authorities took a strong interest in black education in South Africa. The first apartheid state Minister For Native Affairs, Hendrik Verwoerd, clashed with Christian missionaries who ran schools educating blacks over their academic curriculum. The passing of the Bantu Education Act (1953) cut off subsidy to those Christian missionary schools, causing nearly all of them to shut down, and forcing black African pupils to attend apartheid regime-mandated schools “specially designed for their race”.
Verwoerd complained that Christian missionary schools were teaching black Africans “unnecessary” knowledge and skills. He explained it as follows:
“There is no place for [the Bantu] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour... What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?”
Verwoerd helpfully added that government-established schools would only impart knowledge necessary for blacks to enter the unskilled labour market.
The long term legacy of Verwoerd’s brand of “black education” is still felt today, 31 years after the apartheid state ceased to exist. A long succession of corrupt ANC governments of post-apartheid South Africa have failed woefully to reverse that mess.
That has led to the current situation in which better educated black immigrants from poorer African countries such as Somalia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and D.R. Congo have been able to build successful lives to the envy of many native black South Africans.
From time to time, that boiling envy erupts into deadly xenophobic violence during which business enterprises owned by those immigrants are destroyed. In many cases, those black immigrants themselves have been hacked and burned to death by natives resentful of their achievements.
Of course, the black natives often excuse their horrendous behaviour by claiming that the black legal immigrants “took their jobs” or were responsible for “committing crimes”. Yes, illegal migrants do engage in crimes, but most crimes recorded by the police in post-apartheid South Africa are committed by native-born blacks. That doesn’t stop the black natives from attacking legal immigrants from other African countries.
The notion that “foreigners are stealing all the jobs” is mostly ludicrous, considering that many black immigrants establish businesses after settling in South Africa. Ironically, some of those envious black South Africans complaining about “foreigners stealing all the jobs” are employed by black immigrant-owned shops, car dealerships, automobile repair garages, internet cafes, restaurants, etc.
The surging crime rate in post-apartheid South Africa is a corollary of the failure of successive ANC governments to improve the lives of native blacks. Incompetent ANC governance has also given new life to a vocal minority of the white population nostalgic for the defunct apartheid state, which once provided them with a racially exclusive, crime-free bubble to inhabit between 1948 and 1994.
The pro-apartheid rally in front of the US Embassy on 15 February 2025 was an attempt to build on the “white genocide” propaganda that misfired badly. Trump did not get the tacit message that AfriForum liars have been pushing in American rightwing circles since 2017.
As I mentioned in a previous article, the propaganda about non-existent “white genocide” was always about getting USA to intervene in force to create racially exclusive Volkstaat on African soil.
Instead, Trump took the lies of impending “white genocide” at face value and promptly offered unsolicited refugee status exclusively to Afrikaners (58% of whites) to escape to the safety of the United States. As expected, most Afrikaners—including the apartheid nostalgic minority—rejected the idea of abandoning their wealth and properties in South Africa to go and become landless refugees in North America.
The chief propagandist of AfriForum, Carl Martin Kriel, rejected Trump’s offer as he has no intention of abandoning several acres of his personal real estate in South Africa to go and become a landless hobo in New York City. He gave the plausible excuse that he and his fellow apartheid nostalgics did not want their children to assimilate into the Anglo-Saxon culture of USA— a sentiment that I can somewhat understand, even if I know he is being disingenuous.
Again, let us watch the video of Carl Kriel giving his excuse for refusing Trump’s offer to escape “white genocide” :
However, when life throws lemons at you, it is time to make lemonade. From the point of view of those apartheid nostalgics in front of the US Embassy in Pretoria, President Trump could still be steered away from the “well-meaning, but utterly stupid” refugee proposal and brought around to the idea of using the US government, a pre-eminent white superpower, to defend their “right” to have a separate whites-only apartheid statelet in the historic territory of the defunct Cape Province.
After all, if Trump is ready to defend the right of Zionists to have Israel, there is no reason why he cannot do the same for apartheid-nostalgic separatists. The photograph below from the pro-apartheid rally sums it up well:
Of course, Volkstaat is a pipe dream that its delusional supporters would never let go, and that includes the leadership of AfriForum.
Being a filmmaker, Ernst Roets of AfriForum understands the act of generating make-belief stories. He knows the United States of America very well and the stark ignorance of many Americans about the world outside their country’s borders. He understands that it is almost impossible for many Americans to separate their domestic Culture Wars from events happening in faraway foreign nations. So, he taps heavily into the domestic racial tensions within US society.
Conservative white Americans, already weary of the woke racialist garbage emanating from their left-liberal compatriots, are susceptible to AfriForum lies about “ANC governments organizing white genocide in preparation to seize all the farmlands in South Africa.”
To make sure that the propaganda that has been swirling in rightwing American circles reaches the largest audience of white conservative Trump supporters, Ernst Roets does interviews with Tucker Carlson, a brilliant American journalist who knows absolutely nothing about the African continent.
The first Tucker Carlson interview with Roets occurred in 2018 while the American journalist was still an employee at Fox News Corporation. Trump was said to have watched that particular interview during his first administration (2017-2021) and fell hard for the propaganda.
Unfortunately for Ernst Roets and his pro-apartheid comrades, President Trump was too busy fighting the Russiagate Hoax orchestrated against him by his Democratic Party adversaries to act on the “white genocide” myth.
But that was then and this is now. In 2025, President Donald J. Trump finds himself in complete control of all the executive agencies that make up the federal government of the United States, a stark contrast to 2018 when his hold on those agencies was tenuous at best and non-existent at worst.
Despite attempts by his domestic political enemies to use dirty tricks to stop him, Trump won the 2024 Presidential Elections decisively and has set about purging those enemies entrenched in Deep State institutions such as the State Department, Department of Defence, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Tucker Carlson’s situation in 2025 was also remarkably different from what it had been in 2018. The rightwing US journalist was fired from Fox News corporation on 24 April 2023 for refusing to go along with the neoconservative narrative about the Russo-Ukraine War.
Contrary to wall-to-wall lying in the liberal mainstream corporate media, he wasn’t sacked over claims that election machines were rigged during the controversial 2020 US Presidential Election.
While Tucker certainly believed that some shenanigans did occur during the counting of the ballots in the so-called swing states, he notably stood alone among Fox News hosts in asserting during a televised segment on 20 November 2020 that no concrete evidence had been presented to support the specific allegation that Dominion Voting Machines had been rigged. An archived video clip of that televised segment can be accessed by clicking on this link.
