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    An Afrikaner Farming Family Trades South Africa for Alabama

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    Errol Langton and eight members of his family were among the first group of white South Africans to arrive in the United States this week after President Trump created an expedited path to citizenship.The Afrikaner family of nine looked around the small office space in Birmingham, Ala., feeling jet-lagged as they took in their new surroundings. Errol Langton, the patriarch of the white South African family, had spent much of his time so far with a pen in hand, signing required documents at a refugee coordinating office.His granddaughter played with toy blocks on the floor. His oldest son watched over her. They had just eaten noodles. Later, they would spend time looking for apartments.“Everybody still doesn’t believe that we’re actually standing here,” Mr. Langton, 48, said in an interview, about 40 hours after landing at Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport. His family was among the first group of 59 South Africans who arrived in the United States this week, about three months after President Trump signed an executive order establishing refugee status for Afrikaners, the white ethnic minority that ruled during apartheid.The president essentially halted all refugee admission programs on his first day in office. But he soon created an expedited pathway for Afrikaners, who claim they have been discriminated against and subjected to violence because of their race, or have reason to believe they will be.Now, the Langton family has traded its South African hometown on the beach, Hibberdene, for a southern American city thousands of miles away. But Mr. Langton said he felt much safer already, as did his extended family who had joined him: his wife, son, three daughters, son-in-law and two grandchildren.Mr. Langton has a brother in Birmingham. But he said another factor had also drawn his family to the state.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Republicans say they want more American babies – but which kind?

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      Some of the children were too young to stand on their own. Instead, they sat on their parents’ knees or in their parents’ arms, waving American flags. Many of them seemed confused about what, exactly, was even happening.But these kids were in the midst of making history: their families were among the first to take advantage of Donald Trump’s February executive order granting white South Africans refugee status in the United States, on the grounds that Afrikaner landowners – who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population yet, decades after the end of apartheid, control about half of its land – are facing persecution. While the doors to the US refugee program have been slammed shut to virtually everyone else, these Afrikaners showed up in the US earlier this week, their refugee status promising a path to US citizenship.Days later, the Trump administration took a far narrower view of who deserves access to the American polity. On Thursday morning, a lawyer for the Trump administration argued in front of the US supreme court that the 14th amendment does not guarantee citizenship to the American-born children of “illegal aliens” – a view contradicted by more than a century of legal precedent.This split screen raises a vital question: is the Trump administration really interested in helping children and families flourish – or only the “right” families?Over the last several months, the Trump administration’s policies on immigration, families, and children have been pockmarked by all kinds of contradictions. The administration is reportedly considering numerous policies to convince people to have more children, such as “baby bonuses” of $5,000 or medals for mothers who have six or more kids. The Department of Transportation has issued a memo directing the agency to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”. And JD Vance has proclaimed: “I want more babies in the United States of America.”These moves are, in part, fueled by the growing power of the pronatalism movement, which believes that the declining birthrate in the US is an existential threat to its workforce and its future.Why, then, does the government want to exclude an estimated 150,000 babies born every year?“It’s hard to look at any of these policies and not believe that they’re created for the purpose of satisfying a political base that was promised some sort of notions of recreating a nostalgia for a white Christian nationalist nation,” said P Deep Gulasekaram, a professor of immigration law at the University of Colorado Law School.If the fate of the US workforce is really of concern, experts say immigration could help grow it – but the Trump administration has taken a hardline stance against immigrants from the Global South and their children. The administration has not only reportedly turned the refugee agency responsible for caring for children who arrive in the US alone into an arm of Ice, but also slashed funding for legal representation of children in immigration proceedings. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are trying to block parents who lack Social Security Numbers – such as undocumented people – from benefiting from the child tax credit, even in cases where their children are US citizens.The Trump administration has also unveiled new screening protocols that make it far more difficult for undocumented people to “sponsor”, or take custody of, children who enter the US alone. Just last week, the National Center for Youth Law and the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward sued the Trump administration over the changes, which they say have forced kids to languish in government custody. Between December 2024 and March 2025, kids went from spending an average of two months in government custody to spending an average of six.“This administration has compromised the basic health and safety of immigrant children in egregious ways,” Neha Desai, managing director of children’s human rights and dignity at the National Center for Youth Law, said in an email.In March, KFF, a charity that conducts health policy research, conducted focus groups of Hispanic adults who are undocumented or likely living with someone who is undocumented. Many spoke of the effect that the Trump administration’s policies are having on their families and kids.“I have a six-year-old child. Honestly, I’m afraid to take him to the park, and he asks me, ‘Mom, why don’t we go to the park?’” one 49-year-old Costa Rican immigrant woman told KFF. “How do I tell him? I’m scared.”“Even the children worry. ‘Mom, did you get home safely?’ They’re already thinking that something is going to happen to us on the street,” added a 54-year-old Colombian immigrant woman. “So that also makes me very nervous, knowing that there might come a time when they could be left here alone.”The supreme court arguments on Thursday centered not on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, but on the legality of lower court orders in the case. Still, some of the justices expressed concerns about what the case could mean for children.Eliminating birthright citizenship, Justice Elena Kagan suggested, could render children stateless. The high court needed a way to act fast, she said.If the justices believe that a court order is wrong, she asked, “why should we permit those countless others to be subject to what we think is an unlawful executive action?”Both the historical and legal record make clear that the 14th Amendment encapsulates birthright citizenship, Gulasekaram said. But, he said, predicting the supreme court’s moves is a “fool’s errand”.“There’s really no way of getting around the the conclusion that this is a call to some form of racial threat and racial solidarity as a way of shoring up support from a particular part of the of the of the Trump base,” Gulasekaram said. “Citizenship and the acquisition of citizenship has always been racially motivated in the United States.” More

