Front Burner - Trump, apartheid and the PayPal mafia?

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

Earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans to end all future funding to South Africa claiming that in the country, “certain classes of people” were being treated “very badly.” Trump went on to announce a new specialized refugee program which would facilitate the entry of White South Africans — Afrikaners — into the U.S., as a result of “government sponsored race-based discrimination.”It’s left many wondering exactly why Trump has taken up this new interest in South Africa? The answer to this may lie in a group of white billionaires and political insiders from apartheid-era South Africa that have embedded themselves within Donald Trump’s orbit, a group which includes the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, the billionaire Peter Thiel, Trump donor and official David Sacks, and well known South African golfer Gary Player. Chris McGreal is a journalist with The Guardian and a former South Africa correspondent with the paper through the final years of Apartheid. He joins the show to unpack the throughline connecting apartheid South Africa to the US today.  For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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But it's time to imagine what we can do with more. Join Scarborough Health Network and together, we can turn grit into greatness. Do meet at lovescarborough.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Prossan. Shoot to kill! Hamaza!

Kill the poor! The farmer! Kill the poor! The farmer! What you're hearing is the voice of South African opposition party leader Julius Malema, leading a stadium full of supporters as they sing an apartheid era freedom song. It's called Kill the Boar. The song goes in part, Kill the Boar the farmer. It was a song of resistance during the years in which Black South Africans were stuck under white minority rule and the descendants of Dutch colonizers, or Boars, who arrived at their shores and created a system of government that became known as apartheid. Continued use of the song has been seen by some, including Elon Musk,

as evidence that a so-called white genocide is taking place in South Africa specifically against white farmers. We'll get more into it in the episode. The claim is one which frankly lacks evidence. But essentially the argument is that since the collapse of apartheid, white South African farmers have been victim to a campaign of coordinated violence, which they say centers on the seizure of their land. This idea of a white genocide and the symbol of the white South African farmer has been an animating force for white supremacists and the far right across the world for many years now. But if you are wondering why white South Africans are in the news with such force today, why they've gotten the attention of Trump.

U.S. President Donald Trump has signed an executive order suspending direct assistance to South Africa. 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. Trump's order also directs the State Department to help Afrikaners, an ethnic group descended from European settlers, through refugee programs.

South African-born... The answer may lie with a group of white billionaires and political insiders from apartheid-era South Africa that have embedded themselves within Donald Trump's orbit, some of whom donated hundreds of millions of dollars. This is a group which includes the richest man in the world, Musk, the billionaire Peter Teel, Trump donor and now official David Sacks, and the well-known South African golfer Gary

Player. Chris McReele is a journalist with The Guardian and a former South Africa correspondent with the paper through the final years of apartheid. And he's here to unpack the through line connecting apartheid South Africa to the U.S. and how a long-defunct political system built on white supremacy and exclusion came to find a partner in the Trump administration. Chris, hi. Thank you so much for coming on to Frontburner. My pleasure. I mentioned in the intro that when trying to figure out Trump's actions vis-a-vis South

Africa right now, you have to look to some of the most powerful men with South African roots in his orbit. Let's begin with Elon Musk, who lived in apartheid South Africa until age 17. It's been reported that Musk's family wealth is owed at least in part to apartheid era mining. I would take the money home and put it into the safe, you know, because we used it again to buy more emeralds later on, you know, to keep on going, you know, because we did this for about seven years and the safe was not that big. And so I would stash the money in there, you know, and I'd tell my two boys, Elon and

Kibble, they can take money from the safe for anything they need. They just leave a note. But can you walk me through Elon's connections to South Africa and what his time in the country is likely to have been like. Udon was born there in 1971, and it's worth remembering that at the time he was born, the Prime Minister was a guy called John Forster. Small as we are, and with what we've got, we will defend this country to the last man, because we will not only be doing it for ourselves, we will be doing it for the free world and for Christianity.

And John Forster had been a member of a neo-Nazi militia in the 1930s called the OB, which was infamous for sympathizing with the Nazis in Germany, burning Jewish people out there, businesses in Johannesburg, and when it came to the Second World War, plotting with the Nazis to try and overthrow the government of South Africa, which had entered the war on the side of the Allies, on the side of Britain. Forster is then interned during the war by the South African government as a fellow traveler of the Nazis.