In any case, the sacking of Tucker proved to be a blessing for he drew a new international audience as an independent journalist to the consternation of his detractors in the Democratic Party and the neoconservative wing of the fractured Republican Party. Contrary to expectations, his large domestic audience at Fox News also migrated to his independent media platform.
For pro-apartheid AfriForum organisation, the stratospheric rise in the profile of Tucker Carlson was also an opportunity to reach larger audiences with their propaganda and redirect the “misguided” Trump Administration.
AfriForum has been under fire within South Africa ever since the highly mercurial President Trump decided to take action without bothering to coordinate with the pro-apartheid organization. It wasn’t Trump’s cancellation of “donor aid” or his awkward offer of unsolicited asylum to Afrikaners that caused widespread alarm within South Africa, it was the looming prospect of tariffs for South African exports to USA once AGOA (2000) comes up for renewal in September 2025.
Without the duty-free exemptions offered by AGOA (2000), South African exports to USA will face automatic tariffs. While those tariffs won’t damage the large mixed economy of South Africa, they are likely to have an adverse effect on the country’s thriving agricultural sector.
With the livelihood of many of its (mostly white) members at stake, the AgriSA organisation, which represents over a thousand commercial farmers, issued a statement in the local media, denouncing the “farmland seizures/white genocide” myth.
Grassroots members of AfriForum appeared divided over Trump’s actions. Some members chose to look on the bright side and join the rally in front of the US Embassy to express gratitude to the US President for at least accepting their “white genocide” narrative. Other members were irate with Carl Martin Kriel for his failure to coordinate with the US government, blaming him for the looming prospect of export tariffs that could negatively impact their livelihoods. This discontent was reflected in the decision of over 15,000 paying members of AfriForum to terminate their memberships with the organization.
With AfriForum facing criticism from a section of its membership, it became necessary for Ernst Roets, who is more proficient in English than his boss, Carl Kriel, to return for another interview with the ascendant Tucker Carlson.
In the second interview broadcast on 3 March 2025, Ernst Roets arranged his propaganda talking points very well. He made it clear to Tucker that AfriForum members were not interested in Trump’s offer to become landless refugees in the United States. What they wanted from the Trump Administration was full support for their “right to self-determination”.
Without being explicit, Roets had quietly communicated the desire of his pro-apartheid grouping for United States to exercise its diplomatic and military power to help create a separatist statelet on territory seized from the Republic of South Africa.
Tucker either didn’t understand or wasn’t that interested in Ernst Roet’s Volkstaat project. The American journalist concentrated on the killing of white farmers, which he assumes is being carried out by the African National Congress (ANC).
As expected, Tucker could not resist linking the murder of white farmers in distant South Africa to his domestic Culture War peeve about “white Americans”—in reality, white American conservatives— being treated unfairly by the left-liberal US establishment. He also found a way to link unconnected events in South Africa to the immigration problems of Western Europe.
For Ernst Roets, it was all good. Tucker’s domestic racial grievances provided the perfect fodder for the AfriForum propagandist to craft his narrative about “persecution of South African whites”. Unashamedly, he made ignorant Tucker believe that he was facing potential “treason charges” back in South Africa for sitting down for the interview.
While it is true that certain individuals in South Africa have called for AfriForum propagandists to be arrested for “treason”, the idea that the post-apartheid state will arrest Ernst Roets or any of his comrades is just beyond laughable. Only a person who knows nothing about present-day South Africa can possibly believe such an absurd claim.
But then, Roets did not attend the interview to tell the truth. He was there as part of the eight-year-long campaign to manipulate rightwing Americans into supporting his separatist cause, which he and his comrades euphemistically refer to as “self determination”.
The mutual sharing of grievances is one way human beings are able to form a bond. Therefore, Roets had no intention of endangering the emotional rapport he had cultivated with Tucker and his audience by exposing the mundane reality that white farmers are ordinary victims of a crime wave that successive ANC governments had failed to combat due to sheer incompetence.
As explained previously, the crime wave affects South Africans of all races. The notion of a “white genocide” is absurd, especially when one considers that rural white farmers and their families represent a small percentage of the overall white population, with the majority being urban professionals residing in cities and suburban areas.
The profound ineptitude exhibited by successive post-apartheid governments in addressing the surging crime rates was one among a myriad of reasons that contributed to the African National Congress (ANC) losing the support of its traditional black voter base.
Many disillusioned blacks transferred their support to a plethora of smaller opposition parties, including the white liberal-dominated Democratic Alliance (DA) party, which is the second-most successful political party in South Africa after the ANC. Even the apartheid-nostalgic white conservative Freedom Front Plus (FFP) party has seen a small influx of black members. A black FFP member actually won a city council election in 2022.
Ernst Roets was never going to present such nuanced perspectives at the interview. He was quite happy to endorse Tucker’s supposition that ANC governments were somehow involved in the murders of Afrikaner farmers out of racial animosity. Roets also wanted Tucker’s audience to believe that primitive mobs of black South Africans were revving to go massacre all the whites and steal their farmlands. Here, rabble rouser Julius Malema is a quintessential fodder of the “white genocide” propaganda.
Ernst Roets nodded along as Tucker expressed his horror at video clips of Malema’s racially incendiary rhetoric circulating on the internet. Understandably, it did not serve the AfriForum propagandist to explain to his American interlocutor that Malema is better at running his mouth than growing his party’s voter base. Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) struggles at the ballot box in national parliamentary elections.
The share of total votes gained by EFF in the 2024 general election dropped from 10.8% in 2019 to 9.5% in 2024. In comparison, the Democratic Alliance (DA) managed to maintain its share of the total votes in same time period within the 20-22% range. Despite being a decade older, EFF was surpassed in the 2024 general election by Jacob Zuma’s relatively new MK Party founded in 2023.
An ignorant person watching Tucker Carlson interviewing Ernst Roets would come away with the false impression that Malema was either part of the South African government or had immense influence over it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Afrikaner-dominated Freedom Front Plus (FFP)—which vehemently opposes any farmland seizures— is an integral member of the coalition government of South Africa. Hence, the FFP wields direct influence over national policy through its erstwhile parliamentary leader Pieter Groenewald, who is the current Minister For Correctional Services. Likewise, the Democratic Alliance (DA), is able to exercise influence on national policy through its cabinet ministers in the coalition government. The DA opposes farmland seizures as well.
By contrast, Malema’s EFF, operating outside the government as an opposition party, can only host racially provocative rallies in the hope that its viewpoint may be considered by the ruling coalition. Malema probably holds more influence over the minds of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump than he does over South Africa’s coalition government.
