The traditional Kuchen and Torte cakes, served with or without crème Chantilly, had endured at Café Anton, as had a memorial commemorating the massacres of the native Nama and Herero peoples. Alongside this, a black petrol-station attendant addressed his customer, raising his right arm to the proper height and saying “Heil Hitler”. “It appeared not to be a joke, but rather a greeting that he had exchanged before with German customers,” the American journalist Henry Kamm reported in 1975.
Fifty years on, the Namibian town of Swakopmund ought to be remarkable for nothing other than the cultural battle swirling around its memorial to genocide perpetrators. There is, however, renewed interest in the resort town as scholars and journalists investigate the ideologies of the technology oligarchs bolstering President Donald Trump’s second administration.
The elder statesman of the so-called PayPal mafia, Peter Thiel, who was instrumental in Trump’s political comeback, attended school in a racially segregated Swakopmund as a nine-year-old. Theil’s protege, Elon Musk—who is also backing Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party—grew up swaddled in the privileges of South Africa’s apartheid regime, alongside entrepreneur David Sacks and venture capitalist Roelof Botha.
Little is known about what, if anything, the South African émigrés powering Trump made of apartheid and the culture that shaped their childhoods, or of the struggle against it, as they have never publicly reflected on these issues. Elon Musk, however, has stoked social media rage over the supposed persecution of whites in modern South Africa. This diasporic group, almost unnoticed until now, wields enormous power.
Trump’s return to power was fuelled by people angry over the price of eggs, transsexuals, crime and the power of the state. Many also feared that immigration might turn their country’s white majority into a minority—a paranoiac far-right conspiracy theory known as the Great Replacement. Trump’s first actions, including an order proscribing “anti-Christian bias” and an offer of asylum for white South Africans, addressed this constituency directly.
That is why it is important to consider that towns like Swapokmund might represent the vision lurking behind Trump’s vision for America.
Also read: South Africa unrest is worst since apartheid, confronts the failing state with hard choices
The natural racial order
Even though Christian nationalism is now mainly seen as a fringe movement on America’s right wing, colonial-era South Africa was its incubator. As the Second World War raged, the future prime minister John Vorster proclaimed his support for the Third Reich. “We stand for Christian nationalism, which is an ally of National Socialism,” he said in 1942. “You can call this anti-democratic principle dictatorship if you wish. In Italy, it is called ‘Fascism’, in Germany ‘German National Socialism’ and in South Africa ‘Christian nationalism’.”
Fascism’s defeat, scholar Howard Simson noted, led the many Nazi militias campaigning in South Africa to tone down both their anti-capitalist rhetoric and their veneration of Hitler. In turn, the British colonial government quietly allied itself with these white fascist groups, regarding them as allies against emerging African nationalism.
The region’s wealth—and white privilege—attracted immigrants from around the world. Musk’s maternal grandfather, the Canadian-American chiropractor Joshua Haldeman, immigrated to South Africa. The journalist Joshua Benton later unearthed Haldeman’s writings and speeches, exposing a dark inner world of racism. To Haldeman, South Africa was the centre of an impending battle pitting white Christian civilisation against an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers and “hordes of Coloured people.”
Less is known about the ideological zeitgeist of the Theil family. Like other white families in Swakopmund, the Thiels lived in an elegant bungalow, had access to state-of-the-art medical facilities and enjoyed membership of the uranium mining company’s lavish country club. Labourers, however, were confined to camps “known for conditions not far removed from indentured servitude”, as Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin writes.
Two of Thiel’s contemporaries at Stanford University in the 1980s told Chafkin that he had expressed admiration for the racist state, claiming that apartheid “worked” and was “economically sound.” For his part, Thiel has denied ever supporting apartheid. The fact remains, however, that he never condemned it either, nor participated in the anti-apartheid movement then gathering momentum. “To whites of a certain mindset, this inequality wasn’t due to apartheid,” author-journalist Simon Kuper has thoughtfully observed. “They thought it was inscribed in nature.”
Errol, Musk’s father, was also in the mining business and once boasted that his stake in Zambian emerald mines had made him “so much money we couldn’t even close our safe”. The family owned two homes, a plane, a yacht and a handful of luxury cars. Errol Musk claims to have opposed apartheid but left the Progressive Federal Party after it called for all races to vote for a single Parliament rather than having separate houses for different races. “That was the liberal position inside the Musk family,” journalist Chris McGreal observed in a superb essay.
Also read: Soros to Musk, billionaires are hijacking democracy. Forget taxes, restrict their charity
The rise of white fear
Late in 1989, another young businessman was forming his political opinions in America. That year, five young black and Latin men—Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray and Yusef Salaam—were charged with the brutal rape of Trisha Meili, a white woman who had been jogging in New York’s Central Park. Trump fuelled the city’s rage by taking out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times.
“I am not looking to psychoanalyse or understand them; I am looking to punish them. Bring back the death penalty.”
The five men spent more than a decade in jail before DNA evidence established that a single, separate perpetrator had in fact raped Meili. They were awarded damages after persuasive evidence emerged that the police had coerced them into making the confessions on which their convictions rested.
Later, Meili—who had been beaten into a coma and lost all memories of the perpetrators—expressed regret for the suffering the five had endured. For his part, Trump never apologised for his continued hounding of the black men. The South Africans now close to him are not known to have voiced opinions on the issue, though it would almost certainly have affected their consciousness.
“The white South African nightmare in the 1980s, hanging over everything, was that one day Black people would rise up and massacre whites,” Kuper observed. “Like the US, South Africa was a violent society and becoming more violent in the 80s.”
The Trump-Musk political alliance would see memes resurface in mainstream political dialogue. In 2023, Musk first warned of the potential “genocide of white people in South Africa.” Trump evoked near-identical images in his campaign rhetoric, claiming that “American girls [were] being raped and sodomised and murdered by savage criminal aliens.” That language provoked censure even from Republicans such as Mitt Romney, yet it resonated with the deepest fears of the President’s supporters.
Little is known about the social milieu in which figures like Thiel and Musk formed their views, but the white South African diaspora may have played at least some part. Like many other diasporic communities in the West, scholar Jonathan Crush observed, the white South is sometimes oblivious to its position of privilege, having built an identity around nurturing imaginary grievances.
Fuelled by propaganda from extreme white nationalist lobbying organisations such as AfriForum, this process has yielded tangible results. In 2008, white South African Brandon Huntley was even granted asylum in Canada on the grounds that he faced persecution at home—although the decision was later appealed and ultimately rejected.
The notion of white persecution has been roundly mocked by white South Africans themselves—who recognise that their black fellow citizens face an even greater risk of violence in a society torn by economic and racial injustice—yet it has gained currency among white nationalist circles in America. In one grim incident, worshippers at a black church in Charleston were shot dead by neo-Nazi Dylan Roof in protest of the purported mistreatment of white South Africans.
From the 1850s to the 1870s, from 1915 to the 1920s, and from 1950 through the course of the Civil Rights movement, America’s white nationalists employed large-scale violence to repress black claims to equality, as historian Arlie Prelinger teaches us. When organised white nationalist power waned between 1880 and 1930, mobs took its place: at least 3,000 people are estimated to have died in lynchings such as the one in 1899.
To generations of Americans, it appeared that the war had been won with the Civil Rights movement and the sweeping reforms of the 1970s. Yet, led by Trump and funded by figures like Musk, the project to construct a white homeland has, in effect, begun anew.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)
Very informative article. Thank you, Mr. Swami
Excellent article. Lot of history that I wasn’t aware of.