He makes an infamous comment back in 1942. The system that he espoused at the time was called Christian nationalism. And he famously said, in South Africa, we call it Christian nationalism, the Germans call it Nazism, the Italians call it fascism. It may be anti-democratic, but it's all the same thing. So he very much planted himself in the kind of fascist Nazi camp of the time. 30 years later, he's the prime minister of South Africa, and Christian nationalism isn't the fascism of the 1930s, but you know, there are lots of aspects of it that have resonance, not least race laws in South Africa that in many ways echo the Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany.

The education system is openly called Christian national education and rooted in that is the idea of racial superiority, segregation, the idea that whites are more civilized, all of those ideas that you can see in fascism and in apartheid South Africa. And that's essentially the system that Musk was born into and that he grew up under. Similar to Musk, American billionaires, David Sachs, the current AI and crypto czar, and Peter Thiel, a major donor to Trump's campaigns, also enjoy a lot of power in the realm of American politics. Sachs is from Cape Town, South Africa. Thiel is German born, but was raised under apartheid in what is now Namibia, which at the time was a de facto colony of South Africa. They're

also joined by a man named Roloff Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime's last foreign ministers. Teale in particular spent his formative years in a city that was particularly notorious at the time, right? And could you just talk to me a bit about these men and their connections to Elon, to South Africa, and to the American right? Well, they're known as the PayPal mafia because these three men plus Musk, they basically formed the company we now know as PayPal. Peter Thiel was the co-founder of it. David Sachs was its chief operating officer and Rulof Bota was the chief financial officer. So they were very closely together. But they did not know each other back in the day and they had differing experiences of

apartheid at Avogadro. As you mentioned, Bota was the grandson of the foreign minister, Pickmutter, who was infamous really. He had to sell apartheid on the world stage and bought us the one true Afrikaner in that group. Peter Thiel was German born. He moves to Johannesburg when he's small. His father is a mining engineer, moves there. And then he takes him, as you say, to Southwest Africa, which was in those days a de facto South African colony, where his father works on a uranium mine. Peter Thiel and his family lives in a place called Swakopmund. And Swakopmund is notorious as probably the last place on the planet, where

Hitler was still openly celebrated. His birthday was celebrated. You could go into curio shops and buy swastikas. This was a period when you still had descendants of Germans. That part of Africa had been German until the end of the Second World War and then had been moved to South Africa under a League of Nations mandate. But most of the white people there, or many of them anyway, were German and particularly in Swakopmund. So you do have this open veneration of the Nazis. David Sachs, he was born in Cape Town. His family moves to Tennessee when he's very young, five years old. So he was less informed by that system, although he grew up in the white

South African diaspora. But what you see in all of these men is that they all come together through the tech industry, each in their own way gets into it. And then they're brought together by PayPal and they become known as the PayPal Mafia. And mostly, Bota is a bit of an exception. He's not very public on this, but Teal and Saxon and Musk, as we know, all very openly supported of Trump. Sax is a big fundraiser for Trump and has ended up as his, I think he's czar for AI and cryptocurrency. Teal makes no secret of his support for Trump and we all know the role Musk is now playing.

In addition to these men, are there any other intersections between the Trump administration and South Africa that you think are worth noting here? Clearly the Trump administration's come under a lot of influence from different directions over South Africa. And it's worth bearing in mind that there are forces at work that have nothing to do with historic South Africa. bearing in mind that there are forces at work that have nothing to do with historic South Africa. For instance, the fact that South Africa has taken a stand against Israel at the International Court of Justice has led to a lot of pressure from other quarters on the Trump administration to punish

South Africa. Israel has called on the ICJ to reject the case brought by South Africa alleging that it's committing genocide in Gaza. You've also got South African groups themselves, particularly an organisation called AfriForum, which claims to represent white Afrikaner interests, which has been campaigning in the United States since 2018, against what it has portrayed as the persecution of whites in South Africa, particularly white, African farmers. And it's long caught Trump's attention.

There was a, its deputy leader and its leader came to the United States in 2018 and the deputy leader Ernst Roots appeared on Tucker Carlson and essentially portrayed white farmers as under attack, being persecuted by the government, being killed for their land. You describe in this book a disorganized, but in some sense intentional campaign to crush a racial minority within your country and the government seems on board with it. Is that an overstatement? Well, what the book is about is it's about government

complicity in the scourge of farm attacks and farm murders that we've seen in South Africa. So we know in the last two decades... And Trump was watching that and tweeted directly to his then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to keep an eye on what was going on. Though, you know, clearly long before Musk was really whispering in his ear about this, you have Trump paying attention. He plays golf with one of the most prominent South African sportsmen of all time,

