EBRAHIM RASOOL HOME 'WITH NO REGRETS'

Supporters welcomed him with song and dance

- THEOLIN TEMBO AND LOYISO SIDIMBA

FORMER ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool, returned home yesterday “with no regrets’, as scores of supporters welcomed him and his wife, Rosieda, with song and dance at Cape Town International Airport.

“It was not our choice to come home, but we come home with no regrets,” he said.

Rasool was expelled from the US following remarks made during a webinar held by the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (Mistra) under the theme “Implications of changes in US administrations for SA and Africa”.

Rasool previously served as SA ambassador to the US during the Barack Obama administration between 2010 and 2015.

He was re-appointed in January 2025, as ambassador during the Joe Biden and then Donald Trump administration.

Rasool said his remarks were to South African intelligentsia, intellectuals, political leaders and others to alert them to a change of tradition in the US, and that the old way of doing business with the US was not going to work.

During the Mistra webinar, Rasool said: “The supremacist assault on incumbency, we see it in the domestic politics of the US, 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 US in which the voting electorate in the US is projected to become 48% white.”

Yesterday, while addressing the media in Cape Town, he said: “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.

“Not only to transactionality but also a language that can penetrate a group that has clearly identified a fringe white community in South Africa as their constituency surrounded by a white diaspora in the White House.