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Front Burner Transcript for February 27, 2025

Host: Jayme Poisson

SOUNDCLIP

[Julius Malema chanting the words to "Kill The Boer" in stadium]

JAYME POISSON: Hi, I'm Jayme Poisson.

SOUNDCLIP

[Chants in stadium continue]

JP: 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 Boer. The song goes in part "Kill the Boer, 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 Boers 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.

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REPORTER: US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order suspending direct assistance to South Africa.

DONALD TRUMP: 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.

REPORTER: Trump's order also directs the State Department to help Afrikaners, an ethnic group descended from European settlers, through refugee programs. South African-born...

JP: 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 Thiel, Trump donor and now official David Sachs, and the 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. 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 Front Burner.

CHRIS DEGREAL: My pleasure.

JP: 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.

SOUNDCLIP

ERROL MUSK: I would take the money home and put it into the safe. Yeah, because we used it again to buy more emeralds later on, you know, to keep on going, you know? [VOICE: Yeah]. 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, not till my two boys, Elon and Kimbal, they can take money from the safe for anything they need. They must just leave a note.

JP: 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?

CHRIS DEGREAL: Elon 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 Foster.

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JOHN VORSTER: 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 Christian.

CHRIS DEGREAL: When John Vorster 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 their 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. Vorster is then, in turn, during the war by, by the South African government as a as a fellow traveler of the Nazis. And 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 Nazi ism, the Italians call it fascism. It may be anti-democratic, but it's all the same thing. So, 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 is, isn't the fascism of the 1930s. But, you know, there are lots of aspects of it that that have resonance, not, not least race laws in South Africa, that in many ways echo the Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany. And the education system is openly called "Christian national education." And rooted in that is the idea of, you know, racial superiority, segregation, the idea that whites are more civilized. All of those ideas that you can you can see in fascism and in apartheid South Africa, and that's essentially the system that, that Musk was born into and that he grew up under.

JP: Similar to Musk, American billionaires, David Sacks, 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 Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime's last foreign minister. Thiel 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?

CHRIS DEGREAL: Well, they're known as the PayPal Mafia because these three men, plus Musk, they basically formed the, the, you know, the company now known as PayPal. Peter Thiel, with the co-founder of it, David Sacks, was its Chief Operating Officer. And Roelof Botha was the Chief Financial Officer. So, they will work very closely together. But they, they did not know each other back in the day. And they, they had differing experiences of, of apartheid South Africa. As you mentioned, Botha was the grandson of the foreign Minister, Pik Botha, who was infamous, really, he had to sell apartheid on the world stage and Botha's the one true Afrikaner in that group. Peter Thiel was German-born. He moved to Johannesburg when he's small, his father, who was a mining engineer, moves there. And then he takes him, as you say, to South West Africa, which was in those days a de facto South African colony where his father worked on a uranium mine. Peter Thiel and his family lived in a place called Swakopmund, and Swakopmund is notorious, is 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. And 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 in there, or many of them anyway, were German, and particularly in Swakopmund. So, you have this, you have this open veneration of the Nazis. David Sacks, 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, kind of gets into it. And then, they're brought together by PayPal and they're, they become known as the PayPal Mafia and mostly, Botha's a bit of an exception. He's not very public on this, but Thiel and Sacks and Musk as we know, all very openly supportive of Trump. Sacks is a big fundraiser for Trump and has ended up as his, I think his czar for AI and cryptocurrency. Thiel makes no secret of his support for Trump, and we all know, right? The role Musk is now playing.

JP: In addition to these men, are there any other intersections between the Trump administration and South Africa that you think are worth noting here?

CHRIS DEGREAL: Clearly, the Trump administration has come under, you know, 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. 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.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 2: Israel has called on the ICJ to reject the case brought by South Africa, alleging that it's committing genocide in Gaza. On the second...

CHRIS DEGREAL: You've also got South African groups themselves, particularly an organization 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 Afrikaner farmers. And it's long caught Trump's attention. There was, its deputy leader and its leader came to the United States in 2018, and the deputy leader, Ernst Roets, appeared on Tucker Carlson and essentially portrayed white farmers as under attack, being persecuted by the government, being killed for their land.

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TUCKER CARLSON: 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?

ERNST ROETS: 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.

CHRIS DEGREAL: 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. The, 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, says is the major player in all this at the moment.

[Music playing]

JP: 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?

CHRIS DEGREAL: So, he's certain kinds of people. It's a reference to white people and Afrikaners in particular. And it's because Trump has essentially been persuaded of this notion that there is a persecution of South African Afrikaners, in particular 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, given that almost every other form of refugee is now have been excluded by executive orders, not least Afghans who worked with the U.S. 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, 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, 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 is just a general law. It's been assumed that that would apply to white farmers by the white farmers. It's very narrowly targeted that the law specifically says that actually, most transfers of land should take place through mutual agreement and proper compensation. And the reason for this law is that even 30 years after the end of apartheid, 72 per cent, 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 per cent of the population of South Africa. So, this is still this huge imbalance that hasn't been righted since the end of apartheid. So, it's part of an attempt to write, you know, 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.

SOUNDCLIP

ANNOUNCER: 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. Over the decades...

JP: 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?

CHRIS DEGREAL: No. So, you've seen different reactions. The group AfriForum that I mentioned before, which really has driven this narrative in the United States, is now on the back foot.

SOUNDCLIP

KALLIE KRIEL: 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 the southern tip of Africa. We're not going to disrespect that.

CHRIS DEGREAL: I mean, you know, the government and large numbers of ordinary South Africans, you know, the vast majority of the population is black and turned on it and accused it of bringing this on South Africa. So, AfriForum is now running around saying, "Oh no, we're loyal South Africans," despite everything it's done.

