Debate on Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool’s expulsion from the Unites States is bound to continue into posterity. Perhaps more like the Jessie Owens moment in the 1936 Summer Olympic games when he shattered a Hitlerian scheme to showcase Aryan superiority; or Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City games with their fists raised high during the rendering of the US anthem; or Muhammad Ali in rejecting conscription during the Vietnam war: ‘No Viet Cong ever called me nigger’, Ali said. 

 

There are so many dimensions to the events surrounding Ambassador Rasool that it would be difficult to ventilate all of them in a week, a month, and even a year. In future diplomatic training manuals far beyond South Africa, this will certainly feature as a useful cases study. Besides diplomatic rights and responsibilities, it also raises the question about to whom protocol applies in relation to global power balances. 

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