South Africa’s presidency asked Johannesburg to exercise restraint on plans to rename the street where the US consulate is located after a Palestinian woman who hijacked an American airliner as it seeks to mend frayed ties with Washington.
A majority of councilors last week resolved to proceed with plans to rename Sandton Drive in the heart of the city’s financial hub after Leila Khaled, despite protests from parties including the Democratic Alliance.
City lawmakers from the African National Congress and Economic Freedom Fighters support the change.
It’s the latest episode in a racially charged feud between the two countries that last week saw the US expel ambassador Ebrahim Rasool from Washington after he said that President Donald Trump and his supporters are effectively a “supremacist” movement projecting “White victimhood.”
“Do not engage in any action that will further inflame the situation,” Vincent Magwenya, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesman, told reporters Thursday.
“We have a major diplomatic situation that we are managing. Please support us,” he said, adding that the national executive isn’t asking councilors to stop the process.
Ties between Washington and Africa’s biggest economy took a hit in 2024 after South Africa filed a case in the International Court of Justice accusing Israel, a top American ally, of committing a genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, as well as the Pretoria’s ties with Russia and Iran.
This year, the Trump White House issued an executive order halting US foreign assistance to South Africa and declaring that the US refugee system would give priority to Afrikaner “victims of unjust racial discrimination,” with Trump claiming that their land was being expropriated.
South African authorities haven’t confiscated any private land since apartheid ended in 1994.
A top Trump associate, South Africa-born billionaire Elon Musk, has cited Black-ownership laws that compel companies to allocate a 30% shareholding to historically disadvantaged groups that were sidelined from the mainstream economy during White-minority rule as the reason he won’t bring his Starlink satellite-internet service to the country.
It’s one of the few nations regionally where Musk’s company doesn’t already operate or plan to this year, according to the Starlink’s website.
Thapelo Amad, a former Johannesburg mayor and chairman of Al Jam-ah party in Gauteng province, first brought the motion to change the street name in 2018.
That came after Trump moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, and after he posted on X — the platform then known as Twitter — that he’d asked then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to closely study land and farm seizures and the “large-scale killing” of White farmers, Amad said.
“The colonial master and the supremacist sometimes tends to undermine the people as the sovereign people,” Amad said in an interview on ChaiFM Thursday.
“Americans might perceive her as a terrorist, but one man’s terrorist is another man’s liberator.”
Rasool is due to return to Cape Town on March 23, with the African National Congress encouraging people to go to the airport to “come out in solidarity” with him, Khusela Diko, a lawmaker for the party and a former presidential spokesman, said in a post on X.
Magwenya also urged supporters to “exercise restraint” in the homecoming rallies.
“What we would not like to see is further inflaming the situation and creating more difficulties around what is already a challenging situation,” he said.
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