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      South Africa’s Leader Criticizes Afrikaners Seeking Refuge in U.S.

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      President Cyril Ramaphosa called the white South Africans “cowardly” for leaving for the United States.President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said white South Africans who had left for the United States after being granted refugee status there were “cowardly,” in a blunt broadside as tensions over the issue mount between the countries.“They are running away” from a duty to help with South Africa’s transformation and solve its problems, Mr. Ramaphosa told reporters on Tuesday, adding, “When you run away, you are a coward.” More than 8,000 South Africans have expressed interest in the U.S. program to create an expedited path for Afrikaners to resettle in the United States. That comes even as the Trump administration has barred most refugees from other countries.If approved, they would join the dozens of people who arrived on Monday at an airport outside Washington on a charter flight funded by the United States.The program for the Afrikaners has cut to the heart of post-apartheid race dynamics in South Africa. The country’s government has strongly rejected the Trump administration’s assertion that the Afrikaners — members of a white ethnic minority that ruled during apartheid in South Africa — should be eligible for refugee status.The Afrikaners “do not fit the definition of a refugee,” Mr. Ramaphosa said on Monday at a forum in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Afrikaners Arrive in U.S. as Trump-Approved Refugees

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      The first group of Afrikaners have arrived in the United States, claiming they were victims of persecution or had reason to fear persecution in their home country.President Trump signed an executive order in February establishing refugee status for Afrikaners, the white ethnic minority in South Africa that created and led the brutal system of apartheid.As part of the executive order, the Trump administration created an expedited path for Afrikaners to resettle in the United States, even as the administration has barred most refugees from countries afflicted by war and famine.While waiting at the airport in Johannesburg, the passengers said the U.S. Embassy had instructed them not to speak with the news media. The first group of Afrikaners arrived in the United States on May 12.Here’s what you need to know:Who are the Afrikaners?What does land have to do with it?Why are Afrikaners being granted refugee status?How will they be resettled in the United States?Who are the Afrikaners?The Afrikaners who arrived in the United States on Monday are the descendants of the European colonizers who came to South Africa approximately four centuries ago. They later created the brutal system of apartheid in 1948.Decades after the end of apartheid, some Afrikaners now say they are being denied jobs and have been targeted by violence because of their race.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Episcopal church says it won’t help resettle white South Africans granted refugee status

