Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. – Wikipedia
On clear nighttime early evenings, I sometimes sit outside gazing up at the stars and planets, the ones still visible through the light from a nearby small city. If you are patient enough, you are likely to see satellites, appearing like small stars moving across the night sky.
One evening I was startled to see a burst of them, a dozen or more shooting out in a line. Later research described a Starlink satellite chain, a string of newly launched Starlink satellites deploying into their low-level orbits.
I still occasionally look for them, although the enjoyable curiosity becomes subdued when I consider some of the actions of the billionaire from South African behind Starlink. To offset that, I will try to recall other prominent South Africans who embodied justice, humor, and forgiveness, instead of wealth and power.
With the Starlink connection, I think of DOGE, what I prefer to call the Department Of Greed and Evil. I recall seeing its leader on a campaign stage in 2024 gyrating like a fool. I hear about a possible $1 trillion pay package from Tesla, which makes seeing those hideous Cyber Trucks even more irritating.
While I have sympathy for people diagnosed with Asperger’s, it’s insufficient to offset sour sentiment about what he did to degrade our nation’s government and institutions through DOGE, and possibly meddling in campaigns and elections. While Elon Musk led the set up and ran DOGE, Russell Vought picked the targets. Vought, director of the federal OMB – Office of Massacring the Budget.
Hosting Saturday Night Live in 2021, Musk acknowledged that he was afflicted with the disorder on the autism spectrum. Highly intelligent, he is able to focus intensely and objectively on creating solutions, without being distracted by emotions or nuances in human relations. His success in the high-tech business world is almost unprecedented.
Roots underground
The political world is another story. One important aspect of human relations that has suffered throughout history is racial justice and equality. If this applies to Musk, it could be rooted in coming from South Africa. While apartheid officially ended in the 1990s, as with the Civil War in the U.S., racism and racial inequality just went underground.
Setting up business in the U.S., Musk and several other prominent and extremely wealthy people from South Africa, by donating many millions of dollars to the campaign of a candidate who benefits from racist sentiment among many voters, is like taking revenge on the U.S. for its past role in helping to officially end apartheid in South Africa.
The major prize of their revenge now sits, or slumps, in the Oval Office of the West Wing, the wing that was not demolished. Last spring the president falsely claimed that white farmers in South Africa were victims of genocide, a claim that exposes the underlying racism in both the U.S. and South Africa. Leaders in all of South Africa’s political parties called that claim nonsense.
At the same time, Musk opposes a racial-equality ownership policy in South Africa that prevents his Starlink from doing business there. (Source: Is there a genocide of white South Africans as Trump claims?) It’s no wonder that he supported a presidential candidate who fuels racism, and cares only for personal wealth and power, and nothing of the American people.
‘Born a crime’
The forgiveness comes from another South African, Trevor Noah, a comedian, writer, producer, political commentator, actor, and television host. I did not watch The Daily Show, which he hosted from 2015 to 2022, nor have I yet read his book, Born a Crime – Stories from a South African Childhood. It is said to include forgiveness in telling about his childhood growing up toward the end of apartheid. He did an outstanding job hosting the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2023.
The history of South Africa tells about Dutch colonialism dating back to 1652. The Dutch East India Company established a rest station on the Cape of Good Hope for ships sailing between Europe and Asia. Dutch settlement grew, expanding inland to displace and subjugate indigenous people. Although the British later seized the colony ending Dutch rule (Boer Wars), the legacy of Afrikaner nationalism and racism continued, emerging in apartheid – an official system of segregation and discrimination on the basis of race.
End of apartheid
“Thirty years since the end of Apartheid, South Africa still grapples with its legacy,” states an article from the United Nations Office of Human Rights. “Unequal access to education, unequal pay, segregated communities and massive economic disparities persists, much of it is reinforced by existing institutions and attitudes. How is it that racism and its accompanying discrimination continues to hold such sway in this, majority Black populated and Black governed nation?”
Beginning in 1964 Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years for resisting and fighting back. In the 1980s the U.S. put some pressure on South Africa to end apartheid. “Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, overriding President Reagan’s veto, to impose economic sanctions and restrict investment. These measures, combined with global isolation, economic decline, and internal resistance, pressured Pretoria toward negotiation,” (ChatGPT). A peaceful transition occurred, and Mandela became president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999.
A prelude to apartheid is found in the prominent 1948 novel by Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country, which follows a black village priest and a white farmer who must deal with news of a murder. The back cover promo of the 1987 edition says the “impassioned novel about a black man’s country under white man’s law is a work of searing beauty…. A classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.”
Dawn of hope
The hope emerges in the book’s last sentence: “For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is the secret.”
In modern society we may have progressed from the fear of bondage for most people, the slavery kind anyway. The other bondage, that of fear, seems to have increased in our social and political worlds. That fear is exacerbated and exploited by demagogues and authoritarian wanna-bes.
The first line of Paton’s book is off to a good start: “There is lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it.” I just checked out Paton’s book today from the library. Also Trevor Noah’s book, hoping to find enough reading time in the next month. I wonder if Elon Musk has read them.
