Explaining Elon Musk via his childhood in apartheid SA is in principle a bad idea. It has produced some of the most facile American journalism I have read in recent years. To speculate about the psychology of a person you do not know, who grew up in country to which you’ve never been, is a terrible foundation for an essay.
But Musk’s recent foray into Europe’s right-wing politics offers a genuinely interesting connection between the SA in which he grew up and the world he lives in now. It does not require any faux psychological analysis or guesswork about his interior life. It requires only to draw some simple connections.
In Musk’s interventions into British and German politics he has warned again and again of imminent civil war. He has also been preoccupied with gangs of dark-skinned men raping underage white girls. And with white people having too few children to reproduce themselves in sufficient numbers. And with the darker races coming in to replace them.
I have no idea whether Musk airs these ideas because he grew up in apartheid SA. Untold numbers of people across Europe and North America express these thoughts on social media and none of them grew up where Musk did. It is enough to point out that these ideas were ubiquitous in the high-apartheid period. They were walked back in the 1980s, when it became clear that a political settlement was required and that white fears of hordes of black people were counterproductive. But civil war, the shrinking white population, the growing black population, sexual violence across the colour line: the air was thick with all of this in apartheid SA.
There is a further, and more intriguing, parallel. It is in the proposed policy of remigration, increasingly fashionable in the far-right parties Musk has endorsed. It advocates that darker-skinned citizens of European countries who break the law be deported to the lands from which their forebears came. In this idea is the seed of a project to rewind generations of migration into Europe. It is also to say emphatically that the citizens of Europe are not equal; full rights are reserved for those who are white.
The resonance with apartheid SA is rich and deep. The sorting and resorting of urban residents according to their place of alleged ancestral origin; the idea that cities are not safe unless this sorting is repeated ad infinitum; the rounding up of people deemed not to belong and their deportation to the place they are said to have come from; the idea that in some misty future, never to be reached but always to be strived for, the separation of people will be complete, and everyone will live where they really belong.
These were some of the seminal ideas of high apartheid, even if many of the people who put them into practice never quite believed them.
That a man who grew up in late 20th century SA is supporting these ideas in Europe in 2025 tells a story. By the time apartheid formally died, the ideology that had once fuelled it was thought to have ossified long ago; it was a weird relic of a time that could never return. This was the 1990s. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Nelson Mandela was free. History had ended and freedom had come to everyone on the planet.
That within 30 years a powerful movement at the heart of Europe would advocate sorting its citizens by where their forebears came from; that they’d want to send people “back” to places they’d never been: it was unthinkable.
Apartheid’s deepest ideas are back. They are circulating in the Western world. They have purchase. It is in part because one of the great tales of the past 30 years is the relative decline of the West, the stagnation of incomes among people who expected life always to get better, and the return of brutal financial crises the economists of the 1990s thought were gone.
The future is always surprising. The past is never as dead as it seems. That the richest man in the world is a white South African pouring money into remigration is a quintessential story of our times.
• Steinberg teaches at Yale University’s Council on African Studies.
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