Elon Musk enters the South African race debate by pushing the dangerous narrative of a white genocide

OPINION: The CEO of X, formerly Twitter, used his sizable platform to score political points in his crusade against the left by targeting an outspoken South African leader.

Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.

When one of the world’s richest men bought the world’s biggest megaphone, he got the power to spotlight any issue for his 150 million followers. 

Earlier this month, that floodlight swung on South Africa where a populist politician not unlike Donald Trump in his ability to tap into the psyche of his followers led a stadium full of people in a chant of “Kill the Boer.”

For those unfamiliar with South Africa, a Boer is a Dutch-descended white farmer who stands at the fulcrum of the old apartheid South Africa and the new one that Nelson Mandela tried to forge. 

The politician Musk highlighted with a tweet is Julius Malema, leader of the political party known as Economic Freedom Fighters or EFF. Malema was expelled years ago from the governing African National Congress and went on to form his own small but supremely media-savvy party that frequently grabs headlines despite pulling just 10% of seats in parliament. 

Musk tweeted, “They are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa. [President] @Cyril Ramaphosa, why do you say nothing?”

To unpack this development, you need a working knowledge of South Africa’s current reality and its similarities and divergence with the left-right divide in the United States.

For white nationalists everywhere, South Africa is one front in a worldwide struggle of Caucasian Westerners against a globalist cabal that aims to dilute white Western culture in favor of diversity. That explains the support of Vladimir Putin among some white nationalists who see him as a protector of traditional white culture. The false narrative that white South Africans are being systematically exterminated — “white genocide” — fits in that worldview and was picked up and amplified by the likes of Tucker Carlson, who saw it as another example of an anti-white crusade by globalists. 

For people like Musk and his close adviser, David Sacks of the “All-In” podcast, another South African-born tech mogul and a vocal critic of President Joe Biden and the U.S. support to Ukraine, their support of the anti-apartheid movement stops at efforts to redistribute the ill-gotten goods of the apartheid era to the poverty-stricken majority. 

Musk’s tweets and Malema’s video spread like wildfire on right-wing U.S. social media as proof of the left’s double standards on racial justice.  

Musk’s intervention is significant because South Africa is a fragile nation with tremendous assets as one of the most beautiful and economically developed countries in the world, with racial and economic peace held together with duct tape. 

It’s one of those places that in theory should tumble into chaos and anarchy at any moment (and the possibility still exists) but manages to limp along with the patience and infinite well of resigned and subversive humor from its people.

The South African-born Musk is now approaching Mandela-level global fame, which he is now using as a cudgel to espouse an idiosyncratic worldview that increasingly aligns with American right-wing viewpoints. 

A hero to futurists everywhere and a certifiable genius with his fingers in a handful of the most exciting companies on the planet, Musk has veered in the last couple of years to the political right. He has urged his fans to vote for Republicans, waded into the culture war over transgender rights and invited Donald Trump back to Twitter, now renamed X, after the former president’s banishment from the platform following the Jan. 6 attacks. 

The baby-faced Malema can at times come off as a buffoonish figure, but he is supremely entertaining in a uniquely South African way, perfectly made for memes. Like Trump, Malema doesn’t try to make sense as understood by university professors but is hilarious as a storyteller, dropping truth bombs because he can’t help it. 

Malema, for example, can be a reality check to Black South Africans when he tells them not to hate Africans from the rest of the continent. Xenophobia is a big problem because of frequent pogroms committed against Africans in South African cities.

But the EFF leader sends terror throughout the body politic of the country when he taps into the legitimate anger of the majority of the population by pointing out they live in the most unequal society on earth because their land was stolen.

South Africa was lauded as a miracle because Black liberation leaders agreed to largely let the white minority, which numbered under 10% of the population, keep most of the wealth they had amassed since the first Europeans started landing in Cape Town in the 1700s. 

Three decades after the transfer of power to the Black majority, the liberation era leaders have struggled to transition into competent managers of the government, unable to rise up to challenges that have left the country on the edge of chaos.

Take power outages. If you want to be charitable to the ANC government, you would say it’s clear to see the country buckling from the lack of an electrical system that was built for 10% of the population that is now trying to serve all of them. 

But for the suffering South African citizen, 30 years is more than enough time to have planned and found a solution to this problem that almost everybody saw coming. 

Ditto for income inequality, a police force that is largely seen as virtually invisible and has outsourced its services to private security that only serves the haves, and education and health care systems that don’t meet the needs of the people.

Unfortunately, the alternatives to the governing party are Malema’s party and a tone-deaf white-dominated Democratic Alliance opposition that has not made a significant dent in the electoral rolls.

But getting back to the song, is it a literal call for the murder of white farmers? A South African court has said no after Malema was hauled to court to explain himself. 

The court ruled that “Before democracy, the song was directed at the apartheid regime and not particularly the disposition of the land of the majority of the members of the society by the colonial powers.”

And Malema maintained in court that the song was now aimed at the ruling Black-led government.

Many liberation-era leaders, including former President Thabo Mbeki, have argued against taking the song literally, saying it was used as a rallying cry at the height of the struggle against the white supremacist apartheid regime, which pitted the races against each other. 

But that explanation has not lessened the chilling message of the song, especially when chanted as a political war cry in a stadium filled with party faithful.

For Musk, highlighting a bomb-throwing South African politician known for his antics was just another chance to score points in his crusade against the left, damn the reputational harm to his birthplace.

Samson Mulugeta has reported from 45 of Africa’s 54 countries and has lived and worked in South Africa for two decades.

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