From The Dial
The tech mogul’s statements about his country of origin reveal that he never really knew the place.
There’s a legend among South Africans that, if you travel overseas, people will ask if you walked to school riding a lion. That’s hyperbole, but it represents a truth: the questions you get are baffling, suggesting a warped or even completely imaginary version of the country exists abroad. That version is often either a fairy tale — a place redeemed by a single smiling saint, Nelson Mandela — or a pastiche of exotic images: thatched huts, rhinoceros poachers, beaded necklaces. When I was preparing to move from Washington, D.C. to South Africa in 2009, a well-educated Europe-based foreign correspondent asked me whether the country had electrical outlets. (93% of South African households in urban areas have access to electricity.)
Nowadays, I get a different kind of query about South Africa — thanks, in large part, to the country’s most famous export, Elon Musk. In July, the tech entrepreneur commented on a Florida media personality’s post on X that alleged that South Africa’s “black party” was encouraging a genocide against white South Africans. “They are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa,” Musk commented, and asked why president Cyril Ramaphosa was “say[ing] nothing.” The claim was a layer cake of stale myths and gibberish that few South Africans — even those concerned about white people’s future in the country — bothered to amplify: The political party to which the original poster referred is not South Africa’s “black party.” More than 80% of South Africans are black, but the Economic Freedom Fighters hold only 11% of seats in the parliament. And the fringe allegation that black South Africans intend to massacre white people has circulated for decades, attaching itself to some new potentiality when the original theories, like that the genocide would begin the night Nelson Mandela died, don’t pan out. Musk’s concern, however, was taken up by a range of non-South African white supremacists: Patrick Casey, founder of the Neo-Nazi Group Identity Evropa, posted, “In 2016 South African white genocide was a fringe issue — now, the richest man in the world, who also owns Twitter, is drawing attention to it. Things are moving in the right direction!”
Eve Fairbanks is a political writer and novelist based in Johannesburg, South Africa.