Elon's African roots
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What are the current issues facing white South Africans?
The South African situation is very, very dangerous and very bad for a lot of people. There's tremendously bad things going on, including the confiscation of property and worse, much worse than that. You know what I'm talking about. You might not know what he's talking about. We got you. President Trump says that Afrikaners, white South Africans who decades ago architected a brutal system of segregation laws known as apartheid, are now themselves victims of discrimination after the passage of a law that allows their land to be expropriated without compensation. Trump is offering these white South Africans resettlement in the U.S. and they are gently turning him down.
We see our future in Africa.
But what got Trump interested in South Africa? And is it unelected white South African Vice President Elon Musk? We're going to ask on Today Explained.
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This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Chris McGreal. Chris is a reporter for The Guardian who covered South Africa for many years, including the end of apartheid and the start of South Africa's democracy. Recently, Chris wrote a piece about the influential white South Africans in President Trump's orbit.
The argument is being made that Afrikaners who were the group that imposed apartheid on South Africa in 1948, the very rigid form of racial segregation, are now victims of the post-apartheid era, that they're being targeted with… as the White House and others characterize it, racist laws, that they're victims of discrimination in the post-apartheid order, and that they are victims of politically targeted violence. This is the argument being made.
What are these so-called racist laws? What's Trump referring to?
Well, what's upsetting Trump and others is that essentially South Africa has an affirmative action program for the black majority and other minority people of color who were discriminated against and left very much at a disadvantage by apartheid. So there's, for instance, a black empowerment legal requirement for businesses. There's upliftment in education, in job opportunities, in the civil service. That is now being characterized as discrimination against the white minority. Although it's worth bearing in mind that the white minority at the end of apartheid, which is 30 years ago now, 30 years later still hangs on to its big houses, its swimming pools, its Mercedes-Benz.
When does Donald Trump become interested in South Africa and why?
So there's a group in South Africa which describes itself as an Afrikaner rights group called AfriForum. And the Southern Poverty Law Center has described it as white supremacists in a suit and a tie. The leadership of that group came to the United States in 2018. And amongst other things, they appeared on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News.
South Africa is a diverse country, but the South African government would like to make it much less diverse.
Why is Trump interested in white South Africans?
They laid out the case that whites were the victims of discrimination in South Africa, but particularly latched onto this issue of the killing of white farmers.
Basically threatening white farmers that if they do not voluntarily hand over their land to black people, then there would be a violent takeover. So the situation is very dire in South Africa. They would be tortured to death and it would receive very little news coverage.
Which is totally untrue. But they appeared on Tucker Carlson. Trump was watching. This is when he's president in 2018. And he tweets to his then Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, telling him to watch the situation in South Africa with the whites and how they're being victimized. And others pick up on this around the states afterwards. And it starts to gain some momentum.
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