Rešoketšwe Manenzhe on Trump’s South African Connection

South African writer Rešoketšwe Manenzhe joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V Ganeshananthan to talk about the influence that wealthy South African immigrants like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are having on the Trump administration and conservative U.S. politics in general. Manenzhe talks about how growing up under apartheid may have shaped these men’s views, how South Africans view Musk now, and what the country’s history can tell us about the current American political situation. She also discusses South Africa’s Immorality Act of 1927 and reads from her novel, Scatterlings.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/. This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, and Hunter Murray.

*
From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: Just to put some markers down, Apartheid in South Africa was formalized in ’48, and then it ended in 1994. 

Rešoketšwe Manenzhe: Yeah.

WT: That means that people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel grew up in an era of white-rule and anti-apartheid movements—Musk was born ’71. Can you talk a little bit about the Apartheid rule as Musk would have lived it before he left, and what anti-apartheid activism of that era kind of looked like?

RM: Yeah, his childhood would have been during some of the most turbulent years of Apartheid, most notably in ’76 we have the June massacres where high schoolers [were killed]—what ended up happening is that you had these high school kids who were essentially saying, “Hey, we don’t want to learn Afrikaans.” And it wasn’t just simply an Afrikaans issue and that usually gets muddy. People are like, “Oh, people just hate Africans.” It wasn’t just an Afrikaans issue. It was because the Afrikaans came with Bantu Education, and Bantu Education was a form of education that was designed specifically to make sure that black people could only be educated—I use that word loosely—educated enough to be subservient at a position that was so-called “menial” at the time. So we wouldn’t have learned things like art in school. We wouldn’t have done a whole lot of sports. It would have been kind of like a training for you—it’s not even preparing you, it’s just so that you can take instructions from your “master,” so to speak.

WT: Real quickly, Americans don’t know jack-shit about South Africa, so could you just tell everyone what Afrikaans is so that they know?

RM: Oh, yeah. So Afrikaans is like a Creole language. I don’t know if there’s another word for it, but basically what it means is that there were a whole lot of slaves and native people—by slaves I mean people who would have been taken from the so-called West Indies at the time. We also have quite a lot of people from the Malay region, and they were now employed by the Dutch colonizers, or colonists, I should say. There were people from Angola and obviously Bantu people from Southern Africa and South Africa as a whole. What happened was you had all these people who were working for the Dutch speaking masters, and because they didn’t necessarily have a common language, and also because it would have been kind of outlawed to speak your own native language, it made sense to take the language of the master and then infuse it with elements of your own language and like characteristics and linguistic structures and ways of speaking and all of that. So all these people came together, and they made Afrikaans, and it was called a “kombuis taal”, which literally translates to kitchen language, which is the language of the lower classes—in this case, it would have been enslaved people. So that’s what Afrikaans is. 

Over the years, what happened was that it was such a cool language—it’s honestly a really awesome language. What you read is what you see. It’s a lot easier than English. But because it was so cool, the masters hijacked it, and so it became the language of Afrikaners and Afrikaners people. Afrikaners would have been the descendants of the Dutch colonists. So now it was no longer just the language of the enslaved peoples, but over the years, it then also became a tool against the Bantu population of South Africa. The Bantu population is what people would call the “black” population. We’re actually called Bantu, but no offense there. So over the years, it then became a tool for Apartheid. 

By the time we get to 1976, people are now actively resisting this language that they had a hand in formulating, because now it’s changed hands, and not only has it changed hands, it’s being used in a way that—it’s not a language that we use every day. Imagine that one day when you showed up at school—you’re 13 or 12 or whatever—and suddenly the medium that you had to speak in, and you had to write in, and that your teacher had to instruct you in was now suddenly Greek, and you couldn’t deviate from Greek. If you didn’t speak Greek, you would get severely punished—you would get shambocked, which is corporal punishment, or you would get arrested. So it became not the best thing to speak Afrikaans. Does that explain things

WT: That was really helpful.

RM: So, yeah, that’s Afrikaans. It’s this really beautiful thing, and if you look at the history of Afrikaans, the first Arabic text, the first Quran in South Africa, was written in Afrikaans. To this day, there’s a masjid or a mosque, or a minaret—I’m not sure which one is more appropriate in this context—on Robben Island, and that’s where it was written, and the first imam in South Africa would have written everything in Afrikaans. It’s this really beautiful thing that just got tainted by history and by a fascist regime. 