Genuine contentious matters such as the “affirmative action” policies of the ANC were mischaracterized by Ernst Roets in the interview as part of a diabolical attempt to destroy whites— the wealthiest and most successful racial demographic in South Africa, which also happens to be well-integrated into the societal fabric of the post-apartheid state.
During the interview, Roets latched onto the recently enacted land law in South Africa to buttress his “white genocide” talking points. In actuality, the controversial land law is similar in wording to equivalent laws found in other countries, including the United States, where it is referred to as Eminent Domain.
The highly contentious clause in the new South African land law that allows national, provincial and municipal authorities to take unused land without compensation in certain situations would not be controversial in other parts of the world where similar laws are in operation. But in South Africa, where farmland ownership is a sensitive issue, legislation concerning any type of land was bound to be controversial. Hence, litigation being brought in South African courts to challenge the new land law.
Now, let’s directly confront the racially charged anti-apartheid song “Dubul’ ibhunu”, which translates from Zulu to English as “Shoot the Boer”. The rendition of this song by Malema and his followers over the years have been an incredible propaganda gift for Ernst Roets and his boss, Carl Martin Kriel. They found that this song shocks the sensibilities of white conservative Americans and so bring it up again and again in their conversations with Trump Administration officials, sympathetic rightwing alternative media outlets such as Breitbart News, and think-tanks such as the libertarian Cato Institute.
Roets mentioned the racially incendiary song during his first interview with Tucker Carlson in May 2018, prompting the American journalist to broadcast a Fox News report to his teeming American audience that falsely claimed the ANC government was already violently seizing farmlands from their white owners. The “Zimbabwe scenario” was being replicated in South Africa.
As mentioned earlier in this article, Trump saw that Fox News segment back in 2018 and denounced the non-existent “violent farmland seizures”. However, he was too preoccupied with Russiagate Hoax to act on the propaganda.
Because Malema was a relatively unknown figure to many Americans in 2018, Roets was at pains to explain him to Tucker and Fox News viewers. In the years following that interview, viral videos of Malema and his supporters singing the offensive song in unintelligible local languages have appeared on the newsfeeds of social media platforms used by Americans. Some video clips helpfully bear English subtitles of the lyrics.
So, upon his return for the March 2025 interview, Roets found himself in a position where he didn’t need to explain what the song was about. All he had to do was sit back and watch Tucker Carlson repeatedly express disgust at the song. Roets mostly limited his contribution here to reinforcing the false image of a highly influential Malema in league with the South African government, which is portrayed as a monolithic entity composed solely of angry black politicians out to get whites.
On a personal level, I see no value in a racially divisive song that undermines the spirit of post-apartheid reconciliation. In a country that has “hate speech” laws, I find it interesting that the fiercely independent, liberal-leaning judiciary of South Africa hesitates to ban racially controversial acts such as the rendition of “Shoot the Boer”. I am referring here to the same judiciary that ruled in September 2021 that the decision of University of South Africa (UNISA) to drop Afrikaans as one of its languages of instruction was “discriminatory and unconstitutional and, therefore, should be reversed”.
To its credit, AfriForum was one of several entities that have tried over the years to get Malema’s favourite song banned, but to no avail. In 2010 and 2011, a temporary victory was achieved when a high court ruled the song to be “hate speech”. Malema responded to the verdict by changing the lyrics and title of song from “Shoot the Boer” to “Kiss the Boer”.
Nevertheless, court battles continued over the lyrics and title of the original version of the song. In 2022, another court ruled that the song “was not intended to be taken seriously”. The court added that the plaintiffs had failed to prove the connection between the song and actual violence. An appellate court upheld the decision of the lower court, concurring that the song was not intended to be taken literally, and so not “hate speech”.
Although I support the idea of South Africa prohibiting the racially divisive song, I have seen no concrete evidence that “Shoot the Boer” incited common criminals to commit acts they had already planned against white farmers in semi-isolated rural areas.
Ernst Roets’ nervousness about “Shoot the Boer” is obviously genuine. But I wonder if he and his fellow apartheid nostalgics ever bother about how his black compatriots feel about the existence of Afrikaner extremist groups that do not even try to hide their wish to overthrow the post-apartheid order and reinstate the brutal apartheid regime.
Of many examples floating around the internet, I submit this video clip of Afrikaner secessionists burning the current South African flag, raising the flag of the defunct apartheid state, and chanting about their desire for Volkstaat :
Last I checked, none of these flag burners have been victims of the mythical “white genocide”. They continue to occupy their properties in South Africa and openly spout their pro-apartheid views without harassment. Other secessionists have even openly discussed the necessity of expelling black African communities in the areas of South Africa they wish to carve out as a separate whites-only statelet.
While Roets and his AfriForum followers agitate for the prohibition of “Shoot the Boer” song, I also do not see them advocating for the eradication of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner movement Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), which currently has 5,000 members and has a long history of violence against non-whites since its founding in 1973. In the early 1990s, the AWB killed 21 people in an unsuccessful bid to stop the demise of the apartheid state. In post-apartheid South Africa, the AWB has been responsible for inciting hatred. Its members were behind a supermarket bombing in 1996.
It is unlikely that more than a handful of Americans are aware of the issues I have discussed above. The success of AfriForum propaganda lies in the insular nature of large segments of the American populace. Roets and his comrades would struggle to gain similar success with Europeans who tend to go overseas more often for their holidays. It would be impossible to convince Norwegians, Danes, Belgians, Germans and Britons who have gone on multiple Safari holiday tours that there is an ongoing genocide—especially when several tour guides are white South Africans who aren’t living in fear of being massacred.
Watching Roets’ second interview with Tucker Carlson, you might come away with the impression that apartheid South Africa was some kind of Nirvana, a Garden of Eden, for all its inhabitants. Definitely, Roets and people that share his racial appearance did enjoy a great life under the defunct apartheid regime. But for non-whites, life under the regime was radically different.
During the existence of the apartheid regime, many blacks had no access to the wonderful infrastructure that Roets and Carlson repeatedly lament as being mismanaged by successive ANC governments of post-apartheid South Africa. While black South Africans may currently endure electric power outages due to the ineptitude of ANC governance, under the apartheid regime, many black households received no electricity at all.
Throughout its existence, the apartheid state committed itself exclusively to making its white population comfortable. After all, whites were the ones who could vote in those racially exclusive elections that cemented National Party as the sole central governing authority for 46 years. This had serious implications for the black population since the provision of basic amenities and the modern infrastructure varied from area to area depending on the race of the people compelled by law to live there.