Gary Player, who had been back in the day in the 70s and 80s, essentially an apologist for apartheid and the apartheid government making excuses for it and defending it. And you also have other issues such as business interests, which including Musk are very unhappy about South African laws promoting black empowerment in the post apartheid era and are looking to try and circumvent them. So you've got all these different influences at work and they sort of come to a head with Trump's reelection, although I think ultimately Musk must be probably, I would say, is the major player in all this at the moment. So let's talk about how the president has focused this month and focused the authority

of his office on South Africa and the conditions of white South Africans specifically. He outlined this plan to cut funding to South Africa until the country committed to investigating quote, certain classes of people that have been treated very badly. And can you walk me through the plan that Trump rolled out, what its response to and some of the reactions to it in South Africa? Sure. So he's certain kinds of people is a reference to white people and Africanas in particular. It's because Trump has essentially been persuaded of this notion that there is a persecution of South African Africanas in particular, and whites in general, going on at the hands of the post-apartheid government. His executive order offers asylum

to those certain classes of people, Afrikaners in particular, which is astonishing really when you think about it, Geywem, that almost every other form of refugee has now been excluded by executive orders, not least Afghans who worked with the US military and whose lives are in danger from the Taliban in Afghanistan. They are being excluded from coming to the United States now. But the path is open for white Afrikaners to claim that they're being persecuted. And all of this is essentially based on the premise that, the false premise, I have to say, that there is a campaign by the government of South Africa to take the land from white farmers and that that is leading to their murder.

Specifically, Trump has latched on to a new law that came in in January, which is an expropriation law. And it allows in the most exceptional circumstances, the government to expropriate land without compensation. It doesn't say white farmers, it says it's just a general law. It's been assumed that that would apply to white farmers by the white farmers. It's very narrowly targeted. The law specifically says that actually most transfers of land should take place through mutual agreement and proper compensation. The reason for this law is that even 30 years after the end of apartheid, 72%, I think

the figure now is of agricultural land in South Africa is in the hands of white farmers. And whites make up just 7% of the population of South Africa. So there's still this huge imbalance that hasn't been righted since the end of apartheid. So it's part of an attempt to right a deep historic wrong which wasn't introduced by the apartheid government, but actually introduced by the British in 1913 with a law that essentially took most of the land for white people. The 1913 Natives Land Act allocated only around 7% of arable land to non-whites. Blacks could only own land in what were called native reserves, overcrowded and impoverished.

And they weren't allowed to purchase or hire land in white areas. Are white South Africans excited? Are they ready to leave the country that they say is persecuting them? How are they kind of reacting to these executive orders? No, so you've seen different reactions. The group effort forum that I mentioned before, which really has driven this narrative in the United States, is now on the back foot.

We are not going to ask our children now to move to another country. The fact is, our ancestors worked hard to make sure that we as a people are formed beyond the southern tip of Africa. We're not going to disrespect that. I mean, you know, the government and large numbers of ordinary South Africans, you know, the vast majority of the population is black,

have turned on it and accused it of bringing this on South Africa. So AFRI Forum is now running around saying, oh no, we're loyal South Africans, despite everything it's done. This kind of situation we're in would be to the detriment of all people in this country. We are loyal to the people of this country.

We are angry with the president and government that they put us in this precarious position. But it does not mean we'll turn our back on the place we see now and we will make sure. I don't really think most of the farmers intend to leave. There might be some younger white South Africans who see a good opportunity. There's relatively high unemployment in South Africa and limited opportunities and, you know, claiming a political asylum and getting a work permit for America, I'm sure is a dream for many of them. But here the reality is that what is being said here is based on one big lie, which is that farmers are being murdered, persecuted and murdered for

their land. This lie is premised on what happened in Zimbabwe 20 years ago, when as part of a political move by then President Robert Mugabe to shore up his very, very unpopular regime. And after losing a constitutional referendum in 2000 that would have given the government power to take farms owned by whites, Mugabe cracked down, encouraging the seizure of white-owned farms anyway, saying he was redressing colonial imbalances. The land is ours, it's not European, it's our land. He let loose a group of black Zimbabweans known as war veterans onto the farms to and so They did kill some farmers and they took the land no job of their land