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      The Episcopal church’s migration service is refusing a directive from the federal government to help resettle white South Africans granted refugee status, citing the church’s longstanding “commitment to racial justice and reconciliation”.Presiding bishop Sean Rowe announced the step on Monday, shortly before 59 South Africans arrived at Dulles international airport outside Washington DC on a private charter plane and were greeted by a government delegation.Episcopal Migration Ministries instead will halt its decades-long partnership with the government, Rowe said.Donald Trump opened a fast-tracked refugee status to white South Africans, accusing their government of discrimination, even as his administration abruptly shut down the overall US refugee program. The South Africans jumped ahead of thousands of would-be refugees overseas who had been undergoing years of vetting and processing.Episcopal Migration Ministries has long resettled refugees under federal grants. Rowe said that about two weeks ago, the government contacted it and said it expected the ministry to resettle some of the South Africans under terms of its grant.“In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step,” Rowe said. “Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the US federal government.”South Africa’s government has vehemently denied allegations of discriminatory treatment of its white minority residents.“It has been painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years,” Rowe said. “I am saddened and ashamed that many of the refugees who are being denied entrance to the United States are brave people who worked alongside our military in Iraq and Afghanistan and now face danger at home because of their service to our country.”He also said many refugees, including Christians, are victims of religious persecution and are now denied entry.He said the church would find other ways to serve immigrants, such as those already in this country and those stranded overseas.The move marks the end of a ministry-government partnership that, for nearly four decades, has served nearly 110,000 refugees from countries, including Ukraine, Myanmar and Congo, Rowe said.It’s not the first high-profile friction between the Episcopal church and the Trump administration. Bishop Mariann Budde of Washington DC drew Trump’s anger in January at an inaugural prayer service in which she urged “mercy” on those fearing his actions, including migrants and LGBTQ+ children.The Anglican church of Southern Africa includes churches in South Africa and neighboring countries. It was a potent force in the campaign against apartheid in the 1980s and 1990s, an effort for which the late archbishop Desmond Tutu received the Nobel peace prize in 1984.Another faith-based refugee agency, Church World Service, says it is open to serving the South African arrivals.“We are concerned that the U.S. Government has chosen to fast-track the admission of Afrikaners, while actively fighting court orders to provide life-saving resettlement to other refugee populations who are in desperate need of resettlement,” Rick Santos, CWS president and CEO, said in a statement.He added that the action proves the government knows how to screen and process refugees quickly.“Despite the Administration’s actions, CWS remains committed to serving all eligible refugee populations seeking safety in the United States, including Afrikaners who are eligible for services,” he said. “Our faith compels us to serve each person in our care with dignity and compassion.”The Episcopal ministry and CWS are among 10 national groups, most of them faith-based, that have partnered with the government for refugee resettlement. More

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      in US Politics

      First group of white South Africans arrive in US after Trump grants refugee status

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      The first group of white South Africans granted refugee status by Donald Trump’s administration has arrived in the US, stirring controversy in South Africa as the US president declared the Afrikaners victims of a “genocide”.The Afrikaners, a minority descended from mainly Dutch colonists, were met at Dulles international airport outside Washington DC by US deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, and deputy secretary of homeland security, Troy Edgar, with many given US flags to wave.Reuters reported that the group numbered 59 adults and children, citing a state department official, while Associated Press said there were 49.At Dulles airport, Landau told the assembled white South Africans: “It is such an honour for us to receive you here today … it makes me so happy to see you with our flag in your hands.He invoked his family’s history, saying: “My own father was born in Europe and had to leave his country when Hitler came in … We respect what you have had to deal with these last few years.”He added: “We’re sending a clear message that the United States really rejects the egregious persecution of people on the basis of race in South Africa.”On the same day the group arrived in the US, Trump’s government also ended legal protections that had temporarily protected Afghans from deportation, citing an improved security situation in the country, which is ruled by the Taliban.One consideration for resettling Afrikaners not Afghans was that “they could be easily assimilated into our country,” Landau told reporters at the airport.Trump suspended the US refugee settlement programme in January, leaving more than 100,000 people approved for refugee resettlement stranded. Then, in February, he signed an executive order directing officials to grant refugee status to Afrikaners, whose leaders ruled during apartheid while violently repressing the Black majority.“It’s a genocide that’s taking place,” Trump told reporters at the White House, when asked why white South Africans were being prioritised for resettlement above victims of famine and war elsewhere on the continent, echoing a far-right conspiracy theory that has also been amplified by his South African-born billionaire adviser Elon Musk.Trump added that the Afrikaners’ race “makes no difference to me”. He said South Africa’s leaders were travelling to meet him next week, but that he would not attend the G20 leaders’ meeting in Johannesburg in November unless the “situation is taken care of”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSouth Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, said at a conference in Ivory Coast that he had told Trump by phone that he had received false information about white South Africans being discriminated against, from people who disagreed with government efforts to redress the racial inequalities that still persist three decades after white minority rule ended.“We think that the American government has got the wrong end of the stick here, but we’ll continue talking to them,” he said.White South Africans typically have 20 times the wealth of Black people, according to an article in the Review of Political Economy. The Black South African unemployment rate is 46.1%, compared with 9.2% for white people.Laura Thompson Osuri, executive director of Homes Not Borders, a refugee care nonprofit in the Washington area, stood in the airport check-in area with a sign reading: “Refugee. Noun. A person who has been forced to leave his or her country due to persecution, war or violence. Afrikaners are not refugees.”Osuri said of Trump’s policy: “It’s for showing: ‘Look at us. We do welcome people as long as they look like us.’”Democrats also condemned the Afrikaners’ resettlement. Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen told a thinktank event: “To watch the Trump administration apply what I call their global apartheid policy … is just an outrageous insult to the whole idea of our country.”Meanwhile, the Episcopal church said it was ending its decades-long work with the US government supporting refugees, after it was asked to help resettle the white South Africans, citing its “commitment to racial justice and reconciliation”. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘It’s back to drug rationing’: the end of HIV was in sight. Then came the cuts