Segregationist governments in Southern USA divided its inhabitants into two races— “white” and “black”. The inconveniences and complications stemming from the existence of people of mixed racial ancestry were lazily addressed by instituting the “one-drop rule”. This rule stipulated that any individual with even a trace of black ancestry, no matter how distant, was to be classified as a “negro”. This led to individuals with predominantly European features being classified as “negroes” as exemplified by the case of Walter White.
In apartheid South Africa, categorizing an individual like Walter White as a “black man” would have been viewed as utter idiocy. The apartheid regime took racial classification quite seriously and built a vast bureaucracy to classify and register every inhabitant of South Africa according to the cast of his or her racial features. Under the law promulgated by the Malan regime in 1948, each inhabitant of South Africa was allocated to one of four officially recognized racial categories: White, Black, Coloured (i.e. mixed race) and Indian (i.e. South Asian).
The apartheid state tasked a government agency known as the Office of Racial Classification (ORC) with implementing discriminatory laws that varied from one racial group to another. The ORC also performed “scientific tests” in those rare cases where it was not obvious from close appearance whether an individual should be classified as “coloured” or “black”, and to a lesser extent, when it was not obvious whether one was “white” or “coloured”.
That brings me to the pseudo-scientific “pencil test” that was performed to determine whether an individual was “black” or “coloured”. An ORC official sticks a pencil in the hair of the racially ambiguous test subject who is then asked to shake his or her head vigorously. If the pencil slides out of the hair and falls to the ground, then that individual is classified as “coloured”. If the pencil stubbornly sticks to the hair, then the individual is classified as “black”.
In the Kafkaesque world of the apartheid system, classification as “coloured” gave an individual more rights than one considered “black”, but fewer rights than a person considered “white”. Therefore, areas inhabited by whites got all the basic amenities and best infrastructure. Areas reserved for coloured people got amenities that weren’t as good as those of whites, but was still better than those available in areas inhabited by Indians. Areas inhabited by blacks got the barest minimum or nothing at all.
So, when Tucker Carlson and Ernst Roets rabbit on about the glorious rule of the extremely violent apartheid state, they should note that the percentage of black Africans in South Africa’s population grew from 70% to 80% between 1948 and 1994. And yet, the vast majority of those blacks had little or no access to electricity produced by state-owned ESKOM Limited.
How can the apartheid state be said to be competent when it bothered to provide basic amenities and infrastructure to only a fraction of its national population? Would all the utility companies within the US state of Maine— where Tucker mainly resides—be referred to as “competent” if they took a joint decision to deliver services only to 10-20% of the total state population?
The present-day challenges faced by ESKOM can be traced directly to frantic efforts of post-apartheid South Africa to extend electricity to the vast majority of black households that had little or absolutely no access to it during the existence of the defunct apartheid state.
The infrastructure of ESKOM was never designed to serve the entire national population. Therefore, power stations, transformer substations and the national grid got overstretched and overloaded by the extension of electricity to places where it had never been. So, it is not surprising that ESKOM engineers were forced to ration electric power to different parts of the country on a rotational basis, starting from January 2008.
The presiding Mbeki Administration (1999-2008) had ignored repeated warnings from ESKOM that huge infrastructural investments were required to cope with the stress and strain faced by the overburdened public utility. However, President Thabo Mbeki was too busy thinking about racial quotas to care about mundane matters, such as keeping the lights on.
The decision of ESKOM to ration electricity was shocking for whites who had no experience of rolling blackouts when they lived in racially exclusive bubbles of the apartheid era. Hence, the myth of the glorious apartheid state that served non-stop electricity to all corners of the country. The myth of the super-competent apartheid state that worked for all its inhabitants and was the envy of Africa. The brutality, strict media censorship, the CCB death squads, imprisonments without court trials, and corruption scandals (e.g. Muldergate) of the apartheid state are conveniently swept aside in favour of a false romanticized image.
Tepid efforts by the Zuma-led ANC government (2009-2018) to expand electrical infrastructure ended up being a scheme for personal enrichment. The ESKOM corruption scandal in 2017 implicated the Gupta family. The family of wealthy businessmen from India resettled in South Africa in 1993 and forged close ties with influential members of the ANC, including the utterly corrupt President Jacob Zuma.
Since that scandal broke, plans to build a brand new nuclear power station to work alongside Koeberg Nuclear Power Station (KNPS) has been put off. KNPS represents 5% of the total electricity generated in South Africa.
Apart from corrupt procurement scandals, successive ANC governments (excluding the Mandela administration) are guilty of creating positions within the organogram of ESKOM solely to serve as sinecures for politically-connected individuals. How those sinecures work was explained in a book written by André de Ruyter, who served as the CEO of ESKOM Limited from December 2019 until his voluntary resignation in January 2023.
Having said all of that, it would be remiss of me not to mention a few positive things done by past ANC governments with regards to public infrastructure, such as the refurbishment of various apartheid-era railway networks and the construction of a brand new high-speed commuter train system known as Gautrain.
Despite its ultimate failure, I still commend the efforts of successive ANC governments from 1994 to 2010 in funding scientific research into the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR), which held the promised of providing South Africa with small modular nuclear reactors for the electricity generation. Inability to find sufficient international customers interested in PMBR technology coupled with rising costs killed the research project.
In a belated effort to combat the rolling blackout problem, the Ramaphosa Administration authorized the importation of extra electricity from neighbouring countries. Since 2022, Cahora Bassa Hydroelectric Power Station in neighbouring Mozambique supplies 10,800 GWh of electricity to South Africa. Importation of electricity from abroad and the turnaround of domestic coal-fired power plants enabled South Africans to enjoy ten months of uninterrupted electric power supply before rolling blackouts returned.
Even after hearing Tucker Carlson's uninformed remarks during his interviews with Ernst Roets, I remain steadfast in my refusal to align with his detractors’ characterization of him as a “racist”. Yes, he undeniably displays the sort of ignorant arrogance that I have observed in some Americans when they confidently discuss topics they have little knowledge of.
I also do not agree that Tucker is “racist” for his forthright views on immigration, which are barely different from those expressed by people who live in other parts of the world, including China, Russia, Japan, India, Southeast Asian nations, and African countries. As previously mentioned, black South Africans aren’t exactly thrilled to have black immigrants from other African states in their country.
Tucker’s views resemble historic anti-immigration sentiments prevalent in prosperous Nigeria of the 1970s and early 1980s. So strong were those sentiments that President Shehu Shagari yielded to popular demand and issued an Executive Order in January 1983 for the summary deportation of more than two million illegal immigrants from poorer West African countries. Half of those deportees were Ghanaian illegals. The Executive Order was fully implemented without harassment of foreigners who had a legal right to be in Nigeria.
