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03-10-2025
PARIS: South Africa’s ambassador to France, Nathi Mthethwa, has been found dead near the four-star Hyatt Regency Hotel in Paris, French officials have told media.
Mthethwa, 58, was reported missing by his wife on Monday evening, after a “worrying message from him”, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.
He had booked a room on the 22nd floor of the high-rise hotel, whose security window was forced open, it added.
The circumstances around his death are unclear at this stage, and an investigation has been opened, the Paris prosecutor’s office said, adding that a duty magistrate was “going to the scene”.
Mthethwa was a high-ranking member of the African National Congress, the party that brought in democratic rule in 1994 with Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first black president.
He had been serving as South Africa’s ambassador to Paris since December 2023, and had previously been in government as police minister and also arts and culture minister.
He was a close ally of former President Jacob Zuma and was implicated in what is known in South Africa as the state capture inquiry, which looked into allegations of high-level corruption during Zuma’s presidency.
In a statement, South Africa’s Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola hailed Mthethwa as a “distinguished servant of the nation”.
“I have no doubt that his passing is not only a national loss but is also felt within the international diplomatic community,” he added.
Lamola confirmed that the circumstances around Mthethwa’s death were being investigated by the French authorities.
However, in August, Brash, controversial and unafraid to speak his mind, South Africa’s Sports, Arts and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie has been swift to call out racism in others but he himself has now been branded a racist, a charge he refutes.
He is often seen as the lightning rod for the frustrations of the country’s colored community, as people of mixed heritage are referred to in South Africa’s population census but old comments McKenzie made on social media, using a profoundly offensive term referring to black people, have created a political storm.
He has until the end of Wednesday to respond to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), which wants the minister to delete the offensive posts and issue a public apology, among other demands.
“Colored” was the classification given to people of mixed heritage under apartheid. This system created a legally enforced racial hierarchy that saw white people at the top and black people at the bottom, with Indians and colored people in between.
Despite apartheid being abolished three decades ago and the promotion of the “rainbow nation”, its bitter legacy lives on in the country’s economy and politics.
McKenzie’s Patriotic Alliance (PA) has attracted support among colored people, winning parliamentary representation in elections last year.
“For the first time there is colored people also going to parliament through the Patriotic Alliance,” McKenzie said, after the results were announced.
President Cyril Ramaphosa included the PA in his multi-party coalition government after his African National Congress (ANC) lost its parliamentary majority for the first time.
The ANC sees McKenzie as useful to counter the second-biggest party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), in the campaign for the colored vote, and to address perceptions of marginalization within the colored community. (Int’l News Desk)