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      This year the world should have been “talking about the virtual elimination of HIV” in the near future. “Within five years,” says Prof Sharon Lewin, a leading researcher in the field. “Now that’s all very uncertain.”Scientific advances had allowed doctors and campaigners to feel optimistic that the end of HIV as a public health threat was just around the corner.Then came the Trump administration’s abrupt cuts to US aid funding. Now the picture is one of a return to the drugs rationing of decades ago, and of rising infections and deaths.But experts are also talking about building a new approach that would make health services, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, less vulnerable to the whims of a foreign power.The US has cancelled 83% of its foreign aid contracts and dismantled USAid, the agency responsible for coordinating most of them.Many fell under the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) programme, which has been the backbone of global efforts to tackle HIV and Aids, investing more than $110bn (£85bn) since it was founded in 2003 and credited with saving 26 million lives and preventing millions more new infections. In some African countries it covered almost all HIV spending.View image in fullscreenThere is a risk, says Lewin, director of Melbourne University’s Institute for Infection and Immunity and past president of the International Aids Society, of “dramatic increases in infections, dramatic increases in death and a real loss of decades of advances”.There is no official public list of which contracts have been cancelled, and which remain. It appears that virtually no HIV-prevention programmes funded by the US are still in operation, save a handful principally providing drugs to stop pregnant women passing on the infection to their babies. Countries report disruption to the most basic measures, such as condom distribution.Some treatment programmes have been spared, but not those whose focus conflicted with the Trump administration’s war on “gender ideology” or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), such as those working with transgender communities. Doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers have been laid off, while worried patients are hoarding drugs or stretching supplies, according to UNAids surveillance. UNAids itself has lost more than half of its funding.Even programmes that have survived the cull have faced turmoil since February, with instructions to stop work rescinded but with no certainty that funding will continue.View image in fullscreenIn only one example, the Elizabeth Glaser Paediatric Aids Foundation says it has had to halt HIV treatment for 85,000 people in Eswatini, including more than 2,000 children, and tests for thousands of pregnant women and babies to prevent transmission and begin life-saving medication.Access to drugs represents an “immediate crisis”, Lewin says. “If people with HIV stop the medications, then not only do they get sick themselves, which is tragic, but they also then become infectious to others.”As clinics on the frontline of treating the disease scrabble to secure access to basic drugs, scientists at this month’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in San Francisco were hearing that HIV might soon be preventable with a once-a-year injection.The drug lenacapavir was already generating huge excitement in the field, after trial results showed that a six-monthly jab could prevent HIV. New results from the manufacturer Gilead suggest that a tweak to the formula and how it is given could see its protective effects last even longer.Nevertheless, Lewin says, the mood at the meeting, packed with many of the world’s leading HIV specialists, was “dire”.As well as programme cancellations, there are “huge concerns around science and what’s going to happen to the [US] National Institutes of Health, [whose] funding of science has been so significant on every level”, she says.Some scientists in receipt of US funding have been told to remove their names from DEI-linked research, she says, even though DEI is fundamental to the HIV response.View image in fullscreen“I don’t mean that in a sort of touchy-feely way, I mean that’s what we need to do: you need to actually get those treatments to these diverse communities.”In 2022, 55% of all new HIV infections were within “key populations”, such as gay men, other men who have sex with men, sex workers, transgender people, prisoners and people who inject drugs.Prof Linda-Gail Bekker, of South Africa’s Desmond Tutu Health Foundation, has seen US funding for three trials of potential HIV vaccines involving eight countries cancelled and only reinstated after an appeal to the US supreme court.“We’re running around like chickens without heads to at least get one going, because the vaccines are sitting in the fridge and will expire,” she says.She led the lenacapavir trial that showed it offered 100% protection to young women in sub-Saharan Africa, but now worries about HIV/Aids prevention “falling off the radar completely”.The global community had been making headway towards the United Nations’ goal of ending Aids by 2030, she says, with a five-year plan to use “amazing new innovative tools and scale them up”, which would have led to “less dependence on foreign aid and more self-reliance” as new infections fell and attention shifted to maintaining treatment for people with HIV.“All of that is hugely at risk now because, without these funds, our governments will have to step up but they will concentrate on treatment,” she says. “We know they will do that, because that is what we did for the first 30 years.”Efforts to control Aids were entering “the last mile”, which was always likely to be more expensive, she says. “The people who were happy to come into health facilities, they would have come into health facilities.”It would be difficult to rely on government funding to reach the remaining groups, she says, not only because of fewer resources but also because in some countries it means targeting groups whose existence is illegal and unrecognised, such as sex workers or sexual minorities, and young girls may be reluctant to use government clinics if they are not supposed to be sexually active.“I feel like the odds are very stacked against us,” says Bekker, adding: “We’re obviously going to have to re-programme ourselves [and] formulate a different plan.”Pepfar had pledged funding to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, to deploy 10m doses of lenacapavir in low-income countries. While the Global Fund has promised to maintain its commitment, it might receive fewer than the planned number of doses, Bekker fears.“Six months ago, I was saying the best thing we can do with lenacapavir is offer it to everybody in a choice environment. [Now] I think we’re gonna have to say who needs [injectable] prep,” she says, “and the rest have to do the best they can.“How do we make that decision? And what does that look like? It is back to sort of rationing.“When we started ARVs [antiretroviral drugs] way back in 2000,” Bekker recalls, “you would go, ‘you get treatment; you don’t, you don’t, you don’t’.“It feels terrible … but you have to get over that. You have to say it will be infection-saving for some people. And we’ve got to make it count.”View image in fullscreenFor Beatriz Grinsztejn, president of the International Aids Society, the disruption is critical and threatens many vulnerable people. But, she adds, it could present “an important opportunity for ownership – otherwise we are always left in the hands of others”.She worries about the impact of cuts to funding on younger scientists, with their potential loss from the research field “a major threat for the next generation”. But, she adds, the HIV community is “powerful and very resilient”.There have already been calls for new ways of doing things. It is “time for African leadership”, members of the African-led HIV Control Working Group write in the Lancet Global Health. There are now plans for Nigeria to produce HIV drugs and tests domestically.Christine Stegling, deputy director of UNAids, says it began “a concerted effort” last year to develop plans with countries about how their HIV programmes could become more sustainable domestically “but with a longer timeframe … now we are trying to do some kind of fast-tracking”.Governments are determined, she says, but it will require fiscal changes either in taxation or by restructuring debt.The goal of ending Aids by 2030 is still achievable, Stegling believes. “I think we have a very short window of opportunity now, in the next two, three months, to continue telling people that we can do it.“I keep on reminding people, ‘look, we need to get back to that same energy that we had when people were telling us treatment can’t be available in the global south, right?’ And we didn’t accept it. We made it happen.“We have national governments now who are also very adamant, because they can see what can happen, and they want to make it happen for their own populations.” More