Strict enforcement of ECOWAS protocols on “free movement of persons” and introduction of ECOWAS passports has made mass deportation of fellow West Africans the practice of a bygone era.
Of course, Nigeria is quite happy to play the tit-for-tat deportation game with South Africa, which is not a member of ECOWAS. In 2012, South Africa deported 125 Nigerians. Within 48 hours, Nigeria deported 84 South Africans. Having said that, Nigeria—South Africa relations have improved a lot since Ramaphosa replaced Zuma as President in 2018, notwithstanding the looting and destruction of Nigerian-owned businesses in Johannesburg during the xenophobic riots of 2019.
Circling back to Tucker, I find it quite interesting that his detractors aren’t curious about his close relationship with Neil Patel, a British-born Indian immigrant to USA. Both men are best friends who lived together during their student years at Trinity College. They jointly founded The Daily Caller when Tucker was fired from MSNBC and the Tucker Carlson Network (TCN) when Tucker was fired from Fox News. Neil Patel is currently the chief executive officer of TCN.
None of this excuses the willful ignorance of Tucker Carlson, who apparently enjoys being told that his prejudiced perceptions of the African continent are correct. Does Tucker know there are white ANC legislators in the South African Parliament, and some of them are ethnic Afrikaners? I doubt it.
Despite not being a social conservative, Elon Musk managed to wangle himself into Trump’s populist fold— a process that began with his acquisition of Twitter at a time when American conservatives were complaining of being censored.
After buying the social media platform, Elon became a “free speech hero” to populist conservatives. He built on top of that image by investing his money in the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. That investment paid off when Trump won a landslide to become the 47th President of the United States. Upon entering the White House, Trump appointed Musk to head the ad hoc Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
His popularity among his conservative admirers was affected when he aggressively defended his advocacy of increased legal immigration through H-1B Visas. Nevertheless, his standing within Trump’s inner circle remained rock-solid.
Elon began to amplify “white genocide” propaganda on Twitter because the Ramaphosa Administration had refused to grant him a license to operate Starlink in South Africa unless he complied with “affirmative action” laws, which stipulate that local subsidiaries of foreign companies must give 30% equity to “historically disadvantaged groups”.
My readers already know my views on racial or ethnic quota schemes, so I won’t bother repeating them again. It goes without saying that Starlink is operational in other African countries. Elon Musk’s attempt to extend Starlink to his native South Africa has been obstructed by an entrenched racial quota system, which he rejects.
Ever since, Elon began promoting the “white genocide” myth, President Ramaphosa has repeatedly expressed surprise and bewilderment. His current relationship with Elon is miles apart from what it was last year.
In September 2024, Ramaphosa flew to New York City to attend a UN General Assembly (UNGA) meeting. On the sidelines of UNGA, he had a business meeting with Elon, which seems to have made a deep impression on the South African leader.
I say this because after the meeting, Cyril Ramaphosa granted an interview to the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), in which he gushed about Elon in the same way an excited teenager describes meeting his favorite pop star idol.
President Ramaphosa said the following to SABC after his meeting with Elon last year :
Meeting Elon Musk was a clear intention of mine... Some people call it bromance, so it's a whole process of rekindling his affection and connection with South Africa.
I think all of us here in April 2025 can agree that whatever bromance Ramaphosa thought he was in with Elon is dead and gone.
In February 2025, after Trump issued his Executive Order, President Ramaphosa reached out to Errol Musk, who arranged a phone call between his son and the South African President. Ramaphosa wanted Elon to use his influence on Trump. Elon wanted Starlink to become operational in South Africa without need to comply with racial quotas.
Ramaphosa explained politely that the racial quotas were enshrined in South African law and therefore, Starlink cannot be exempt. Elon said he “understood” Ramaphosa’s need to stand by the laws of South Africa. The phone call ended with both men parting on good terms.
Shortly after, Elon began to aggressively promote the “white genocide” myth, claiming he was not allowed to bring Starlink to South Africa because he was not a black person. Of course, this is false.
Lots of white-owned businesses operate in South Africa. For foreign-registered companies like Starlink, the price of entry into the country is compliance with racial quotas. For understandable reasons, Elon is unwilling to grant 30% equity to some black dudes with political ties to the African National Congress.
There can be no compromise on racial quotas. As I explained in an earlier article, self-proclaimed “socialist” ANC stalwarts such as Saki Macozoma, Mosima Sexwale, Patrice Motsepe and Cyril Ramaphosa became fabulously wealthy from the quota system instituted in the business sector to address economic disparities experienced by ordinary black South Africans due to the discriminatory policies of the apartheid state.
Ordinary black South Africans did not benefit from the quota system. But that was okay because ANC bigwigs benefited “on behalf of the people”.
In the early 2000s, Cyril Ramaphosa was among the newly affluent ANC figures who boldly asserted that the wealth they were amassing would eventually reach poor black voters through trickle-down effect. By 2017, no poor black voter with a brain was buying that cockamamie story.
The ANC went from enjoying nearly 70% of total votes cast in the 2004 parliamentary election to a paltry 40.2% of the votes cast in the 2024 election. Meanwhile, its closest rival, DA, increased its share of the total votes cast from 12.4% to 21.8% in the same twenty-year period.
The failure of ANC to win an outright majority meant that the original Ramaphosa Administration (2018-2024) could not remain in power.
The ANC could have chosen to form a coalition, which included EFF and MK Party. However, both parties advocate farmland seizures, rendering them unattractive to President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is focused on attracting foreign direct investment to South Africa. That explains why the ANC preferred to form a ruling coalition with other opposition political parties, including DA and FFP. The coalition government assumed power on 30 June 2024.
I suppose if black ANC members were to initiate a “white genocide” as claimed by Elon Musk, the starting point would be inside the multiracial cabinet of the new coalition government led by President Cyril Ramaphosa.
My guess is that Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen would be the first one against the wall, followed by other white government ministers, white legislators in the parliament, elected white officials at the provincial and municipal levels, and then white members of the ANC. This would then have to spread to whites in the armed forces, police, media, courts, civil service, business community, and farmsteads.
Of course, the whole scenario is downright stupid, but that does not stop Elon Musk from stirring the pot to rile up people in the racially sensitive USA.
Many American conservatives consume Elon’s slop without ever stopping to ask why he isn’t bothered about the safety of Musk family members living in South Africa. If he really believes that a “white genocide” is ongoing, why doesn’t he try to rescue his father and other relatives in South Africa? More broadly, why aren’t South Africa’s 4.7 million whites taking up Trump's offer to flee en masse to the United States?
