Elon Musk’s impending takeover of Twitter has many individuals probing his public statements and his previous for clues about how he’ll form one of many world’s most influential public platforms.
But Musk, greatest identified for proudly owning the businesses Tesla and SpaceX, has not talked a lot in public a couple of vital swath of his previous: how rising up as a white individual underneath the racist apartheid system in South Africa might have formed him.
“It’s telling; white kids were insulated from the harsh reality of it,” mentioned Terence Beney, who’s white and graduated with Musk from Pretoria Boys High School in 1988.
Interviews with kin and former classmates reveal an upbringing in elite, segregated white communities that have been suffering from anti-Black authorities propaganda and indifferent from the atrocities that white political leaders inflicted on the Black majority.
Musk, 50, grew up within the financial hub of Johannesburg, the chief capital of Pretoria and the coastal metropolis of Durban. His suburban communities have been largely shrouded in misinformation. Newspapers typically arrived on doorsteps with complete sections blacked out, and nightly information bulletins ended with the nationwide anthem and a picture of the nationwide flag flapping because the names of white younger males who have been killed preventing for the federal government scrolled on the display.
Elon Musk on the Met Gala. (Image: Reuters)
“We were really clueless as white South African teenagers. Really clueless,” mentioned Melanie Cheary, a classmate of Musk’s throughout the two years he spent at Bryanston High School within the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, the place Black folks have been hardly ever seen apart from in service of white households residing in palatial properties.
Musk left South Africa shortly after commencement at 17 to go to varsity in Canada, barely ever wanting again. He didn’t reply to emails requesting remark about his childhood.
Musk has heralded his buy of Twitter as a victory without cost speech, having criticized the platform for eradicating posts and banning customers. It is unclear what function his childhood — developing in a time and place wherein there was hardly a free change of concepts and the place authorities misinformation was used to demonize Black South Africans — might have performed in that call.
Classmates at two excessive faculties he attended described him as a loner with no shut pals. None provided recollections of issues he mentioned or did that exposed his views on the politics of the time. But Black schoolmates recall that he frolicked with Black pals.
Musk’s father, Errol Musk, mentioned in an interview with The New York Times that Elon, his brother and sister have been conscious from a younger age that there was one thing incorrect with the apartheid system. Errol Musk, who was elected to the Pretoria City Council in 1972, mentioned they might ask him in regards to the legal guidelines prohibiting Black folks from patronizing eating places, film theaters and seashores. They needed to make calculations once they have been going out with nonwhite pals about what they may safely do, he mentioned.
“As far as being sheltered from it, that’s nonsense. They were confronted by it every day,” recalled Errol Musk, who mentioned he belonged to the anti-apartheid Progressive Party. “They didn’t like it.”
Still, Errol Musk provided an outline of their lives that underscored how eliminated they have been from the nation’s violent actuality. They received alongside properly with Black folks, he mentioned, pointing to his kids’s good relationship with their home employees, and he described life in South Africa throughout apartheid as being principally higher and safer than it’s now.
According to a biography of Elon Musk, written by Ashlee Vance, Musk mentioned he didn’t need to partake in South Africa’s obligatory navy service as a result of it will have pressured him to take part within the apartheid regime — and that will have contributed to his determination to go away South Africa shortly after highschool commencement.
The apartheid system created a distinction amongst white folks, particularly between those that spoke Afrikaans and those that spoke English, like Musk’s household. While political energy lay with the Afrikaners — the perfecters of apartheid who descended from Dutch, German and French settlers — English-speaking white South Africans loved wealth that felt to some like a birthright, Cheary mentioned.
“We were the white, English-speaking elite of the world,” she mentioned. “It was literally our kingdom.”
Pretoria Boys had a socially progressive undercurrent. The faculty’s headmaster had participated in freedom wrestle actions; some college students would journey to anti-apartheid gatherings.
“I’m pretty confident in saying that a place like Pretoria Boys High, you were exposed to progressive ideas, even if you didn’t adopt them,” mentioned Beney, 51, who does coverage work for public well being and social welfare organizations.
Yet none of them skilled the beatings and gunshots of state safety forces just like the Black kids who have been preventing for fundamental rights in township faculties. And many college students purchased into authorities propaganda, Beney mentioned.
He recalled a debate in one in every of his lessons at Pretoria Boys within the mid-Nineteen Eighties over the federal government’s requirement that they serve within the navy, squashing efforts by Black South Africans to defeat an oppressive regime.
A slight few mentioned they might refuse to kill on behalf of an unjust political system. But others mentioned that whereas apartheid had its injustices, the nation was in an all-out battle. Some insisted that the combat was to guard towards communists. Others justified the battle by arguing that Black folks have been vulnerable to evil concepts.
Another frequent trope amongst college students again then, Beney mentioned, was that Black folks couldn’t be trusted with the best to vote as a result of that they had no custom of democracy.
The apartheid system had pressured the Black majority to dwell in sure areas. The approach that was taught in class was that the nation was made up of many tribes, with some choosing independence in their very own homelands, in response to Stanley Netshituka, who grew to become the primary Black scholar at Pretoria Boys in 1981.
Netshituka mentioned he had some pals from liberal households who understood how unhealthy issues have been for Black South Africans. But they have been the exception, he mentioned.
“I would say the majority were blissfully ignorant and happy to be blissfully ignorant,” mentioned Netshituka, 54, who was allowed to attend the college as a result of his father was a diplomat for Venda, one of many ethnic homelands in South Africa that was thought of a semi-independent nation on the time.
In the identical breath, classmates would name Black freedom fighters terrorists however inform him that “not all Black people are necessarily bad because I can see you’re not so bad,” he recalled.
Musk grew to become pals with a cousin of Netshituka’s, Asher Mashudu, in response to Mashudu’s brother, Nyadzani Ranwashe. One time at lunch, a white scholar used an anti-Black slur, and Musk chided the scholar however then received bullied for doing so, Ranwashe mentioned.
Mashudu was killed in a automotive accident in 1987, and Ranwashe mentioned he remembered Musk being one in every of solely a handful of white individuals who attended the funeral within the household’s rural village.
“It was unheard of during that time,” he mentioned.