It's not our land, but they're citizens are they and isn't this? farming Citizens by colonization Seizing land from the original people, indigenous people of the country. But how did that happen? That is not what is happening in South Africa, although groups like Afroforum and some in the Trump administration and even Elon Musk are kind of drawing a parallel between the

two. What is happening in South Africa is that farmers are being killed because there's an incredibly high crime rate and a high murder rate. There's really no evidence that they're being killed in higher numbers than anybody else in the country. And actually, you're far more likely to be a victim of crime and violent crime if you live in a black township than if you live on a white farm. And there is not a single case where a white farmer has been murdered and the land has then been taken from him

either by the government or by the person that murdered him. So there's really no paranoia at all. ["The Last Supper"] In Scarborough, there's this fire behind our eyes. A passion in our bellies. It's in the hearts of our neighbors. The eyes of our nurses. And the hands of our doctors. It's what makes Scarborough, Scarborough.

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The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks it will take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about how this conspiratorial idea of this

white genocide in South Africa has become an animating force for white supremacists and the far right across the world. Dylann Roof, for example, the man who entered the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina and killed nine parishioners in a white supremacist terror attack. Pictures from Facebook show him wearing a jacket with patches of the racist-era flags of South Africa and Rhodesia, the once white-ruled country now called Zimbabwe, and had a Confederate flag on his license plate.

Lauren Henry Brenton Tarrant, who killed at least 50 people in the Christchurch mosque attack in New Zealand, he also had the words, the word Rhodesia written across his rifle. Emblems from the apartheid era are often worn by far-right militias in the U.S. and across Europe. What are white supremacists and extremists identifying in the tradition of apartheid in South Africa that they're able to connect to their own anxieties and ideologies in the West? So there's this idea amongst some white nationalists, white supremacists in the United States and

in other parts of the West that white people, their existence is under threat. There's the great replacement theory. There's the idea in America that white people are being displaced. It's part of the roots of the attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in this country that have been led by Trump. And part of how they justify both the argument that whites are under attack, but also the need to defend themselves is to look back to examples where they see groups of white people besieged by people of other races.

And Rhodesia is a classic example. For those that don't know, it's the precursor to Zimbabwe. It declared unilateral independence from the UK in the 1960s and 1965 when it was about to become a multiracial democracy. Whites tried to cling on to power. They managed to cling on for 15 years, but ultimately were defeated by the economic realities and an insurgency led by Robert Mugabe. Zimbabwe is mine. I am a Zimbabrian. Zimbabwe for Zimbabrians. Zimbabwe never for the British.

Britain for the British, Britain for the British. And then you have the last bastion in Africa of kind of white rule was apartheid South Africa. And in both those cases, the end of white rule, the end of white domination, political domination, if not economic domination, is portrayed as a disaster for white people as this is what's going to happen to us if we don't stand up against these other forces coming at us. And so they've become emblematic for a lot of white supremacists in the United States in particular of the need to fight back, of the need to resist, of the need not to become like South Africa or Rhodesia,

where the whites are now portrayed as victims of the end of white supremacy systems. What I'm really struck by here is just how much of this appears to be driven by white fear, self-victimization, the local fear of white South Africans connecting to these multinational anxieties shared by white people throughout the world, as you mentioned, replacement theory. Through time, there's also been this long-held fear of a Black revolution, too, right? There's actually a word for this in South Africa, swart gavar, essentially a sense that Black people may one day rise up and do to white people what white people had done to them, a fear of reprisal. And I wonder, as someone that has covered this through the apartheid years to now, and as a white man, what role do you think white fear plays in all of this?

Well, I think in South Africa it evolved. So what you see in South Africa is, you know, in the early years of apartheid, which begins in 1948, but there's plenty of discriminatory laws before that. But what you see is a fear of the Black majority, and who are seen as uncivilized, as unfit to govern, and as, you know, after what white people have got. As Africa becomes increasingly decolonized through the 1960s, you have these independent nations that stand up. So that fear is reinforced and it becomes clearer and clearer. A lot of earlier apartheid justification is the idea that the white race is standing up for

civilization, standing up for God, nation, and civilization. That evolves as that becomes a harder argument to sustain in South Africa to a defense against communism, particularly as many of these countries that became independent lean toward allied themselves with the Soviet Union or had overtly Marxist systems. So they see themselves by this point as fighting communism, but it's all really the same thing. It's fear of the black majority. A lot of the white genocide fervor in South Africa today revolves around the words and actions of one man who I mentioned in the intro, Julius Malema.

