Given how much shit the zone is being flooded with right now, you might have missed Donald Trump screaming about the supposed mistreatment of white South Africans recently. Last week, he said “certain classes of people” were being treated “very badly.” The trigger was a bill signed by South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, a former anti-Apartheid activist, trade union leader, and successful businessman—three qualities Trump doesn’t really understand.
Like the Trump administration, we have our own South African on staff—and he’s legitimately employed here! Julian grew up under apartheid and left the country due to it. Derek chats with him about what life was like growing up there, and he explains the confusion that Trump is injecting into the body politic.
Show Notes
Trump vs. South Africa
South African president signs controversial land seizure law
No Proof Elon Musk's Grandparents Belonged to Nazi Party
Errol Musk Talks About Elon’s Maternal Grandparents
Understanding What the 2025 Expropriation Act Means
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Given how much shit the zone is being flooded with right now, you might have missed Donald Trump screaming about the supposed mistreatment of white South Africans recently.
Last week, he said certain classes of people were being treated very badly.
The trigger was a bill signed by a South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, a former anti-apartheid activist, trade union leader, and successful businessman.
Three qualities Trump doesn't really understand.
Now, the bill in question allows the South African government to seize land without compensation, and it is being contested by his own government right now.
To be clear, this includes property that's not being used and when there's no intention to either develop or make money from it as well.
And there's another one, land that poses risk to people.
So those are the parameters by which the bill exists.
It's designed to balance out the fact that Blacks own 4% of farmable land in South Africa, although they make up 80% of the population.
Now, obviously, to Trump, this means white oppression.
He offered Afrikaners, who are white South Africans descended from Dutch settlers who led the apartheid regime from 1948 to 1994, refugee resettlement in America, and then Trump cut off all aid to South Africa as long as the bill remains in place.
Add to this story the fact that Elon Musk, while not an Afrikaner, is from South Africa.
And there's been longstanding rumors that his family was either part of the Nazi party or sympathetic to it.
I should note that Snopes recently found no direct evidence of these connections, but Elon has certainly been critical of the South African government.
I know this isn't normally a story that we'd cover on this podcast, but like Trump, we have our own South African on staff and he's legitimately employed here.
Julian Walker grew up under apartheid and actually left South Africa because of it.
So I thought this would be a good opportunity to chat with him about what life was like growing up there and find out if he sees any similarities to what's happening in America right now and perhaps explain a little of the confusion that Trump is injecting into the body politic.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Elon Musk.
Oh, sorry, wait.
I'm Julian Walker.
He confuses that often.
Thank you.
Let's dive into the story.
Julian, what's the background here regarding the Afrikaners, apartheid, and Elon Musk?
Yeah, I mean, this is particularly hitting me hard.
Elon and I, we're basically the same age.
We grew up under apartheid during the same period.
We can talk about my own experience in a little bit, but I think there are some interesting details here which help with the current news story.
And you covered the facts very accurately, including some of the historical data there.
Musk was born and raised in Pretoria.
So even though he's not an Afrikaner per se, he's a Canadian transplant in terms of his family origin.
He grew up in Pretoria, which is a conservative, predominantly Afrikan-speaking enclave.
And it's the seat of government power in South Africa.
A population of about 2.8 million, so it's less than half the size of Johannesburg where I grew up, which is the biggest city in the country, much more metropolitan, predominantly English-speaking, and more liberal historically.
The split between the Afrikaners and the English-speaking white South Africans historically has been a political one.
The ruling party, as you said, for 46 years, from 48 to 94, was called the National Party.
It was started by an Afrikaner separatist.
And he was prime minister from 1924 to 1939. So they're actually in power for much longer.
There's a little brief moment here which we'll talk about during World War II when they were not in power.
And this guy was in power from 24 to 39 when he resigned in protest at the parliament electing to support the Allies instead of the Nazis in World War II. So then during the next nine years, the National Party is out of power.
But it's loosely aligned with an extremist pro-Nazi group.
It's called the Ossobrand, Ossobrand, which is always fun to say to prove that I can speak Afrikaans.
Stop me if you've heard this before, but popular outcry against the prosecution of these far-right insurrectionists was part of what would lead to the National Party returning to power in 1948. And there were two young men who were in that pro-Nazi group who would go on to then successively rule the country between 1966 and 1994. And my entire life in South Africa, as well as Elon Musk's, coincides with this period.
And these are the guys who would create and officially codify apartheid and brutally enforce it in a way that was completely dehumanizing to anyone who wasn't white.
