South Africa names apartheid-era negotiator as ambassador to US

South Africa has appointed a former apartheid government chief negotiator during the talks that ended white rule in the 1990s as ambassador to the US, in what is seen as an attempt to improve the deeply strained diplomatic relationship between the two countries.

Roelf Meyer replaces Ebrahim Rasool, who was expelled in March 2025 after he criticised the Trump administration.

Since Donald Trump began his second term, the US president has accused South Africa’s government of racial discrimination against white Afrikaners, who led the country during apartheid. His government has also given priority to white South Africans, who have come to the US as refugees while almost all other refugees have been shut off.

Roelf Meyer at the Union Buildings in Pretoria in July last year. He said it was ‘very important’ to restore relations with the US. Photograph: Gallo Images/Getty Images

Meyer, an Afrikaner, was a reformist minister in the last apartheid government, while Cyril Ramaphosa, now president, was his opposite number in the African National Congress in the negotiations that brought about democracy in 1994. The two formed a close rapport.

Meyer joined the ANC in 2006. The ambassador-elect would not be giving interviews until his credentials had been accepted by the US, Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, said.

“At this stage, until all administrative protocols have been completed in Washington it would be unwise for him to be speaking to the media now. I don’t have a sense of timelines, as it’s a state department process and we have no control over it,” he added.

South Africa has not had an ambassador in Washington since Rasool was expelled, accused by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, of being a “race-baiting politician who hates America”.

Rasool had told a thinktank event that Trump’s Make America Great Again movement was a “supremacist” response to demographic shifts meaning that white people would soon no longer be a majority in the US.

In July 2025, Meyer said in an interview that the US was an “important partner” that could not be ignored. “We have to work at restoring that relationship. I think it’s very important,” he said. “And I think maybe there is something of a blame going our way, and that is that we didn’t pay enough attention to keeping that relationship going over a period of time, even pre this current administration’s period.”

A 1994 photograph shows Roelf Meyer, chief apartheid government negotiator (second row, second right) next to his counterpart, the ANC's Cyril Ramaphosa, right. In the front row are, from left, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the IFP, the then President FW de Klerk, and Nelson Mandela. Photograph: Lynne Sladky/AP

The 78-year-old said at the time that the hard work of being ambassador needed “youthful energy”, adding, “I don’t think somebody of my age should take on that responsibility at this stage, quite frankly.”

Meyer criticised “Afrikaner groups that went [to Washington and] are not speaking on behalf of me as an Afrikaner, let alone the rest of the nation”, saying their lobbying was “distorting the picture”.

The conservative Afrikaner group AfriForum has promoted the idea in Washington that the killing of white farmers is racially targeted, despite South Africa’s high murder rate affecting all races.

Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer in 1995, the early years of the ANC government. Photograph: Independent/Alamy

Trump has repeatedly falsely claimed that there is a “white genocide” in South Africa. His administration has also criticised the country’s affirmative action policies and its case at the international court of justice that accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.

Prof John Stremlau, a US-Africa relations expert at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, called Meyer “the right person, at the right time”.

“He is an excellent and experienced negotiator who not only negotiated in South Africa, but has brokered agreements elsewhere in various other places under very difficult circumstances,” Stremlau told Associated Press, adding that Meyer needed to “stabilise the relationship” between the South Africa and the US.