Elon Musk has also retweeted pro-apartheid propagandists who sought to falsely portray 13,310 poor landless whites living in squatter camps as people recently immiserated after their non-existent farms were seized by the ANC.
In reality, poor whites (mostly Afrikaners) constitute a pre-existing demographic that historically relied on welfare cheques and government jobs provided by the apartheid state until its dissolution in 1994. Without the jobs welfare system of the apartheid regime, those poor whites found themselves in the same category as tens of millions poor blacks that live in similar squalid environments.
After checking the Income & Expenditure Survey data of Statistics South Africa, The Daily Mail newspaper, published an article in October 2016 presenting the demographic breakdown of poverty in the country— 0.9% of whites (42,115 people), 63.2% of blacks (25.3 million people), 37% of Coloureds (1.68 million). The poverty figure for South African Indians omitted by Daily Mail was 6.9% (87,969 people).
The October 2016 article was likely a quiet correction of a grossly misleading article published eight months earlier by the same rightwing British newspaper, which falsely claimed that more than 400,000 whites lived in poverty—the same fake number that pro-apartheid propagandists sell to ignorant foreign audiences in USA, Australia and New Zealand.
This brings me finally to Ebrahim Rasool, the recently expelled South African Ambassador to the United States.
A South African Muslim of mixed English, Indonesian, Indian and Dutch ancestry, Ebrahim was born in the port city of Cape Town. When he was a child, he and his family, along with over 60,000 Coloured inhabitants, were forcibly removed from their homes in 1970/1971 after the apartheid state declared their entire district a “whites-only area”.
As a young university student, Ebrahim worked with dissident groups and was frequently incarcerated by the autocratic apartheid state without the benefit of a court trial.
In post-apartheid South Africa, he rose quickly through the ranks of the ANC, occupying various leaderships roles within the party. Between 2004 and 2008, he was the elected Premier of the West Cape Province. After a brief stint as a lawmaker in South Africa’s national legislature, he was appointed the Ambassador to the USA, where he served from 2010 to 2015, and again from January 2025 until his expulsion in March 2025
His first tenure as South African Ambassador was not challenging at all. Ebrahim and Democrat officials of the Obama Administration got on very well on the basis of shared leftwing ideology. Ebrahim did not have to work to maintain good diplomatic relations with the USA at that time.
Ambassador Rasool and the hosting Obama Administration were firm believers in “affirmative action” policies. President Obama often held up the LGBT policies of liberal South Africa as a standard for other African nations to emulate. Other African countries, deeply conservative, begged to differ.
At the end of his first tenure as ambassador in February 2015, Ebrahim returned to South Africa and delved into local politics. He was a candidate in the May 2024 parliamentary election. Due to the electoral disaster that befell the ANC, he was not able win a seat in the national legislature.
Despite AfriForum’s efforts, diplomatic relations between USA and South Africa remained amicable during the first Trump Administration (2017-2021). Two black South African Ambassadors in a row served in Washington DC during Trump’s first presidency.
The Trump-appointed US Ambassador to South Africa, Lana Marks, was an American citizen who grew up in a South African Jewish family. She speaks Xhosa and Afrikaans fluently, and got along with the Ramaphosa Administration.
The succeeding Biden Administration (2021-2025) replaced her with Reuben E. Brigety, a black American academic who had previously served as US Ambassador to the African Union. Ambassador Brigety got along with the South African government until the Russo-Ukraine War erupted. To the chagrin of Brigety, South Africa bluntly refused to go along with Biden Administration’s sanctions policy on Russia.
By May 2023, Ambassador Brigety was falsely accusing South Africa of supplying weapons covertly to Russia, stating that he would “bet his life” on that allegation. He also accused South Africa of “outrageous anti-Americanism”. For his efforts, he was summoned for a dressing down by the South African foreign ministry. Subsequently, he issued an apology.
With Trump's impending return to the White House, Ambassador Reuben Brigety resigned abruptly on 3 January 2025, leaving the position of top US diplomat in South Africa vacant till date.
Without the spectre of the Russiagate Hoax haunting his second term in office, Donald Trump has been free to pursue his own foreign policy choices and those set for him by his Zionist Jewish billionaire donor, Miriam Adelson.
Miriam Adelson, the widow of the late casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, is not a fan of the African National Congress, which has incorporated its activism for Palestinian rights into the national foreign policy of post-apartheid South Africa.
When it was still a banned activist movement, the ANC had declared its own struggle against the apartheid regime to be similar to the Palestinian struggle against Zionist occupation. Accordingly, it forged an alliance with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The presence of leftwing South African Jews within the senior ranks of the ANC did not affect the relationship with PLO, as they were mostly hostile to Zionism.
On the opposite end, Israel and apartheid South Africa consolidated diplomatic ties that date back to 1948 when the first apartheid leader, Daniel Malan, personally instructed his government’s Customs Department to provide logistical support for the transportation of $1.2 million worth of goods to Israel, sponsored by the South African Zionist Federation. Between 1951 and 1961, more than $19 million in funds donated by Zionist South African Jews had flown to Israel.
The fourth apartheid leader, Balthazar Johannes Vorster, installed South Africa’s first ever diplomatic mission in Israel in 1972. The following year, the Yom Kippur War broke out and most African countries severed diplomatic ties with Israel in solidarity with Egypt, a founding member of the now defunct Organization of African Unity (OAU).
The apartheid South African state was one of only 4 African countries that continued to maintain friendly ties with Israel. The Israeli government showed its appreciation by secretly helping the apartheid regime with its nuclear weapons programme and granted it a manufacturing license to produce a localized version of the Jericho ballistic missile.
Israel also handed its IAI Scout drones to apartheid SADF in 1981 for field-testing in the Angolan theatre of the South African Border Wars (1966-1990). The following year, those battle-tested drones made its Middle Eastern war debut when Israeli military forces invaded Lebanon.
Vorster showed his gratitude for all the rendered assistance with an official visit to Israel in 1976. He also made sure that his government’s official yearbook of 1978 celebrated excellent diplomatic relations between the two countries. The passage quoted below from that yearbook is an absolute gem:
Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.
The Israeli government was embarrassed by that passage. Nevertheless, Israel maintained diplomatic relations even after every other nation that once held ties with the apartheid state had revoked them. Under pressure from the US government, Israel curtailed its military contracts with the apartheid state, denounced racist apartheid policies, and applied some sanctions. However, diplomatic ties continued.
The Mandela Administration, the inaugural government of post-apartheid South Africa, elected to preserve diplomatic ties with Israel, but reiterated ANC’s longstanding policy of supporting Palestinian national rights. To the dismay of Israel, the Mandela Administration recognized the State of Palestine on 15 February 1995, thirteen years after most African countries had done the same.