Now, the Afrikaners had come to South Africa in the 1650s, and they eventually fled inland to escape the British.
And then by the 1880s, they found that they were sitting on the largest single source of gold mining in the history of the world, which is why a 10% minority group, just how small they were, were able to rule the country for as long as they did.
Now, how this intersects with Elon's story...
It's that his maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, had emigrated to South Africa from Canada in 1950 during the very early years of the establishment of apartheid.
And he had been a member in Canada of an anti-democratic organization called Technocracy Incorporated.
Apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
This guy believed that countries should be ruled by technocrats and democracy was a failed experiment.
And according to his son-in-law, which you referenced as Errol Musk, Apparently, Joshua Haldeman expressed many racist, anti-Semitic, anti-democratic beliefs and was a strong proponent of apartheid and also a supporter of Hitler, which, as inflammatory as that sounds, was not that unusual in the 50s in South Africa.
I did want to be accurate, so I found that fact check about whether or not they were involved in the Nazi party.
Ironically, right before we started recording, I was on social media and someone posted a more recent podcast interview with Elon Musk's father talking to some 20-year-old kid.
And he just starts talking about how Michelle Obama is a man and he's seen photos where you could see his schlong when she's wearing dresses.
I mean, it's so...
Disgusting and horrific.
And this podcast host is just laughing along like, really?
No, that's not true.
Really?
And these sorts of echo chambers.
So anyway, I just wanted to kind of paint that picture because I do think it's important to be accurate.
But he's a fucking disgusting human being.
Well, if you look into Errol Musk's, Elon's dad's story, it gets very, very dark.
Very dark, including fathering children with his stepdaughter, who he became stepfather to when she was like five.
Awesome.
Well, let's talk about you because I don't want to go down that rabbit hole right now.
And what was it like growing up under apartheid?
The thing about growing up in a state like that is that there was...
Total control of the media by the government, one official TV channel, so one version of the news.
The newspapers were censored.
The newspapers would try to show you that they were censored by leaving blank spaces.
This is as it went deeper into sort of the late 70s, early 80s.
They would try to show that there were stories that were not allowed to report, but eventually that became illegal to do as well.
So essentially you're living in a bubble where you don't really know as a white person what's happening in the country.
Unless there are black people that you're talking to who are somehow involved in the struggle.
Everything was segregated by law.
So neighborhoods are segregated.
Restaurants are segregated.
Movie theaters.
Places are designated for whites only.
Black people could be in those neighborhoods.
For work, but they had to have papers, and they had to be able to show those papers on demand.
So for me, it was this experience.
I had very progressive intellectual parents, so I knew what was really going on in the country, and I had access to that kind of information, and we intersected with black people in a way that was extremely rare for the white population.
So as a kid, I knew what was going on.
I knew how egregious it was, how amoral and inhumane it was.
But I lived in neighborhoods where people were blissfully ignorant, and the only Blacks they ever intersected with were their housekeepers and the gardeners and the guy who pumped your gas.
And they were all subservient, and they were purposely kept poorly educated, didn't speak English very well, and they were happy to have a job.
So there was a sense of unreality about it.
And I grew up knowing that...
I would be conscripted.
I would be drafted into the military like all white boys were.
My father had gone through that and there was no way that my brother and I were going to submit to that.
So I grew up knowing that push would come to shove by the time I got out of high school.
I would say one of the characteristic experiences of it for me was knowing that every white person I ever met Who I thought I could be friends with, or who I thought I might date, or who I thought I might work with in a musical capacity.
There's always that moment of waiting to see.
Are they going to say the throwaway, standard, racist thing that will mean?
You know, it's a no-go for me.
And I actually have to be careful what I say in response.
Yeah, I can imagine.
And also, some of what you're saying reminds me of Trevor Noah's story.
If people don't know, he's talked about this in his comedy specials and elsewhere.
His father was white.
His mother was a servant who was black.
And he would be in public with his mother and his father would walk by and they couldn't acknowledge each other.
I just couldn't imagine such a situation and growing up in that.
Yeah, and as a white person in that situation with consciousness of what's happening, the guilt was immense and the helplessness, the desire to change the situation and the knowledge of incredibly unfair, like a level of privilege in terms of human rights that most of the population didn't have.
I mean, most of the people around me didn't realize we were in the minority.
I would be the one who told them that.
No, actually, we're like 20% of the total population here.
They had no idea because everything was controlled by the state, including the segregated education system and what you learned in school about the country.
So you've told us what it kind of was like growing up.
When and why did you decide to leave?
