Trump to nominate handbag designer Lana Marks as new US ambassador to SA
The designer was born in SA and attended Wits University
US President Donald Trump intends to nominate luxury handbag designer Lana Marks as the new ambassador to SA, the White House said, almost two years after the last ambassador left under Barack Obama. The nomination comes at a time of frayed relations between the two countries after a tweet in August in which Trump asked his secretary of state to study SA “land and farm seizures”. SA accused Trump of stoking racial divisions with the comments, which it called “misinformed”. African politicians also labelled Trump a racist in January after he was reported to have described some immigrants from Africa and Haiti as coming from “shithole” countries. President Cyril Ramaphosa told reporters earlier in November that he had met Trump since the tweets on “farm seizures” but that the US president mainly talked to him about golf. Ramaphosa has said repeatedly that plans to accelerate the pace of land reform to tackle racial disparities in ownership will follow a parliamentary process and that ...
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