SOUNDCLIP

KALLIE KRIEL: 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 will turn our back. [VOICE 2: Yeah], or replace me, you know, and we will make sure...

CHRIS DEGREAL: 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. You know, 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, it 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.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 3: After losing our 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.

ROBERT MUGABE: The land is ours. It's not European, it's our land.

CHRIS DEGREAL: He let loose a group of black Zimbabweans known as war veterans on to the farms to, and so, they did kill some farmers and they took the land.

SOUNDCLIP

[cross-talk]

ROBERT MUGABE: Of their land. [REPORTER 3: It's not theirs] Our, our land.

REPORTER 3: But they're citizens, aren't they? And isn't this farming disaster contributing to your...?

ROBERT MUGABE: Citizens by col--, citizens by colonization, seizing land from the original people, indigenous people of the country.

REPORTER 3: But how did that…

CHRIS DEGREAL: That is not what is happening in South Africa. Although, groups like AfriForum and, 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 a crime and violent crime if you live in a black township, than you, 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 parallel at all.

[Music playing]

JP: I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about how this conspiratorial idea of, like, 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.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER 4: 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. All...

JP: 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, and... 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?

CHRIS DEGREAL: So, there's this idea among some white nationalist, white supremacists in the United States and in other parts of the West that, you know, white people, their existence is under threat as the great replacement theory. There's the idea in America that people are being, 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 the argument that whites are under attack, but also the need to defend themselves, is to look back to examples where they see, you know, groups of white people besieged by people of other races. And Rhodesia is a classic example. For those that don't know, you know, it's the precursor to Zimbabwe, it declared unilateral independence from the UK in the 1960s, in 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, you know, defeated by the, by the economic realities and an insurgency led by Robert Mugabe.

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ROBERT MUGABE: Zimbabwe is mine. I am a Zimbabwean. Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans. Zimbabwe never for the British. Britain for the British.

CHRIS DEGREAL: And then, you had the last bastion in Africa. A 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 old 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, you know, the end of white supremacy systems.

[Music playing]

JP: 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 black revolution too, right? There's actually a word for this in South Africa, "Swart gevaar." Essentially, a sense that black people may one day, rise up. And due to white people, what white people had done to them, 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?

CHRIS DEGREAL: Well, I think in South Africa evolved. So, what you see in South Africa is, you know, in the early years of apartheid, which it 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. And I, a lot of early apartheid justification is, 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 clear the black majority.

JP: 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.

SOUNDCLIP

JULIUS MALEMA: Why must I educate Elon Musk? He looks like an illiterate. The only thing that protects him is his white skin. Elon Musk wants to learn about this song, the records are there in court.

JP: Can you just tell me more about Malema and why Musk has zeroed in on him this way?

CHRIS DEGREAL: Yeah, Julius Malema, is a phenomenon in South Africa.

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JULIUS MALEMA: 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 Maltabella. I'm not in the business of going around to please people.

CHRIS DEGREAL: He was actually the head of the ANC Youth League. The ANC being the African National Congress, which governed South Africa since the end of apartheid. He gets thrown out the ANC Youth League, but 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 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, you know, the political and economic reality is that, as we mentioned, whites still own more than 70 per cent of the land. They still own great chunks of the economy and white lifestyle. That's really fundamentally changed in South Africa. It's still very, very comfortable. And there's not really a sense that a majority of black South Africans have benefited to the extent that they should have by the end of apartheid. Clearly, life is an 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, you know, voice to that frustration that more needs to change and that needs to change faster. And that really, the whites kind of won in the end. They gave up political power and hung unto everything else. And you know, he's a rabble-rouser. He uses the Kill the Boer 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 Afrikaner side, it's sort of equivalent to that. They, they do something pretty much the same.

JP: Right. You know, I've, I've heard our producer, Matt Amha, 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.

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[Music: "Fuck Tha Police" by N.W.A.]

JP: Essentially, to them, the meaning to them is more of, like, an incendiary protest song than a call for genocide.

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JULIUS MALEMA: I will sing this song. As in when I feel like. It's not my song, it's a struggle song.

CHRIS DEGREAL: I certainly don't think it's a call for a genocide. I mean, that, that is, I mean, 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, whether it's intended or not, isn't necessarily, you know, a right political message. And 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 different ways. And I suspect that song and that chant means different things to different people.

[Music playing]

JP: Something that we haven't talked about yet is, 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?

CHRIS DEGREAL: One of the interesting things when you kind of look at Musk's apart from this, is that it's only really in the past couple of years that he's become so outspoken over what he regards as the, you know, 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, but affirmative action laws, black empowerment laws which require black investment in foreign companies coming to do business there. And in the telecom sector, it's, it's a 30 per cent investment. And what that basically means is you have to start a local company and 30 per cent 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. And he's really ramped up his criticisms of South Africa and attempted to link the killings of farmers, the 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 kind of new apartheid of a racist system run by the ANC. And 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, you know, openly pushed that. He's even directly attacked by Twitter, the President of South Africa. So, Ramaphosa, 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, the affirmative action laws intended to, you know, uplift, you know, what are known as formerly disadvantaged people in the country. And I, I don't think it's a coincidence that this is ramped up just as he's trying to get Starlink off the ground in South Africa.

JP: Right. Chris, thank you so much for this. This is great. I really appreciate it.

CHRIS DEGREAL: My pleasure.

[Music: Theme]

JP: Alright. That is all for today. I'm Jayme Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

For transcripts of this series, please visit this page.

Trump, apartheid and the PayPal mafia? - Transcript

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