Well, as I said, we knew from my earliest...
Awareness of being someone who knows anything about the world, so probably five or six years old, we knew at some point we would have to leave.
We knew that we would do whatever we could to try to make a positive impact on the society.
But by the early 80s, it was illegal to be involved in any kind of activist, protest, anti-apartheid movement.
And it was just, at some point, we're going to have to get out of here.
My mother, fortunately, had a British passport, so that eased the transition in terms of being able to leave.
And I became one of the first 1,500 conscientious objectors that had never happened in the country's history before, that white people had refused to serve, white boys.
One of the first three was a kid who was in my tiny high school with me.
Uh, who was a year ahead of me and he was put in prison for six years.
So I knew that the, I knew the state wasn't bluffing.
I knew I would go to jail if I stayed.
Um, and I had signed the papers and said, this is an evil system.
And I, I could, there's no way I am a conscious objector.
You, you, you will not take me into your military.
So at that point, the, uh, the, the choice was forced and I was fortunate to be able to get out.
That's part of the privilege of being a white person in that situation.
And I always dreamed of coming to this country.
I always dreamed of living in LA. There was a music school I really wanted to go to.
All through high school, I fantasized about doing that.
So I was chasing a dream as well.
But yeah, it was a political situation that I was relieved to be able to get out of.
So you left with your entire family or by yourself?
My family actually left before I did because I was playing in an anti-apartheid protest rock band under an assumed name, touring the country.
It was very sort of like, yeah, I mean, I don't even know.
There's a romanticism to it that was just kind of crazy, having a lot of success and being an 18, 19-year-old kid.
But knowing my draft notice was going to be up soon and I better get the hell out of there.
Okay, so it was a situation where because you stayed, you could have been in prison because you were hanging around.
Yes, yes.
My flight was four days before there would have been an arrest warrant issued.
Well, let's talk a little bit about this bill, too, and thank you for sharing that history.
The bill replaces the Pre-Democratic Expropriation Act of 1975. That was the year I was born.
What did that entail?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of talk about that based on the technicality of the fact that they're updating that bill or act.
It's not that significant.
I mean, the important historical context is this.
Non-white people, which is the term that I use because in South Africa there was this classification of white, colored, Indian, and black.
Those were the four racial groups in the hierarchy.
Actually, white, Indian, colored, and black was the hierarchy of who had which rights.
And so essentially there were whites and non-whites, but it was a vast majority of black people were routinely just relocated under white rules.
So prior to apartheid...
This was just the usual reality of settler colonialism.
There was subjugation of Native people.
There was slave labor.
And then all of the features of what would later be called apartheid, it just wasn't systematically and formally named yet.
And there was something called the Native Lands Act of 1913, which again predates apartheid officially, but it had already reduced the land designated for Black ownership to around 10% of the country.
So you have, at that point, 80 to 90% of the population are allowed to own land in 10% of the actual geography of the country.
Then when apartheid is officially codified, even more areas that were desirable for development for white people were essentially ethnically cleansed.
Non-whites were put in buses, their houses were bulldozed, and they were taken somewhere else.
And there was, hey, here's your new home.
And it would usually be a much more barren landscape, but we usually be disconnected from their cultural roots and from the ways in which they made a living and all of those sorts of things.
So really, really tragic.
This nice area is going to be for white people now.
And the government over time eventually designated areas of the country as what are called Bantustans, which the English term is homelands.
It's a bit like the reservations here, but worse.
They would claim that these are the original tribal homelands of each of these different tribes.
There are probably 10 or so different African tribes within the country.
So we're going to send you off to these different areas that we've identified as your true homeland, right?
And there, so we're going to do resettlement.
So periodically between like 61 and 94, there would be these big pushes to like, okay, let's get all these people back where they actually belong.
And the land that they were on before they were resettled was taken away.
and sold cheaply to white people.
And then the government would turn around and say, you know, black South Africans actually do have equal rights because they can vote in their own elections, in their homelands, where we forcibly relocated them.
And that was the kind of argument that they made that was convincing enough for a short period of time in the 80s that Sun City was so successful.
You remember that period?
There were all of these singers and athletes coming and participating in various things at Sun City, which was on one of And so they could say, no, it's not part of South Africa.
It's Paputatswana, which is actually its own country, but it was all just an absolute sham.
I don't remember that, given that I was probably eight or nine at the time, and I did not have that sort of political awareness in New Jersey.
Yeah, so little Stephen, Stephen Van Zandt, did an album called We Ain't Gonna Play Sun City, which is what blew the lid off of the whole thing.