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      in Elections

      Marco Rubio Essentially Expels South Africa’s U.S. Ambassador

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      As he flew back from the Group of 7 allies meeting in Canada on Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made an announcement that essentially expelled South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool. Mr. Rubio wrote on social media that the ambassador was a “race-baiting politician who hates America” and President Trump. He added, “We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA.” That designation requires South Africa to end his role as ambassador. Mr. Rubio made his comments above a repost of an article from Breitbart, a right-leaning news site, about remarks Mr. Rasool made on Friday at an institute in Johannesburg. The article quoted Mr. Rasool saying Mr. Trump was leading a “supremacist” movement against “the incumbency, those who are in power,” in South Africa.The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations says a host country “may at any time and without having to explain its decision” declare “any member” of a diplomatic mission to be persona non grata, which is Latin for an unwelcome individual. The convention states that in case of such designation, “the sending state shall, as appropriate, either recall the person concerned or terminate his functions with the mission.” Mr. Rubio said on social media last month that he would not attend the meeting of top diplomats from the Group of 20 nations in South Africa, criticizing the South African hosts for having a focus of the meeting be on “solidarity, equality and sustainability.” Other countries did not follow Mr. Rubio’s boycott. China sent its top foreign policy official, Wang Yi, who held meetings with counterparts from other countries while Mr. Rubio was absent.Mr. Trump has signed an executive order last month prioritizing the resettlement in the United States of white South African farmers, whom he referred to as “Afrikaner refugees,” whose land had been taken by the government, even though that is not a widespread practice in South Africa. He also ordered the federal government to cut off all aid to South Africa. More

