There’s a particular kind of arrogance that colonialism has bred – the kind that walks into another nation’s house, surveys its laws, dismisses its courts, and pronounces itself dissatisfied. That arrogance arrived in the Western Cape wearing a diplomat’s badge. Its name is Leo Brent Bozell III, and its title is US ambassador to SA.
At a gathering that should have been an occasion for bilateral goodwill, Bozell decided that his host country had tried his patience long enough.
He said so, directly and without the faintest blush of diplomatic restraint. He was running out of patience with SA, he declared. With its courts. With its laws. With, it would seem, the very idea that a sovereign African state might be entitled to govern itself.
The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations – ratified and observed by both SA and the US – is explicit on the obligations of diplomats. Article 41 requires that all persons enjoying diplomatic privilege and immunity respect the laws and regulations of the receiving state and do not meddle in the internal affairs of that country.
For a foreign ambassador to stand on our soil and announce that he does not care what our courts have ruled is an extraordinary act of institutional disrespect — Jovial Rantao
Bozell did not merely breach the convention in spirit. He did so with the confidence of a man who has never seriously contemplated that international law might apply to him.
When he dismissed the findings of SA’s highest court that the phrase “Kill the boer, kill the farmer” is constitutionally protected speech within its historical and performative political context, he was not offering an opinion. He was staging an insult. This is not diplomacy; it’s contempt.
For a foreign ambassador to stand on our soil and announce that he does not care what our courts have ruled is an extraordinary act of institutional disrespect.
Bozell did not arrive in a vacuum. His predecessor, Reuben Brigety, was summoned to the Union Buildings in 2023 after making the extraordinary and evidence-free claim that SA had supplied Russia with ammunition for use in its war against Ukraine.
The allegation was false and was retracted, but it caused diplomatic damage. Brigety was effectively démarched — a rare and pointed diplomatic signal of SA’s displeasure.
One might have expected Bozell’s appointment to come with a lesson attached: SA is not a subordinate. It is not a client state. It does not accept false accusations or public lectures from foreign envoys.
And yet here we are, with a second US ambassador in as many years conducting himself as though SA’s sovereignty were conditional on Washington’s approval.
This is not coincidence. This is doctrine. And the doctrine is this: SA, as a nation that has refused to join Western sanctions against Russia, that has pursued an independent foreign policy, and that has brought a genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), must be brought to heel.
This is a country that faced down apartheid. It did not do so in order to accept a new set of foreign masters.
If it cannot be sanctioned into compliance, it will be lectured into submission.
The US and Israel – an alliance that has in recent years conducted itself as judge, jury and executioner on questions of international law while being immune from its findings – constitute a genuine threat to African stability.
Their alignment against SA is not passive. Bozell’s remarks are not isolated rudeness. They are a coordinated signal: fall in line, or face consequences.
SA will face those consequences standing upright.
When Israel’s chargé d’affaires made false and inflammatory statements attacking the SA government, the country acted, and he was summoned to explain himself. The principle was clear: the privileges of diplomatic status do not extend to the privilege of lying about and attacking the government that hosts you.
Bozell has now done what that Israeli diplomat did. He has publicly attacked SA’s judicial system, inserted himself into the country’s domestic legal debates, and done so with a contempt for the rules of diplomatic engagement that makes his continued presence untenable.
The department of international relations and cooperation must act. The government owes its citizens and the international diplomatic order a firm, proportionate, and immediate response.
Declare him persona non grata. Return him to his natural habitat. The relationship between SA and the US is too important to be held hostage to one man’s bad manners, and worse, ideology.
This is a country that faced down apartheid. It did not do so in order to accept a new set of foreign masters.
SA’s case before the ICJ on the question of Israeli genocide in Gaza is proceeding. The Hague Group – the coalition of nations that has aligned behind international accountability – is growing. History is watching, and history, on this question, is on the right side.
Bozell told South Africans he was losing patience. SA should save him the wait. Send him home. And then get back to the business of building a country that needs no foreign approval to know its own worth.
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