White Africans – descendants of European colonizers in South Africa – who are subjected to ethnic discrimination should be offered refugee status in the USA, the White House announced last week.
In the same presidential order, all aid to South Africa was withdrawn, motivated by the claim that the government in Pretoria is seizing land and allowing violent attacks on white farmers. This means that hundreds of millions of dollars intended primarily for combating HIV and AIDS will be stopped.
Terrible things are happening in South Africa,
Donald Trump.
The recent land reform that Trump is assumed to have referred to aims to counter historical injustices, primarily regarding ownership, created by the apartheid regime and its racial segregation policy. However, no land has been seized so far, according to Time.
"Genocide of whites"
Since the shift in power, Trump and his associates, not least Elon Musk, have raised the tone against South Africa. The latest claims – that whites are being forced out of their homes and killed at a rapid rate – are an echo from the former South Africa and have been found to lack basis several times before.
South Africa-born Tesla and X CEO Musk, raised with strict racial laws in 1970s Pretoria, has repeatedly accused South Africa's leadership of racism and "genocide of whites".
After
during Trump's inauguration ceremony – and support for, among others, the German far-right party AFD – observers are now seeking answers in the roots of the world's richest man, according to The Guardian.Musk's maternal grandfather was openly racist, anti-Semitic, and pro-apartheid, according to several reports. Father Errol, with whom Elon Musk has long since broken, made his fortune by breaking diamonds in Zambia – an industry that was the core of the apartheid regime's finances.
Accused of Hamas support
Musk is not the only tech billionaire with roots in southern Africa and growing influence in American politics. Another is Trump ally Peter Thiel, who according to Financial Times spent his childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father broke uranium as part of the apartheid regime's pursuit of nuclear weapons. According to a biography about Thiel published in 2021, he as a student called apartheid "economically sound", writes The Guardian. Thiel later founded PayPal together with Musk.
Among the South Africa-born in Trump's inner circle are also Thiel's Stanford friend David Sacks, appointed as Trump's "AI tsar", and venture capitalist Roelof Botha, who is the grandson of the apartheid regime's last foreign minister.
In the presidential order where aid was withdrawn, Trump also pointed to South Africa's support for several of the USA's "enemies" and its allies, including Russia and Iran, which, like South Africa, are part of the Brics cooperation organization.
The word "apartheid" comes from the Afrikaans language and means "separation".
South Africa adopted apartheid as a political system in 1948, when the Nationalist Party came to power. Under the very brutal system, non-white inhabitants were subjected to extensive and systematic racism.
The population was divided into whites, blacks, Asians, and colored (of mixed descent). Many blacks were placed in reserves, so-called "homelands".
The UN General Assembly condemned South Africa on several occasions and emphasized that apartheid was a crime against humanity.
In practice, apartheid was more or less abolished in 1990. The resistance movement ANC's leader Nelson Mandela was released then after 27 years in prison. After the country's first democratic election in 1994, Mandela became South Africa's leader.
Source: Landguiden/UI
