JOHANNESBURG: Thousands of South Africans marched on Saturday to demand respect for their nation's sovereignty after months of pressure from US President Donald Trump on issues from trade to race relations.
Trump has clashed repeatedly with South Africa's government, hitting the country with high tariffs, berating President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office over discredited claims of a "white genocide", and boycotting a G20 summit in Johannesburg last year.
Marking Human Rights Day in South Africa — the anniversary of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, when apartheid police opened fire on a crowd of black protesters — Ramaphosa's party called for marches "in defence of our sovereignty and democratic gains".
"We want to defend our country," said demonstrator Siyanda Moloi, a 34-year old construction worker.
"I think they will get the message. You have to respect our president, our laws, our policies."
A sea of marchers in the green and yellow of the ANC took to the streets in Johannesburg, the economic capital, some in T-shirts with messages such as "We will not be bullied".
Another march was planned in second city Cape Town later in the day.
"The principle of national sovereignty is under attack from foreign and domestic forces," Ramaphosa's party, the African National Congress (ANC), said in the manifesto convening the rallies.
The marches come 10 days after South Africa summoned US Ambassador Brent Bozell just a month after his arrival in the country for "undiplomatic remarks".
The ambassador said it was hate speech for black South Africans to use a controversial apartheid-era chant, "Kill the Boer" — a word for the country's white Afrikaner population.
"I don't care what your courts say, it's hate speech," Bozell had said in some of his first public remarks in South Africa. - AFP
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