ELON MUSK: AFRICA’S MOST DANGEROUS ENEMY SINCE CECIL RHODES
The world’s richest man is waging a silent war on Black Africa — and the continent must wake up before it’s too late
By Kio Amachree
There is a particular kind of racist that the African continent has always found most difficult to confront — not the crude bigot who announces himself, but the polished predator who wraps his contempt in the language of freedom, efficiency, and progress. Elon Musk is that man. And he may be the most dangerous enemy Africa has faced since Cecil Rhodes carved a continent open with a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other.
I was educated at Eton College. In my time there, the only students whose racism was genuinely frightening — visceral, ideological, structural — were white South Africans. Not all of them. But those who were, were truly terrible people. I saw in them something that went beyond prejudice into something colder: a belief, bone-deep, that Black people were a problem to be managed. I see that same coldness in Elon Musk.
Musk was born into the comfort of apartheid South Africa, shaped in its schools, raised on its hierarchies, and nurtured in a home that researchers have since connected to neo-Nazi sympathies. Investigative reporting has documented how Musk’s family history in South Africa reveals ties to apartheid and extremist movements, with his grandfather immigrating to the country just as the most aggressive apartheid laws — laws described as reminiscent of the Nazi Nuremberg statutes — were being enacted against Black South Africans. This is the ideological soil from which Elon Musk grew.
His behaviour as an adult confirms it. He has described South Africa as having “racist ownership laws,” accusing its post-apartheid government of doing too little to prevent what he has called a “genocide” against white farmers — a narrative widely contested — while conveniently ignoring that white farmers, just 7% of the population, still own approximately three-quarters of the country’s land, a direct inheritance of apartheid. He has amplified the “Great Replacement” theory. He performed what observers widely identified as a Nazi salute on a public stage. He is not a man who stumbled into racism. He has chosen it, repeatedly, in full public view.
Most recently, Musk claimed his satellite internet company Starlink was blocked from South Africa because he is “not Black” — a characterisation South Africans across the political spectrum have called a deliberate lie, noting that over 500 American companies operate freely in South Africa under the same regulatory framework.
But Musk’s war on Africa is not merely rhetorical. It is lethal.
As the architect of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency inside the Trump administration, Musk orchestrated the systematic dismantling of USAID — the United States Agency for International Development — an institution that for six decades kept children alive across Africa and the developing world. Around 200,000 more children are believed to have died in 2025 than in 2024. Over 1,300 health and family planning clinics have closed globally due to USAID cuts. Thousands of medical professionals were laid off. Lancet modelling indicates these cuts may cause 14 million deaths, including those of 4.5 million children under age five, by 2030.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, five-year-old Suza Kenyaba died of malaria after a shipment of anti-malaria drugs — already purchased — was left stranded in a distribution warehouse when US government payments to contractors were frozen. In Mozambique, an eleven-year-old girl named Paciencia died of HIV after her caseworker was abruptly laid off and hospitals ran out of the US-funded antiretroviral drugs she depended on. These are not projections. These are names. These are children.
Bill Gates — a man who has spent over $100 billion fighting the diseases Musk has now allowed to resurge — said it plainly: “Killing the world’s poorest children.” He added: “80% cuts — that’s going to be millions of deaths and it’s a mistake.” When the world’s leading philanthropist uses such language about the world’s richest man, Africa must listen.
Musk has responded to all of this with characteristic contempt. He celebrated putting USAID into a “wood chipper.” He waved a chainsaw at rallies. He denied that a single child had died. Former USAID global health official Nicholas Enrich, in his whistleblower account, described a man who was “gleeful” about the destruction — someone who had never once mentioned USAID publicly until he encountered a conspiracy theory about it on a podcast, and then proceeded to dismantle a 60-year institution on the basis of that conspiracy theory.
This is the man who wants to bring Starlink — and his political influence — deep into Africa. This is the man who champions the interests of white South African farmers over the majority Black population that apartheid dispossessed. This is the man who sits at the right hand of Donald Trump and whispers into the ear of the most powerful government on earth.
The African Union must act. Elon Musk should be declared persona non grata across the African continent. Not as symbolism. As strategy. Africa cannot afford to allow a man of his resources, his ideology, and his demonstrated contempt for Black lives to embed his commercial and political infrastructure across our nations. History has taught us — at tremendous cost — what happens when Africa extends welcome to those who view Black people as a problem to be solved.
Musk is not a businessman seeking opportunity in Africa. He is a man shaped by apartheid, enriched by exploitation, and now armed with both the world’s largest fortune and direct access to American state power. He has already shown what he does with that combination: he reaches for the most vulnerable, and he cuts.
Africa must not wait for the wood chipper to reach its shores.
Kio Amachree is President of Worldview International and author of The Kio Solution, published across Vanguard, Sahara Reporters, and Substack’s Letters from Stockholm.