South Africa has summoned the new United States ambassador, Brent Bozell, to formally explain a series of remarks that Pretoria says crossed diplomatic lines and misrepresented the country’s racial policies and judiciary.

Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola confirmed that Bozell was called in after his first major public address in South Africa, where the conservative envoy denounced the liberation-era chant “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer” as hate speech and attacked government efforts to redress apartheid-era inequality.

South Africa’s courts have repeatedly ruled that the chant, while deeply contentious, does not constitute hate speech when used in its historical and political context as part of the struggle against white-minority rule. Bozell dismissed those rulings, telling a gathering of business leaders that “I don’t care what your courts say, it’s hate speech.”

Lamola said such comments undermined the independence of South Africa’s judiciary and ignored the country’s constitutional framework. He stressed that foreign envoys are expected to respect domestic institutions, even when they disagree with specific judgments.

Bozell later attempted to soften his stance in a post on X, saying that while his personal view, “like that of many South Africans,” was that the chant amounted to hate speech, the US government respected the findings of South Africa’s courts. The clarification did little to quell anger within the ruling African National Congress and among legal scholars, who saw his initial remarks as an affront to the country’s hard-won legal order.

The ambassador further inflamed tensions by likening South Africa’s black economic empowerment policies to apartheid-era race laws. Citing figures promoted by pro-white lobby groups, he claimed there were roughly as many laws now “against whites” as there had once been against black South Africans.

Lamola rejected that comparison as “regrettable” and “misleading,” insisting that broad-based black economic empowerment was neither reverse racism nor a mirror image of apartheid, but a constitutional tool to correct structural imbalances created by centuries of racial exclusion.

Bozell, a prominent figure on the American right and founder of the Media Research Center, has long been a polarising voice on issues of race and media. His posting to Pretoria comes at a time when US–South African relations are already strained over Pretoria’s genocide case against Israel and Washington’s alignment with President Donald Trump’s claims about the treatment of white Afrikaners.

Lamola warned that the ambassador “must not take us back to a polarised society along racial lines,” adding that as a guest in the country, his role should be to help build “one nation,” not deepen existing divides.