OPINION What Musk and Trump describe is not the South Africa I know and love

[Uncle Joe]

Trump is following Musk’s lead in branding post-apartheid South Africa a country riddled with racial discrimination. They are wrong.

As a white South African man now living in the United States, I am acutely aware of the oversized role played by Elon Musk and a few other white men with strong South African ties in the US’s lurch towards authoritarianism. These include far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who spent formative years of his childhood in apartheid South Africa; US President Donald Trump’s Cape Town-born “AI and crypto tsar” David Sacks; and Joel Pollak, the South African-American conservative political commentator currently serving as the senior editor-at-large of the Breitbart News Network.

While I am no billionaire and have no influence over government policy, these men and I still have quite a bit in common. I was born in apartheid South Africa about the same time as Musk, Pollak and Sacks and benefitted from the system. Like them, I eventually migrated to the US. Like Musk, I went to Veldskool, or “field school” – a weeklong camp during high school during which teachers tried to indoctrinate us into Christian nationalism, the whites-only political ideology of the apartheid government. Also like him, I was a nerdy boy who was relentlessly bullied in school.

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I feel compelled to speak out because Musk and his uberwealthy South African-born or -raised friends – people with more money than many of us can fathom – are now directly working with the American president to take everything away from those who have almost nothing.

Their model is not the one we should be following. There are far better examples in the past and present. Take Jennifer Davis, who helped forge constructive connections between South Africa and the US based on human rights and justice. Or the many members of the CHANGE coalition, led by organisations such as Health GAP in the US and the Health Justice Initiative in South Africa, who are right now collaborating to challenge and reverse Trump’s aid cuts. Or the millions of people in both countries who are showing up every day to do the work necessary to make the US and South Africa better for all their people, no matter their race, sexuality or bank balance, motivated and inspired by the values of democracy, social justice and Ubuntu – the idea that we are all connected and responsible for one another.

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https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/3/25/what-musk-and-trump-describe-is-not-the-south-africa-i-know-and-love