Errol Musk’s latest performance in Moscow carries the familiar stench of South African white grievance packaged for an international audience. He now seeks to export the “white farmer genocide” myth to Russia, as though Russia should become the latest stage for a racial fantasy manufactured by Afrikaner lobbyists, Trumpists, right-wing media circuits and the Musk family’s own resentment towards post-apartheid South Africa.
AFP reports that Musk told them from Moscow that his project concerns “providing refugee status to South African farmers.” The plan reportedly involves 50 white Afrikaans families, with the Vladimir regional governor saying he discussed agricultural development and the possible settlement of “Dutch-origin families from South Africa.” The same demographic has already received refugee status from the Trump administration on the false claim that Afrikaners face persecution under South Africa’s post-apartheid government.
There sits the obscenity. South Africa, a country where Black people still carry the brutal material consequences of land theft, migrant labour, forced removals, farm evictions, wage slavery, apartheid spatial planning and post-1994 elite compromise, now has to watch Errol Musk parade white farmers as the injured party before Russia.
Russia should take this as an insult.
The Russian Embassy in South Africa has already cut through the hype. Kirill Kalinin, Senior Counsellor and Spokesperson of the Russian Embassy in South Africa, stated that the Russian Government “has nothing to do with this initiative” and that Errol Musk did not approach the Russian Embassy in South Africa on the question. According to the Embassy, the early talks with the authorities of Vladimirskaya oblast concerned “solely joint agricultural cooperation projects.”
The official line strips the story of Musk’s racial melodrama. The Embassy describes Vladimirskaya oblast as an agricultural region with more than 50 large-scale agro-industrial projects in development, mainly focused on livestock and dairy farming. It says Russia welcomes foreign investment from friendly countries and would treat any successful agreement as a private investment collaboration. In plain terms, Russia speaks of agriculture, investment and development. Musk drags in racial asylum politics.
The Embassy also reaffirmed Russia’s strategic partnership with South Africa, rooted in “mutual respect, sovereign equality, and common interests.” That statement should be read against the noise of Western media and right-wing South African propaganda. Russia has no reason to inherit the white panic industry that Washington, AfriForum and the Musk family have already tried to globalise.
This smells like another propaganda campaign to drive a wedge between Black South Africans and Russia. It takes the old settler myth of white victimhood and tries to plant it in a relationship built through anti-apartheid struggle, BRICS cooperation and anti-imperial memory. It asks Russia to stand beside a racial fiction that insults the Black majority of South Africa. It asks Moscow to legitimise a lie that Washington already weaponised against Pretoria.
For those of us on the real left, the anti-imperial left, the left that does not take instructions from liberal foundations, NGO circuits, Atlantic think tanks and Western media houses, Russia occupies a serious place in South African memory. Black South Africans remember the Soviet Union as a material ally in the struggle against apartheid. Moscow supported liberation forces while the West protected, armed, financed and excused apartheid. That historical love did not come from nostalgia. It came from solidarity in a century where Black South Africans knew exactly who stood with them and who stood with their oppressors.
That memory explains the deep affection many Black South Africans and many of us on the anti-imperial left hold for Russia and for President Putin. We do not confuse Russia with liberal Europe. We do not look to Washington for moral instruction. We understand why Putin commands respect across much of the Global South. Russia has faced the full machinery of Western demonisation because it refuses Western command.
Errol Musk now tries to insert a racist South African grievance into that historic relationship. He willfully places white Afrikaner anxiety inside a diplomatic space shaped by anti-apartheid solidarity. He wants Russia to absorb the propaganda that Washington already uses against South Africa. He attempts to make Moscow appear available to the old settler fantasy of rescue from Black majority rule.
South Africa’s material reality exposes the lie. Stats SA’s 2025 mid-year population estimate records South Africa’s population at 63.1 million people. Black Africans number about 51.6 million, or 81.8% of the country. White South Africans number about 4.5 million, or 7.1%. This means that a small white minority, still carrying enormous inherited advantage from colonialism and apartheid, now asks the world to treat itself as the besieged moral centre of South Africa’s story.
The official 2017 Land Audit found that, within farms and agricultural holdings owned by individual landowners, white South Africans owned 26.6 million hectares, or 72%, while Africans owned 1.3 million hectares, or 4%. That figure alone blows open the moral fraud. The people who still dominate agricultural land now present themselves abroad as the dispossessed. The people still locked out of land, finance, irrigation, mechanisation and markets vanish from Musk’s story.
South Africa also carries a mass unemployment and poverty crisis that falls hardest on the Black majority. Stats SA placed official unemployment at 31.4% in the fourth quarter of 2025, with the expanded rate at 42.1%. Stats SA’s poverty data records that 37.9% of South Africans lived below the lower-bound poverty line in 2023. These figures describe a country where millions survive below the cost of a minimally dignified life while the old landowning class exports its own mythology to Washington and Moscow.
If Russia wants agricultural cooperation with South Africa, let it speak to the African majority who still wait for land, irrigation, equipment, seed systems, markets, training, agro-processing infrastructure and sovereign food production. Let Russia speak to Black farmers locked out of finance by banks built on colonial accumulation. Let Russia speak to rural women who feed families without title deeds, machinery or state support. Let Russia speak to young Black agricultural graduates who could build food sovereignty if anyone treated them as producers rather than statistics.
Those farmers would benefit from serious Russian cooperation. They need tractors, cold chains, grain storage, veterinary systems, dairy infrastructure, fertiliser partnerships, rail logistics, technology transfer and state-backed production agreements. They need land and capital. They do not need white refugees marketed as agricultural saviours.
The white genocide myth has never concerned truth. It works as a weapon. It yransforms land reform into racial persecution. It converts Black poverty into white victimhood. It presents apartheid’s beneficiaries into refugees from the democracy that refused to uproot their property power. It showcases crime, which devastates Black communities numerically and structurally, into a racial morality play centred on white fear.
Musk speaks from the position of a man shaped by apartheid entitlement. In the same IOL report, AFP notes that he rejected the fact of racial oppression under apartheid in an interview with CNN. A man who cannot recognise apartheid oppression now asks Russia to recognise white farmer persecution. A man who cannot see Black suffering sees white suffering everywhere. A man who belongs to the class history of apartheid privilege now wants to script himself and his people into refugee innocence.
No serious anti-imperial politics can accept this.
Kalinin’s closing rebuke lands exactly where it should. He said it was a shame that certain media outlets choose to “swim in shallow waters, chasing sensationalist clickbait” instead of focusing on economic development and ways in which South Africa and Russia can support each other in today’s harsh global economic climate.
He is right.
The story should concern agricultural cooperation, investment, sovereign partnership and development between two BRICS-aligned countries with a long historical relationship. Errol Musk’s racial refugee performance drags attention back to white fear, Western propaganda and the old colonial assumption that African political life must revolve around settler anxiety.
South Africa’s majority does not owe Errol Musk sympathy. Russia is not obliged to give him legitimacy. Black farmers cannot afford white grievance another century of deference.
Errol Musk has dragged a racist myth to Russia’s door. Russia should close that door politely, firmly and publicly. Then it should open another one for African food sovereignty, Black farmers, real agricultural cooperation and the living memory of a liberation alliance that Musk has no right to touch.
Errol Musk has dragged a racist myth to Russia’s door. Russia should close that door politely, firmly and publicly