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      in US Politics

      The making of Elon Musk: how did his childhood in apartheid South Africa shape him?

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      With an imposing double-winged redbrick main building, and school songs lifted directly from Harrow’s songbook, Pretoria boys high school is every inch the South African mirror of the English private schools it was founded in 1901 to imitate.Elon Musk, who has rapidly become one of the most powerful people in US politics, spent his final school years in the 1980s as a day pupil on the lush, tree-filled campus in South Africa’s capital, close to his father’s large detached home in Waterkloof, a wealthy Pretoria suburb shaded by purple jacaranda blossoms in spring.View image in fullscreenSouth Africa was rocked by uprisings as apartheid entered its dying years. In 1984, black townships across the country revolted. By 1986, the white minority government had imposed a state of emergency. But in the segregated white enclaves, life was affluent and peaceful.“While the country as a whole was very much in flames and in turmoil, we were blissfully very safe in our little leafy suburbs, going about our very normal life,” said Jonathan Stewart, who was a year above Musk at Pretoria boys, which also counts the Labour politician Peter Hain, the Booker prize-winning novelist Damon Galgut and the murderer and Paralympian Oscar Pistorius among its former pupils.“You had this wealthy set, in relative terms, and everybody else was excluded.”View image in fullscreenMusk, who was born in Pretoria in 1971, railed on his social media platform X last month against the “openly racist laws” of the country of his birth and responded “yes” to the statement: “White South Africans are being persecuted for their race in their home country.”After the posts by the man now at the helm of Donald Trump’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a special group Trump has created, the US president signed an executive order accusing South Africa’s government of “unjust racial discrimination” against white Afrikaners, citing a law allowing land to be expropriated in certain circumstances. The order cut aid to South Africa, which receives 17% of its HIV/Aids budget from the US, and offered asylum to Afrikaners.It was not clear the extent to which Musk, who left South Africa in 1989 for his mother’s country, Canada, and then went to the US, had a direct hand in encouraging Trump to issue the order.Trump has taken an interest in the alleged persecution of white South Africans since his first presidency, when an Afrikaner rights group travelled to the US to claim, falsely, that white farmers were being murdered for their land with the complicity of the government. Trump saw one of the group’s leaders interviewed on Fox News and tweeted his support.Trump has also been influenced by other interests, including US groups critical of South Africa’s case against Israel at the international court of justice (ICJ) over the war in Gaza, which he referred to in his executive order.View image in fullscreenBut with Musk now among Trump’s closest advisers, it is unlikely he has not made his views known to the president, given they are also tied up with his business interests in South Africa.Musk has claimed that land reform laws, in a country where the white minority, who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population, still own more than 70% of agricultural land, are racist and amount to theft. He has endorsed claims that the killings of white farmers amount to genocide; research suggests the crimes are financially motivated.Musk’s attacks have ratcheted up at a time when he is in a dispute with the South African government about affirmative action laws, as he tries to sell his Starlink satellite network in the country. The world’s richest man objects to a law requiring that foreign investors in the telecoms sector provide 30% of the equity in the South African part of the enterprise to Black-owned businesses.Trump’s executive order will add to the pressure on South Africa’s government to exempt Musk from the Black empowerment laws.X’s press team and Musk’s lawyer did not respond to interview requests or emailed questions.To what extent Musk’s years growing up under the collapsing apartheid regime influenced his positions today, from making what looked like a Nazi salute – a characterisation he rejects – at Trump’s inauguration celebrations last month to his embrace of far-right political parties such as Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, remains an open debate.View image in fullscreenWhite, English-speaking South Africans such as Musk’s family benefited from apartheid’s racial hierarchy but lived mostly separate lives from the ruling Afrikaners.Musk spent the first two years of South Africa’s five high school years at the all-white Bryanston high school in Johannesburg’s leafy northern suburbs. Founded in 1968, it is a mixed-sex, English-language, fee-paying state school, made up of rectangular mid-century buildings.Like South Africa then and now, Bryanston high was sports mad. “It was a little bit like when you think of American society,” said Lesley Burns, who finished at the school in 1984, Musk’s first year. “There were all the jocks and the popular guys in the football team.”Musk, who was on the school’s chess team in 1985, was viciously bullied. The hounding culminated with him being thrown down a set of stairs, beaten so badly that he was hospitalised. The school declined an interview.View image in fullscreenMusk’s father moved him and his brother, Kimbal, to Pretoria boys, where he was well liked, according to Gideon Fourie, who had computer science classes with Musk.