We played a clip of him leading a crowd in a notorious anti-apartheid chant, Kill the Boer. Elon Musk has called for Malema to be declared an international criminal, while Malema has called Musk a, quote, spoiled brat, beneficiary of apartheid, and typical racist. Why must I educate Elion Musk? He looks like an illiterate. The only thing that protects him is his white skin.

Elion Musk wants to learn about this song. The records are there in court. Just tell me more about Malema and why Musk has zeroed in on him this way. Yeah, Julius Malema is a phenomenon in South Africa. I came here not to please anyone. I'm here to speak the truth, whether you like it or not. It's your own baby to feed Malta Bella. I'm not in the business of going around to please people. He was actually the head of the ANC Youth League, the ANC being the African National Congress, which have governed South Africa since the end of apartheid. He gets thrown out the ANC Youth League for basically being kind of too much

trouble. And he now heads a political party called the Economic Freedom Fighters, which has representation in parliament, although it's never done quite as well as a lot of people thought it would. It has done well in parts of the country. But the point about Malema is that he gives voice, I think, particularly to a younger generation, which feels that too many compromises were made in the post-apartheid settlement led by Nelson Mandela. And the political and economic reality is that, as we mentioned, whites still own more than 70% of the land, they still own great chunks of the economy, and white lifestyle hasn't really fundamentally changed in South Africa. It's still very, very comfortable.

And there's not really a sense that majority of black South Africans have benefited to the extent that they should have by the end of apartheid. Clearly life is awful lot better than it was. And there's real political power and there's real improvements in lots of aspects of daily life, not least things like education and access to water and electricity. But even still, I think that South Africa is now the most unequal society in the world, which is quite telling 30 years after the end of apartheid. And Malema gives voice to that frustration that more needs to change, it needs to change faster and that really the whites kind of won in the end.

They gave up political power and hung on to everything else. And you know, he's a rabble riser. He uses the kill the bull chant, which a lot of people in the ANC have objected to and said, oh, it's no longer appropriate. But I think, you know, it's a good way of whipping up support. You know, there is on the Africana side, sort of equivalents to that. They do something pretty much the same. Right. You know, I've heard our producer, Matt Armo, was actually just in South Africa

and Cape Town. And he was talking about this song with some people there who, like, compared it to NWA's F the Police. Essentially to them, the meaning to them is more of like an incendiary protest song than a call for genocide. I will sing this song as and when I feel like. It's not my song, it's a struggle song. I certainly don't think it's a call for a genocide. I mean, that is among some people for sure. I mean, I get why it's controversial. Lots of people are being killed, right? There's a very high murder rate in South Africa. And

the idea of encouraging more violence, whether it's intended or not, isn't necessarily a right political message, I guess, in any society, but particularly in present South Africa. So I get the objection to it. I think you can argue it in lots of ways, and I suspect that song and that chant means different things to different people. [♪ Music playing. Something that we haven't talked about yet is Elon Musk's corporate interest here. How does his company Starlink relate to all of this and why have we seen Afrikaner lobby groups doing the bidding for Starlink at home, right, part of a campaign against what they call anti-white laws? One of the interesting things when you kind of look at Musk's path on this, is that it's only really in the past couple of years

that he's become so outspoken over what he regards as a new racist system and racial laws in South Africa. And that happens to coincide with his attempts to start up Starlink in South Africa. The post-apartheid government, the ANC, has laws, affirmative action laws, black empowerment laws, which require black investment in foreign companies coming to do business there. In the telecom sector, it's a 30% investment. What that basically means is you have to start a local company and 30% of that company has to be

black South African investment. Musk objects to that. He says that's racist and he shouldn't have to do it and all the rest. He's really ramped up his criticisms of South Africa and attempted to link the killings of farmers, what he calls the call for genocide by Julius Malema, the affirmative action laws, and various other things. He's tried to put them all in one pot and suggest that this is all evidence of a kind of new apartheid of a racist system run by the ANC. I don't think this is any coincidence that one of the things he's trying to do is get himself or his businesses exempted from these black empowerment requirements.

And in fact, he's openly pushed that he's even directly attacked by Twitter, the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, accusing him of imposing racist laws. And so I, you know, accusing him of imposing racist laws. And so I, you know, at the very least, you can say that Musk has an interest in undermining the post-apartheid black empowerment laws, the affirmative action laws intent to uplift what are known as formerly disadvantaged people in the country. And I don't think it's a coincidence that this has ramped up just as he's trying to get Stalin caught the ground in South Africa. Right. Chris, thank you so much for this. This is great. Really appreciate it. My pleasure. All right. That is all for today.

I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.