WT: Okay, so now we’re back. What was it like for Musk and Thiel back in those days?

RM: Yes, so by the time we get to 1976 you have students who are actively protesting. They are actively striking. They are burning schools, not because they’re like, “Oh, we’re going to be dumb and just burn schools,” but they now realize that, because of Bantu Education, schools are one of the tools that the regime is using to kind of corral them, like sheep or cattle, into this one thing that they are allowed to do. And the kids were like, “We’re not going to do that.” So it was a huge strike all around the country, and kids died. It was one of the massacres that is often cited as having radicalized the world, and that’s the kind of world that Elon Musk and all these guys would have grown up in. 

To turn around and be like, “Oh, we didn’t know,” would be a little bit, I believe, disingenuous, because at this point you would be feeling the boycotts; black farmers or black people who work in farms would not have been taking things like the buses, so the roads would have been packed with these Bantu people just walking to and from from work—I think a similar thing happened in the United States initiated by Rosa Parks—there were bomb threats in a few malls and a few white establishments, so it would have been incredibly uncomfortable for white people. And not only would it have been uncomfortable—even if you say, “Hey, the propaganda could have shielded people,” at this point, it couldn’t, because it was becoming a lot more violent, and because it was becoming a lot more violent, it just simply did not make sense to keep the propaganda up. So this is the kind of world that Elon and his ilk would have seen and would have lived in. It would have been almost kind of like how we’re seeing things play out in Palestine; it’s gotten so much attention, now everybody’s talking about it. So that’s what you would have seen. 

But on the other hand, coming into the activism part of it, the fact that immigration was kind of the thing that Elon and his ilk chose, again, is why we can’t connect Elon to South Africa because he’s having all these problematic ideas with Trump. The fact that you chose to exit South Africa at that point when democracy was at the door, you chose to be like, “You know what? Actually, I’m going to exit. This place is going to the dogs,” that says a lot to me, in my mind. 

V.V. Ganeshananthan: It’s all really interesting. You transitioned perfectly to the next thing I wanted to ask, which is this: one of the things that really caught my attention—and here in the US, there’s so many things to catch one’s political attention at the moment—was when Trump was like, “I’m going to deport all of these immigrants, but we’re going to take refugees from South Africa, where white people are suffering. It is really bad for white people. They are being treated really unfairly,” in all caps, Trump style, etc, right? 

So I was looking this up yesterday, and Reuters has a story about how they started interviewing people; 30 people have been accepted. So to me, a naive American who, as Whitney says, doesn’t know jack-shit about South Africa, I’m like, “Oh, this is totally new,” but actually, it turns out that a quarter million white South Africans emigrated to other countries between ’94 and 2005. I was like, “Oh, my God.” So, I know many progressive Americans are looking very skeptically at this refugee plan. I’m curious about how it is viewed in South Africa. What is the political situation and socioeconomic situation for black South Africans now, Bantu people and others, and what access to immigration do non-white South Africans have or want? What is the temperature on this there?

RM: That’s the funny thing, he chose the one group that already has access to voluntary immigration. He chose the one group that has been leaving South Africa. And I’m not saying black people aren’t leaving South Africa, we are also having a “brain drain,” similar to like Zimbabwe and Nigeria, although to a lesser extent, but people have been leaving South Africa, I wouldn’t lie about that. But the thing is that all the black people that leave are people who have now had the opportunity, post-Apartheid, to go to get higher education, to get higher paying jobs. So it’s a lot of engineers, it’s a lot of accountants, it’s a lot of STEM people in general who end up in Dubai and Australia and all these other places. So black South Africans don’t really have access to that kind of stuff when looking at the entire population and not just the few people that I know from university who have families that can just willy-nilly pay for a Visa, who can just willy-nilly send you off to Australia, and even if you don’t get a job for the first six months, you will be fine. So that’s the funny thing about this whole thing, he chose the one group that really didn’t need encouragement. He was like, “You guys. I’m gonna save you.” 