Growing economic ties between Israel and post-apartheid South Africa had no effect on the latter’s commitment to the Palestinian cause. In 2004, South Africa signed a bilateral investment treaty with Israel. Later that year, South Africa sent a delegation to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to support Palestine’s petition against Israel’s construction of a separation wall that bisected the territory of the West Bank.
The delegation, led by Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Goolam Pahad, a South African Indian, argued that the separation wall did not merely separate the West Bank from Israel as claimed by the Tel Aviv government. In fact, more Palestinian territory had been annexed by adding 9% of the West Bank and 25,000 Palestinians to Israel’s side of the separation wall.
Over the years, as Israeli repression of Palestinians accelerated, the decibel of outcry from South Africa grew louder. Ronnie Kasrils, who was one of several Jews that served in the military wing of the ANC, compared Israel to Nazi Germany. Denis Goldberg, who spent 22 years in jail for participating in the armed struggle, joined in the harsh criticism of Israel, but avoided Nazi references.
Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu called for economic sanctions against Israel. During a visit to Egypt in 1989, he had urged PLO Leader Yasser Arafat to recognize “Israel’s right to exist”. That same year, he visited Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel. While he had consistently criticized Israel's actions, such as the Sabra and Shatila Massacre of 1982, his condemnation of the Zionist state grew more strident as the decades passed.
Those harsh criticisms from so many South Africans caused Benjamin Netanyahu to cancel his plans to fly to South Africa to attend the funeral of Nelson Mandela in 2013.
The atrocious behaviour of Israeli military forces in the Gaza Strip, combined with genocidal rhetoric of Israeli state officials in the Hebrew language media, caused South Africa to file a petition at the ICJ on 11 January 2024.
The powerful Zionist lobby in the United States—consisting of Zionist Jews and fanatical Christian Zionists—was outraged by the audacity of South Africa. The return of Donald Trump to presidential office presented them with an opportunity to strike back.
The convergence of interests between AfriForum propagandists and hardcore Zionists in USA was evident in the Executive Order (EO) issued by Trump, offering unsolicited asylum to Afrikaners.
The EO accused South Africa of “racially discriminatory property confiscations” and condemned its “aggressive” role in the ICJ case against Israel. It also alleged bizarrely that South Africa was “reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements”.
There isn’t much South Africa can do to persuade the Trump Administration about the justness of its ICJ case against Israel. Miriam Adelson contributed $100 million to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Therefore, the Trump Administration will always take the side of Israel. On top of that, the entire US political system is captured by Zionist lobbying groups, such as American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which spends billions of dollars to ensure that politicians aligned with Israeli interests are elected to public office.
South Africa is justified in its refusal to engage the Trump Administration on its policy towards the Zionist state. Disputes between Israel and South Africa are bilateral matters to be resolved between the two countries without American interference.
Having said that, South Africa has an obligation to correct the malevolent wave of pro-apartheid disinformation being spewed in the United States of America, an important trade partner. It should be very easy to dispel the “white genocide” myth.
A highly competent South African Ambassador could have arranged for a large delegation of white parliamentarians from the ANC and other political parties to visit USA to dispel the lies being perpetrated by AfriForum and alt-media outlets such as Breitbart News.
Recently retired white South African military commanders such as Brigadier-General Gerhard Kamffer, Major-General Roy Cecil Andersen, Lieutenant-General Carlo Gagiano could have been invited to join the myth-busting delegation visiting USA.
Just Major-General Michal J. de Goede, the former South African army commander who is still in active service, would have sufficed as a respectable representative of Afrikaners who are forward-looking rather than dwelling on the apartheid past.
So, what action did Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool take to dispel malicious lies being spread about his country in USA? Well, he did not try any of things I suggested above. Instead, he insulted Donald Trump using derogatory language similar to that employed by partisans of the US Democratic Party.
In a webinar recorded while Biden Administration was still in office, Ambassador Rasool repeats the standard claim of Trump being a “white supremacist” even though, it is a well-known fact that non-whites form a part of Trump’s voter base. A significant number of Latinos (45%) voted for Trump. Trump’s share of the black vote (13%) was quite small. Nevertheless, it still represented the highest amount of black votes cast in favour of any Republican presidential candidate in 48 years.
It is one thing for a left-liberal American to accuse Trump and his voters of being “a white supremacist”, it is another for a serving diplomat of a foreign country to repeat the same insult.
It is the job of an Ambassador to understand the political and cultural landscape of the country he is serving in. The United States is a racially divided country. A place where allegations of bigotry (real or imagined) are casually thrown around like confetti at a ticker-tape parade. Did you just criticize Israel? Well, you must be an antisemite !! Are you criticizing the black mayor of Baltimore for corruption and incompetence? You must be a racist !!!
As already stated, the vast majority of the Americans do not know much about the world. Therefore, they tend to tap into their own personal experiences to make sense of unfamiliar places so faraway from theirs. Misinformation spread by various media outlets, from CNN and MSNBC to Fox News and Breitbart, adds to the distorted view of foreign nations that many Americans hold.
Given their deep antipathy towards the woke racialist policies of public authorities in Democrat-run states, it is not hard to convince white American conservatives that the current situation in USA is just a pale imitation of something much worse happening in a distant foreign land. If whites are “demonized” in USA for their race, then in South Africa, they are being “massacred” for it. Viral videos of Julius Malema reinforce that false impression in the minds of Americans.
To his credit, Ebrahim Rasool tried unsuccessfully to set up a meeting with Trump Administration officials to dispel the false narratives. However, he gave up after he was rebuffed. When an old video clip of him heaping insults on Trump during the Biden Administration surfaced, he made no effort at damage control. Instead, all indications showed that he was rather defiant and stood by his insulting words. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio referred to Ambassador Rasool as a “race-baiting politician” and asked him to leave the United States.
For a diplomat representing a BRICS nation, Ebrahim Rasool showed none of the professionalism of Russian and Chinese Ambassadors in Washington DC.
Despite repeated provocations against Russia by the Biden Administration, Ambassador Anatoly Antonov remained courteous and professional. This professionalism persisted even in the face of severe restrictions imposed on Anatoly’s movement within the USA and the forced closure of US bank accounts owned by the Russian Embassy.
Chinese Ambassadors Cui Tiankai (2013-2021), Qin Gang (2021-2023) and Xie Feng (2023-present) also maintained a professional demeanour in the face of non-stop violations of the “One China Policy” that USA agreed to observe in 1972. Despite insults directed at the Chinese government by the Biden and Trump Administrations, Chinese Ambassadors have consistently refrained from breaking diplomatic protocol to respond in kind to their American hosts.
