This article was first published by Business Day South Africa on 24 February 2025.

Jonny Steinberg’s recent column on US President Donald Trump’s bureaucracy slasher, Elon Musk (“Is Musk’s foray into right-wing politics rooted in apartheid?”, January 17), was astonishingly brazen.

He declares that explaining Musk based on his apartheid childhood is “a bad idea”, scolding the “facile American journalism” speculating “about a person you do not know, who grew up in a country to which you’ve never been”.

For Steinberg to suggest that the fact that Musk spent his formative years — until the age of almost 18 — in the militaristic milieu of racist SA under prime ministers John Vorster, who championed a Nazi-inspired Christian nationalism, and the hardline PW Botha, is not directly relevant to his current embrace of racist right-wing politics in the US and Europe, is absurd.

That Musk’s maternal grandfather was a neo-Nazi who emigrated to apartheid SA from Canada is crucial to an understanding of the sociology of the richest man in the world. The sadistic abuse Musk reportedly suffered at the hands of his disciplinarian father and the constant bullying he endured at Bryanston High School in Johannesburg, were also relevant in shaping the adult Musk. Even today, this trauma is evident whenever he is asked about his coming of age in SA.

Steinberg’s complaint about critics not knowing Musk is equally preposterous, as writers analysing public figures clearly do not need to know them personally. Equally puzzling is why critics need to have visited SA to assess Musk’s past. Surely historians do not need to have lived in Habsburg Vienna or known Hitler personally to understand how the impact of his failure as a young artist, admiration of anti-Semitic politicians, and hatred of Austria-Hungary’s multicultural cosmopolitanism shaped many of his later political views?

Steinberg then shockingly talks of racist ideas in SA having been “walked back in the 1980s”, before seeming to exonerate apartheid’s architects by extraordinarily noting “many of the people who put them into practice never quite believed them”. It is as if leaders who brutalised and dispossessed black people and foisted inferior education on them, and the people who consistently voted for their separatist ideology for five decades, suddenly abandoned these ideas or never even held them, because, presumably, Nelson Mandela had declared “a rainbow nation of God”.

Steinberg then bizarrely diverts our attention from racism in SA to focusing on xenophobia in Europe and North America, castigating Europeans for wanting to “send people ‘back’ to places they’d never been”. Rather than dealing with obvious home truths, Steinberg instead points the finger elsewhere, as if hatred cannot simultaneously be perpetrated by white communities in different countries.

The dyed-in-the-wool racism inculcated in Musk — which he now espouses — should surely be assessed on its own terms. Steinberg notes that “apartheid’s deepest ideas are back. They are circulating in the Western world”. But these racist ideas also continue to circulate in post-apartheid SA, where white privilege remains ubiquitous despite its overwhelmingly black majority.

Others such as Rebecca Davis and Chris McGreal have written more insightfully about how Musk’s apartheid background shaped his current politics. As Davis put it: “Musk’s South African schooling was critical to the adult he would become.” McGreal similarly notes: “Musk grew up amid incredible privilege where the racial hierarchy was clear.”

Steinberg wrote a book in 2011 on the Liberian exile community in New York that did not show great depth of understanding of Liberia. He is thus representative of a phenomenon of some white SA academics masquerading as the authentic interpreters of all things Africa — of which they often lack an intimate understanding — to gullible Western audiences. These parochial scholars have often failed to immerse themselves in Africa’s diverse cultures, nor ironically have they lived much in different countries within the “Dark Continent”.

Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Pretoria.