Something that happened on Tiktok—which is why I was now getting validated about Tik Tok—something that happened was that there was this whole host of white South Africans coming out and giving the middle finger to Elon Musk and Trump, because we like it here. So weirdly there was, at least from what I’ve seen, this weird reconnection we had as a country where we were like, “Actually, why is everybody trying to divide us? We like each other. We want to do our rugby things. We want to wear our rugby shirts,” and people then found a reason to put flags on their usernames, to be proudly South African. I’ve met people in real life who will just look me straight in the eye and be like, “Yeah, I’m not going anywhere. You all will have to carry me out.” So it’s really weird. It’s really weird what’s happened. But I’m just saying, accidental connection or not, I love it. I love it.

VVG: I think it’s really funny that Elon Musk is uniting South Africans in disliking him, that’s so beautiful. What a beautiful moment.

WT: For me, it’s very easy to understand why South Africans like Peter Thiel and Musk would have the kind of influence that they do with right wing politicians in America because of the replacement theory that people like Tucker Carlson talk about. I think that right wing white replacement theorists, of which there are many, will go “Look at what happened to white people there, it’s gonna happen here—the same thing. We had this great system. We ran shit, and now all the people of color are gonna take over,” which is not the idea that America was founded on, but they’re looking at South Africa and thinking that, I think. They’re not quite willing to say that out loud, but I believe that is what they are thinking and probably talking to each other about.

RM: Yeah, and they’re saying, “Look at Zimbabwe.” When people want to scare South Africans from any kind of progressive acts or bills, whatever, they’ll say, “Oh, we’re five minutes away from becoming another Zimbabwe.” And that is so reductive, because what went wrong with Zimbabwe wasn’t just Mugabe, it was also a whole bunch of sanctions and all that has happened to Iran and Cuba, but it’s so complex. Yet people are always just willing to reduce it to kind of be like, “Oh, what happened here is that we gave Africa back to the Africans, and that’s the real problem,” where now people are just kind of looking at it like, “Oh, we just put black people in charge, and then things went haywire.” No one’s willing to look at what’s happening behind the curtain, similar to how they’re now trying to overturn Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. No one’s willing to be like, “Hey, what happened when we just gave power to the black people and left them alone? Like with Sankara initially with Burkina Faso. So it’s a whole thing. 

WT: I also just think it’s important to point out that in America, the difference in tenor of the way that we thought about South Africa over time, which has shown a difference in our politics, because I’m roughly the age of Elon Musk, and when I was growing up, Nelson Mandela was a hero in this country. He espoused the kind of virtues that people genuinely cared about, because I think America compared what was happening in South Africa to what was happening in Russia. So that made sense to us. People aren’t free, and Nelson Mandela’s making people free, and we like that. Now, it’s the opposite. It’s just interesting to me, Nelson Mandela’s no hero for someone like Elon Musk or Donald Trump.

RM: That’s why [I think] fascism and racism have become popular. It’s because every time, at least from a South African perspective, it was a white-washed Nelson Mandela that people loved, because every single time we come out of an oppressed stage or oppressed time, no one’s really willing to sit and wallow in it for a little bit and be like, “Why did this happen? How did it happen?” Everyone is just willing to just clap and pat ourselves on the shoulders and be like, “Isn’t the world a much better place today than it was yesterday? And because that happens, every four years, we have to keep fighting for stuff that our grandmothers were fighting for. In 2025, I don’t understand how we still have certain things that are like—just to bring it back to America—like Roe v. Wade. How are y’all now going back to having to fight for that in 2025? It’s because, again, when these things happen, we’re just like, “Oh, haven’t we gotten a great hero out of this? And then we move on. And then the dudes that lost, so to speak, they’re not, you know, congratulating or wallowing in misery and giving up. They’re making plans for four years later and four years after that and they are patient, but we just want to be in the celebration. I don’t want to blame liberals and leftists, but we have a lot to account for presently.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle.

*

Rešoketšwe Manenzhe

Scatterlings

Others:

“A Biracial Family Risks Persecution in 1920s Cape Town” by V.V. Ganeshananthan • How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa | Elon Musk | The Guardian • Gravity’s Rainbow (Classics Deluxe Edition) by Thomas Pynchon • US focuses on persecution claims as white South Africans seek resettlement | Reuters