I can understand Ebrahim Rasool’s angry frustrations at having to sit back and watch breathtaking lies being told about his country. One moment, you are in South Africa fraternizing with white members of your party at ANC Headquarters. The next moment you are in USA being inundated with fake stories of “white genocide” being perpetrated by your political party, which is currently leading a coalition government that includes several white officials.
Nevertheless, patience is a virtue that every Ambassador must practice when dealing with the host government of a foreign nation. President Trump is well-known for not being knowledgeable about other countries.
Recently, Trump said forthrightly that he had no knowledge of the specific location of the Democratic Republic of Congo within Africa. I doubt he knows that there two separate African countries that share the name “Congo”. During his first presidential term, Trump was shocked to learn that the United Kingdom had its own indigenously developed nuclear bombs.
For clearly understandable reasons, Trump does not trust the corporate mainstream media (except Fox News) and tends to rely on rightwing alternative media outlets that blend accurate news reports with misleading narratives. For instance, it is very common to read about “persecution of Nigerian Christians” in Breitbart News. While it is certainly true that jihadi terrorists in the Northern Nigeria attack Christians, Breitbart News gives its readers the false impression that the Nigerian government is persecuting Christians, which is arrant nonsense.
Christians and Muslims are roughly equal in size in Nigeria. Both are well represented at all levels of government and in the security services that are tasked with combating the jihadi terrorists. In any case, most Christians live in the autonomous states of the South, where Muslims are small minority.
Of course, Trump had no knowledge of what I have just explained before he confronted President Buhari with Breitbart’s claim during the visit of the Nigerian leader to USA in April 2018.
In the Oval Office of the White House, Trump had privately asked his Nigerian guest why he was “killing Christians”. A thoroughly stunned Muhammad Buhari —who had an Evangelical Christian Pastor as his Vice President— denied Trump’s allegation that his government was killing or persecuting Christians. He spent some time educating Trump about the true situation in Nigeria.
Due to Trump’s limited understanding of Africa and susceptibility to misinformation from pro-apartheid elements (e.g. Darren Beattie) and Zionist hardliners (e.g. Marco Rubio) within his administration, it is crucial for South Africa to have a capable ambassador who can accurately convey the truth to the US President and the wider American public.
Under Zionist influence, President Trump has nominated Leo Brent Bozell as the next US Ambassador to South Africa. If this nomination is confirmed, then US-South Africa relations will deteriorate at break-neck speed given Bozell’s past as a notorious pro-apartheid activist in the 1980s, and his current gig as a fanatical pro-Israel advocate.
Since the return of Ebrahim Rasool to South Africa, there has been heated debates on who is best suited to become the next South African Ambassador to USA.
Members of the Democratic Alliance (DA) have suggested a white South African to serve as the next Ambassador. Former DA party leader Tony Leon has been suggested as a possible replacement. Tony Leon, a South African Jew, served as his nation’s Ambassador to Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay under the ANC government of President Jacob Zuma.
There have also been calls to pick a white ANC member as the new South African Ambassador. The front runner in that regard is Andries Carl Nel, an ethnic Afrikaner lawyer, who joined the ANC in the 1980s while still a university student. Andries Nel also took part in student protests against the apartheid regime’s conscription of all white males into its armed forces.
Since the post-apartheid state came into existence, Andries Nel has served the ANC in various capacities—as a member of parliament (1994-2009), Deputy Minister of Justice (2009–2013), Deputy Minister of Cooperative Governance & Traditional Affairs (2013–2019), and currently as Deputy Minister of Justice & Constitutional Development.
Another candidate for the ambassadorial position is Marthinus van Schalkwyk, another Afrikaner member of ANC. Marthinus served as a government minister from 2004 to 2014. Thereafter, he was appointed South Africa’s Ambassador to Greece (2015–2019) and then South African High Commissioner in Australia (2019-2023).
Opposition to the idea of appointing a white South African as the top diplomat in Washington DC has come from a small ANC faction led by Ebrahim Rasool, who has already taken to the streets with a megaphone to declare there should be “no white Ambassador for white president”.
In the video clip above, Ebrahim Rasool urges President Cyril Ramaphosa against selecting a white South African Ambassador because doing so might presumably appease the Trump Administration. He seems to suggest that South Africa should adopt a confrontational attitude towards the United States.
This line of thinking is clear evidence that Mr. Rasool was never fit to represent South Africa at such an important role. The man lacks the ability to separate his personal feelings from the national interest of South Africa.
Does Ebrahim Rasool not understand that South Africa exports a significant amount of manufactured goods and agricultural products to the United States? Does he not understand that the job of an Ambassador is to build good relations with the country where he (or she) is based? If appointing a pale-skinned Ambassador would help dispel the pervasive “white genocide” myth that is hindering US-South Africa relations, then what is the problem?
Thankfully, it seems President Cyril Ramaphosa understands the gravity of the situation. He has named politician-turned-businessman Mcebisi Jonas as Special Envoy to USA to mend relations with the Trump Administration.
Despite his anti-corruption credentials, Mr. Jonas was a beneficiary of the racial quota that exists in South Africa’s business sector. His membership of the ANC made him a prime candidate to be gifted directorship positions that gave him a seat on the boards of large companies eager to comply with the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) scheme.
Ramaphosa has tasked his new Special Envoy to the USA with offering trade deals to the highly transactional Donald Trump. But I fear that it could be a waste of time as an old video clip of Mcebisi Jonas has surfaced. In that video, Mr. Jonas described Trump as “racist”, “narcissistic” and “homophobic”.
Unsurprisingly, Ernst Roets and his AfriForum comrades are overjoyed. They have been busy distributing the video clip throughout the length and breadth of the internet, especially on social media platforms. By now, I am sure Roets have already sent Trump Administration officials high definition (HD) versions of that video clip.
Methinks that the best way to wipe that smirk off the face of Ernst Roets and his pro-apartheid comrades is to appoint either Andries Carl Nel, Derek Hanekom, Marthinus van Schalkwyk or Tony Leon the new South African Ambassador to USA.
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This is a wonderful article. As a very old American, I remember much of what you outline here from the history of SA, but there is a lot that is happening now that is new to me. In the fog of Ukraine, Europe and China, SA goes to the back pages far too often. Thank you for writing such an extensive and enlightening piece.
Exemplary scholarship Chima. Thank you.
Apartheid South Africa Classifying Japanese as "honorary whites" has a touch of oxymoron. It's equivalent to classifying American or Australian imperial settlers as "honorary natives".