It may seem like a joke, but in the absurd diplomacy of dealing with President Donald Trump, South Africa’s best move could be to appoint a golf champion as its next ambassador to Washington.
Last week, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool persona non grata after Rasool, participating in a think-tank webinar, accused Trump of trying to incite a “global supremacist revolution.” His expulsion marked a dramatic worsening of the already badly frayed relations between Washington and Pretoria.
Rasool was given 72 hours to leave the US, and now South Africa is looking for a successor for the Washington hot seat.
Commentators in South Africa have focused on two white Afrikaners — members of the ethnic minority that Trump believes are the victim of race prejudice by the black majority — Marthinus van Schalkwyk and Andries Nel, as the likely front-runners. Both are longstanding members of the ruling African National Congress, or ANC. Nel is a deputy minister in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet, and van Schalkwyk is a former minister of tourism and South African envoy to Greece and Australia. (He is not related to South Africa’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, who has the same name and is a career diplomat, unlike the other van Schalkwyk, a politician turned ambassador.)
Asked about the possible candidates, Chrispin Phiri, spokesperson for South Africa’s Department of International Relations, told PassBlue: “We are not entertaining speculation at this point.”
Repairing US-South African relations will take far more than finding the right envoy — but South African-born Phiwo Mnyandu, the assistant director of the Center for African Studies at Howard University, in Washington, has a left-field suggestion for the post: “They should pick Ernie Els. Seriously.”
Els, a former world No 1, is second only to Gary Player in the pantheon of South African golfers. Now living in Jupiter, Fla., Els won four majors during his career and is a regular golf partner of Trump. In 2022, when he claimed to have hit a hole in one at his West Palm Beach golf club, Els backed him up.
“You play with the ex-president and he makes a hole-in-one. How many times does that happen?” Els told a reporter at the time. A spokesperson for him, Steve Newell, told PassBlue in an email, “Unfortunately, Ernie is not available for comment on this occasion.”
Trump, Mnyandu points out, places far more importance on personal relationships than he does on experience or expertise. “He has no respect for ‘qualified’ people. All he’s ever talked about knowing about South Africa since the earliest days of his presidency has been Ernie and Gary Player.”
Even before last week’s ouster, Mnyandu had called the appointment of Rasool as ambassador “monumentally reckless” due to his often-expressed support for the Palestinian cause, which is anathema to the Trump administration.
The US State Department spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, made clear in a briefing this week that the problem was much bigger than “this particular individual” but encompassed South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ); its domestic laws aimed at redressing the economic and land-ownership legacy of apartheid; and its close ties to Washington’s enemies.
“Both the president and the secretary of state have made it clear what the problems are. . . . ,” Bruce said. “The unjust land expropriation law, as well as its growing relationship with countries like Russia and Iran, that’s what prompted this review of our South Africa policy. . . . They have taken aggressive positions towards the US and its allies.”
The reference to Russia might leave some scratching their heads — Trump has openly declared his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, apparently siding with him in the Ukraine war and making the US relationship with the European Union an early casualty of his second presidency.
Johannesburg-born Joel Pollak, a senior editor at Breitbart who has been promoted as Trump’s possible pick for ambassador to Pretoria, said in an interview this week with the South African media outlet BizNews: “This is not a crisis that can be resolved simply by sending the right person to say the right words. . . . This is fundamentally about South Africa’s policies.”
Pollak also cited a proposal by the ANC majority in the Johannesburg city council to rename the avenue in the city where the US has its consulate to Leila Khaled Drive, honoring the Palestinian activist and aircraft hijacker.
“The purpose of renaming the street is an attempt to force the US consulate to put the name of a Palestinian terrorist … on its letterhead,” Pollak said. “That will never happen and it’s going to be met with a very stern response.”
Mnyandu the analyst said the ANC, which rose to power under Nelson Mandela’s leadership when South Africa held its first democratic elections in 1994, was paying the price of having failed to develop a corps of professional diplomats, using embassy postings instead as a reward and sinecure for party hacks.
“Of course, anything ANC is a poisoned chalice with this White House, including van Schalkwyk and Nel,” he said. “Moreover, Pretoria runs the risk of being seen as patronizing the administration by thinking all they have to do is pick a WASP, instead of making a serious ‘change in policy,’ like Tammy Bruce made clear.”
The point is echoed by Joshua Meservey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, based in Washington. “If they’re going to send a white Afrikaner just because he’s white, in the hopes that will solve the problem, then that’s a mistake,” he told PassBlue in a call.
Other, larger issues than the identity of the ambassador are involved in the diplomatic tiff, such as South Africa’s genocide charge against Israel at the ICJ, where it “inserted itself aggressively into an issue the US cares deeply about, on the other side,” its support for China against Taiwan and the Leila Khaled street renaming.
“These are the actions of a hostile party. So, when they say, ‘We want to have good relations with the us,’ it’s extraordinarily hard to give that credence,” Meservey said.
He noted that ANC policy documents had over the years made it abundantly clear that the party did not like the US. “They talk about the fact that they are opposed to the current global order, they refer to the US as a ‘hyperpower,’ they talk about the US’s ‘rapacious licence of empire.’ . . . But they’ve still been able to have a useful relationship, useful to them, economically. The US is still an important partner. So, they’ve had their cake and been able to eat it too.”
Rasool, Meservey said, had a long history of criticizing Trump, including on Twitter/X, and represented the ANC attitude to Washington. “Rasool has been extraordinarily hostile to President Trump . . . calling him an agent of hate, et cetera et cetera, and they still sent this man to Washington. Kind of extraordinary.”
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Anton Ferreira worked for 23 years as a correspondent and desk editor at Reuters. He started in Hong Kong and later worked long-term assignments in the Mideast, Latin America, New York City, Washington and South Africa. Ferreira is now based in South Africa.
