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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However, I am also very different from these men – and not just because I do not have billions in the bank or a direct line to the US president. Unlike Musk, I do not support racist pseudoscience. Unlike Musk and the administration these men serve, I question the apartheid-era policies that allowed a small minority – white South Africans – to control a disproportionate amount of land and resources. And most importantly, I take pride in the achievements and progress of post-apartheid South Africa.
In the early 1990s when South Africa was making a transition from apartheid to democracy, I was working as a radio journalist at the country’s national broadcaster. I remember the pride and elation felt across the country as South Africans of all races and backgrounds lined up to vote on April 27, 1994, in their first democratic elections. Over the next few years, my colleagues and I were part of the effort to transform the South African Broadcasting Corporation from a government mouthpiece to a genuine public broadcaster.
As South Africans won the fight for democracy, they faced another battle, this time against the AIDS pandemic. Once again, the country, and its people rose up to the challenge. Millions of South Africans organised and took to the streets to demand and ultimately achieve access to antiretroviral medications. After relentless pressure, the government agreed to commit to treatment. The US government also did the right thing and agreed to generously fund AIDS drug treatment in the country through the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). South Africa has been one of the biggest recipients of PEPFAR aid, receiving $332.6m in 2024. This aid saved countless South African lives.
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Now, no doubt with full support from his billionaire friends nostalgic for the miserable days of apartheid, Trump has cut this funding. The cuts for AIDS treatment came with Trump’s recent executive orders halting US aid to South Africa and offering support and refuge to white South Africans he described as “victims of unjust racial discrimination”. Later, the Trump administration also decided to expel the South African ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool.
Trump is following Musk’s lead in branding post-apartheid South Africa a country riddled with racial discrimination. Musk has previously described his birth nation as having “racist ownership laws” and accused its government of failing to stop what he calls a “genocide” against white farmers.
What Musk and Trump describe is not anything like the country I know and love.
My South African husband and I moved to the US in 2010 because I was offered a chance to play a part in supporting public health activists internationally through a job at the Open Society Foundations in New York.
We decided this was too exciting an opportunity to turn down – but moving to the US from South Africa was not an easy decision. We had a very comfortable life, and moving to the US actually meant losing a number of rights and protections we had in South Africa, such as good labour protections, paid family leave and – as a gay couple – the right to marry. (Same-sex marriage would not become legal nationwide in the US for another five years.) South Africans of all races also enjoy the right to abortion and the constitutional rights to health, education and housing – even if these are still far from being a reality in practice.
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I became a US citizen in December 2023. It was a bittersweet time. My father, Malcolm, had died a few days before – and I had to postpone heading home for the memorial until I was able to obtain my new US passport. He was a man of faith – a minister in the Congregational Church – who donated his body to science. A devout Christian who was loving and supportive when I came out as gay and even when I told him I was leaving the church, he deeply admired the anti-Nazi German dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer and urged my siblings and me to always have the courage of our convictions.
Unlike Musk, Thiel, Sacks and Pollak, I have no nostalgia for apartheid, and if I am to have the courage of my convictions as my father taught me, I feel I must speak out when Musk cynically labels efforts to undo the legacy of segregation “racism” and leads the way in cutting the funding for international health and development assistance (a tiny fraction of the US federal budget) that, according to experts, could result in more than 500,000 deaths in South Africa over the next decade.
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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Musk and his like-minded friends may now have all the power, but they are just a tiny minority. Justice- and democracy-loving people of South Africa and the US won against their kind before, and I am certain they will do so again.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
