Johnny Steinberg
Appearances
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
Many millions of people were displaced from their homes. You know, in the political struggle against apartheid, many thousands of people were killed and detained. It was a long, bitter, bloody, difficult struggle for democracy, which miraculously ended peacefully in a negotiated settlement in 1994.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
Well, four years earlier, in 1990, the last president of apartheid, F.W. de Klerk, released Nelson Mandela.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
Unbanned his party, the ANC, and decided that apartheid would end by a negotiated settlement with the people who were once his enemy.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
You know, a lot of people died in those four years. There was a lot of violence. It was a complicated process. But it was, in the end, a peaceful settlement that both sides agreed to, bringing in democracy in April 1994.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
It was a pretty gentle settlement on white people. Afrikaans people were about just over half of the white population. Most people carried on living their lives pretty much as they were before, to be honest. You know, that's a simple version of the story. When you scratch underneath, more complicated things are happening.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
One of the things happening is that crime rates absolutely soared in the late apartheid and early post-apartheid era. And white people became victims of crimes in ways that they didn't know under apartheid, which was very frightening. I mean, another thing happening, and this is about the land. This is not about all white people or all Afrikaans people, but is about farmers.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
A policy of land redress was introduced in the mid-1990s. And to explain what happened, it's necessary to go back to 1913 when law was passed disallowing black ownership of land in South Africa. Many, many people displaced from their land in the decades after that. By the early 1970s, several million people had been displaced from their land.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
And a policy of redress was set in place in the mid-1990s. And among other things, it allowed people who could show that they had had their land taken away from them after 1913 to get it back. But not by confiscating land, not by taking it away from those who owned it, but by buying it back at market prices. So that was the core of the land reform scheme, just stated at its most simple.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
It is underway, and... You know, I think many white people's grievances about that process are less about the policies themselves and the way that they've been implemented. Black and white South Africans are both enormously, enormously frustrated with South Africa's government for its levels of inefficiency and its corruption.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
And very often anger at that melds with angle of the substance and the content of policy. A fair amount of land has been redistributed. It has not been a particularly successful or particularly well-managed process. It has left both poor black people and white landholders and others dissatisfied. So a lot has to do with the corruption and inefficiencies of the process itself.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
Well, if you look at South Africa's response to Donald Trump saying that, nobody has agreed with him. Land has not been stolen from anybody in South Africa since 1994. A lot of land has been bought at market prices and redistributed, but not stolen.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
As for where these ideas come from, there have been South African organizations that have lobbied Trump very, very vocally, very persistently for a number of years. on matters of land redistribution, but also on matters of crime, of the extent to which people who live in rural South Africa are vulnerable. And many white farmers have been victims of very violent crime.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
And Trump has heard about all of that from a very vocal, very articulate lobby that says that violent crime against farmers is not coincidental, that it's organized, that there's something behind it. It's an attempt to push them off the land. He has been told that by pretty extreme forces in South African society, not mainstream ones.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
So farmers generally live in remote areas. They're far from rapid response. They're far from police. There are a lot of guns in South Africa. There's a lot of unemployed young men in South Africa. A lot of people making a living from crime. You know, people enter a remote property and hold up the people at gun points to take their possessions, sometimes kill them.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
Sometimes there's a terrible level of brutality in South African predatory crime.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
Levels of violence in South Africa are extreme. In a country of 62, 63 million people, there are 20,000 murders a year. That is breathtaking. It's a violent place. And it's absolutely understandable and natural that the white farming community would feel under siege, would feel vulnerable, would feel scared.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
But it's another thing to say that there's an organized plot against them, that this is a manifestation of a deeper attempt to throw them off their land. You know, if you look at who is killed in South Africa, if you look at per capita murder rates, those most vulnerable to being killed are unemployed young black men.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
And that's not for a moment to say that white farmers should not feel afraid and should not take action to defend themselves. But the idea that they're specially victimized is untenable.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
People are pretty bewildered by the offer, you know, including the people who've been lobbying Trump. Nobody has taken them up on it. The head of Agri South Africa, it's pretty mainstream, perhaps a center-right organization, said we're farming here and we're farming successfully. Hmm.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
The day after Trump made that announcement, I was on a flight from Johannesburg to London and boarding the plane. It was full of white South Africans who were joking about it, saying, well, let's divert our flights to New York. Let's go and live in America. It was really an object of fun.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
Well, I think it's because it's easy for him because there's no downside. He gets to perform a very powerful and entertaining anti-DEI performance in front of the world. He also potentially gets a middle-sized country to change its foreign policy or certainly be under enormous pressure to do that. So South Africa becomes an exemplar.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
It becomes a lesson to the world in what American power under Trump might mean. It causes others to move with caution. I think what Donald Trump is doing has shaken up South Africa and has sharpened divisions.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
Because although nobody thinks that there's genocide taking place, although nobody thinks that white land is being confiscated en masse, you know, there are powerful forces in South Africa which would like to use what Trump is saying to further their own legitimate agendas, which is to contest the government's policies of racial redress, to contest its policies of land reform.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
And this strengthens their hand. And it's natural that they would do that. So I think that matters that are contentious in South Africa, matters that are highly, highly disputed, have become more contentious, more volatile. You know, they're forced in South Africa, which are using what Trump has done to open up space for their agenda. But that's kind of expected.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
Of course, they're going to do that. And in a democratic country, why shouldn't they?
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
Afrikaners are the descendants of the first white people who settled in South Africa. That dates from 1652. At the time, Holland was a great imperial power. About a century and a half later, when Holland was in trouble in the Napoleonic Wars, Britain took over the Cape Colony. A whole lot of English-speaking white people arrived.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
And it was the descendants who formed themselves into Afrikaner nationalists, into a nationalist project in the late 19th, early 20th century. And I guess it was to stand up against the British and to suppress black people. And that project saw its culmination in 1948, when the party of Afrikaner nationalism, the National Party, came to power and instituted apartheid.
Today, Explained
Elon's African roots
You know, apartheid is famously one of many brutal regimes in the 20th century.