“He was a very average personality,” Fourie said. “He wasn’t in any way like a super jock, or a super nerd, or a super punk … He had a group of friends.”South African media were subjected to strict government censorship. Newspapers would appear with censored sections blacked out, particularly reports of the growing unrest in the townships and mass arrests, until those were also banned.In contrast, the fee-paying Pretoria boys was liberal, for its time. In 1981 it became the first government school to admit a Black pupil. The then headteacher, Malcolm Armstrong, used a loophole that allowed it to let in the sons of diplomats from the “homelands” within South Africa that the apartheid system claimed were independent states.“Armstrong even defied the authorities by meeting with the ANC [African National Congress] in Dakar while it was still banned,” said Patrick Conroy, who was in Kimbal’s year, two years below Musk. “He frequently addressed our school assemblies, emphasising the importance of democracy, human rights and social justice.”The school’s current headteacher, Gregary Hassenkamp, was also in Kimbal’s year and has similar memories of his predecessor, although he noted that not all teachers shared Armstrong’s liberal views.View image in fullscreen“I remember him forcing boys to think about the country in which we lived and the attitudes we had,” Hassenkamp said in an interview in his wood-panelled office, wearing a flowing black gown and a tie and socks in the school’s red, white and green colours.Musk has previously described himself as “not a conservative” and backed the Democratic candidate in every presidential election going back to Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, until he moved to the right. But Musk is clearly suspicious of democracy and the leaders it produces.In the 1930s, his grandfather headed an anti-democratic fringe political movement in Canada with fascist overtones, which campaigned for government by elite technocrats. He then moved to apartheid South Africa because the racist system appealed to him.Musk now appears happy to embrace the US version of the “strongman” ruler by backing Trump’s claim that the will of the president is paramount.Some of Musk’s school peers speculated that his current views of South Africa may be influenced by his missing out on the ups and downs of the negotiations to end apartheid and the “miracle” of Nelson Mandela becoming the country’s first Black president in 1994.Since then, the governments led by Mandela’s ANC party have failed to address the world’s worst economic inequality. While its Black economic empowerment policies offer tax breaks and state contracts to Black-owned companies, Black people are five times likelier than white people to be unemployed. South Africa also has one of the world’s highest murder rates.It is not uncommon to hear white South Africans say they are being discriminated against, often citing affirmative action laws. In mid-February, hundreds gathered outside the US embassy in Pretoria carrying signs with slogans such as “Thank God for President Trump” and “Make South Africa Great Again”.View image in fullscreenWhile it is rare to hear white South Africans say they want a return to apartheid, it is also not uncommon to hear older people express nostalgia for that time.“It was a good time, because we had no crime. There were no problems. People, Blacks and whites, got on very well with each other,” Errol Musk said in a video interview from his spacious Cape Town home, when asked about his son Elon’s childhood. “Everything worked. That’s the reality. Of course people don’t want to hear that, but that’s the truth.”Musk and his two younger full siblings, Kimbal and Tosca, have had a tumultuous relationship with their father. Kimbal told Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson that their father would scream at them for two to three hours, calling them worthless and pathetic. Their mother, Maye, has accused him of physical abuse.“It’s rubbish,” Errol said when asked about the allegations, which he has repeatedly denied.The brothers became estranged from their father in 2017, not for the first time, when he had a child with his 30-year-old stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout, according to Isaacson. In Errol’s telling, they got angry with him when he expressed his support for Trump in 2016, at a party in Cape Town they threw for his 70th and Musk’s 45th birthdays.“Things changed when Biden came in and Elon realised they’re trying to destroy America,” Errol said. “Now we exchange messages about every day. Of course, he’s not always able to answer, so his PA will answer me.”Additional reporting by Chris McGreal More