The South African ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, who was expelled from the United States and declared persona non grata, was welcomed home at an airport on Sunday by hundreds of supporters who sang songs praising him.
Crowds at Cape Town International Airport surrounded Rasool and his wife, Rosieda, as they emerged in the arrivals terminal in their hometown, and they needed a police escort to help them navigate 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,” the expelled ambassador said.
LEADERSHIP recalls that Rasool was expelled for comments he made on a webinar that included him saying that the ‘Make America Great Again’ movement was partly a response to “a supremacist instinct.”
On Sunday, he said he stood by those comments and characterised them as merely alerting intellectuals and political leaders in South Africa that the U.S. and its politics had 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,” 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.”
Rasool said it was important for South Africa to fix its relationship with the U.S. after President Donald Trump punished the country and accused it of taking an anti-American stance before the decision to expel him.
Trump 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 U.S.
It is highly unusual for the U.S. to expel a foreign ambassador.
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