Essentially, you had massive, like Lionel Richie, Kenny Rogers, big stars of the time came and performed in these stadiums, in the stadium at Sun City.
They had the Million Dollar Golf Challenge, which at the time was the biggest golf tournament in the world.
They had world title fights.
Ali came and fought.
I think he fought, he fought Kheri Kutsia, who was a South African boxer.
He fought a couple of different people at that time.
One of them, I think, happened in Sun City.
So there was this brief moment where they were able to fool everybody because South Africa was completely blacklisted.
And no one would come and support apartheid.
But for a moment there, it was like, oh no, Sun City is a totally fine oasis in the middle of the sea of racism.
So what you're saying is, I know Stephen Van Zandt wasn't born in New Jersey, but we've adopted him.
So is he coming in to help out, raise consciousness?
Love it.
Absolutely.
Yeah, it's an alliance.
It's the Joburg New Jersey Alliance.
So the legacy of this, as you pointed out, is that a tiny percentage of the white population today, Many have fled.
Owns 70-80% of the property, even 30 years after apartheid ended.
And so this 1975 Expropriation Act is not really that important to the story.
It's just the apartheid-era version of a law that is similar to what exists in many other democracies, whereby the government can negotiate with landowners and pay a fee to take over the land for public use.
But so far, it has failed.
As a vehicle for land reform in South Africa.
And so that 2025 Act that was just signed is being put in its place.
And as you pointed out, what has created all the controversy is that it says that under certain circumstances, land expropriation can happen without any financial compensation, which sounds really ominous, right?
But when you look into it more carefully, as you said, the conditions for that nil compensation include when the land is not being used, when it's not intended to be used to make profit, when it's been abandoned, when it's become dangerous to the public.
It's just sitting there and there's all sorts of maybe broken down construction and stuff like that.
Or the government is actually spending money to maintain the property and it exceeds its actual market value.
So there's a small group of things where they're saying, look, there's this land we've identified all around the country that fits into this category.
And we want to be able to give it to the people who have been impoverished all this time, even 30 years after apartheid ended.
How do you feel about this new bill?
And also, do you think Trump cutting off aid in the way that he's doing it right now is going to have a detrimental impact?
Well, there are two different things there, right?
So let me just say, I'm furious.
I'm very sad.
The fact that Trump is saying the descendants of the people who enacted the atrocities of apartheid and who have devastated the population of this country, who might be negatively impacted by this new act.
Can have free passage, not free passage, but free entry, right?
You have basically refugee status.
You can get asylum in this country while all of these deportations are happening.
And the deportations are primarily of brown people who probably have more of a legitimate claim to being somehow related to the original inhabitants of this land.
And it's like explicitly racist.
It's explicitly saying the descendants, I think the wording of it is the descendants of the European settlers in South Africa can come here.
And the thing about it is that for at least 10 years, far-right influencers, people like Lauren Southern, have been doing stories about this, you know, what is happening to the white farmers in South Africa is so terrible.
And there have been terrible crimes.
And, you know, there are stories that are horrific.
The idea that, or the claim that all of these white farmers are being pushed off their land by the government in some kind of communist authoritarian set of maneuvers, and their land is just being given unjustly to black people, it's just not happening.
The reason why it's egregiously racist is that not only is he saying that these European descendants of settlers are welcome to come and seek asylum in South Africa, but at the same time...
He's stopping aid to the country.
And there are roughly 8 million HIV-positive people in South Africa, disproportionately black, of course, who may now go without treatment as a result.
That number is the highest in Africa, in part because the previous president was an AIDS-denying conspiracy theorist along the lines of thinkers that RFK Jr. actually admires.
And then dismantling USAID ironically means that in addition to losing crucial health and human rights and economic development resources, human rights and democratic transparency efforts in South Africa are also being defunded.
And the fact, you know, it just illustrates how Trump is just open to whatever someone whispers in his ear, like, oh yeah, this terrible thing is happening and now I'm going to take actions on the global stage.
Based on, essentially, disinformation.
The act itself, the Expropriation Act of 2025, I don't know enough about how it's being applied.
I mean, so far, I've listened to legal scholars, South African legal scholars, who say, no, no, no, this is in line with the Constitution.
There's a whole legislative process that's going on here.
There's recourse to appeal and there are legal steps.
It's not some...
Totalitarian thing that's being forced on the country.
And so I can see how it could get tricky.
It does bring up all kinds of interesting and controversial issues about property rights.
In the context of the country, so far it looks like it makes sense.
