This is a narrative I’ve been seeing crop up in some radlib places. Is it at all true? I thought the US backed SA pretty extensively mostly. Anyone have any good sources on this claim?
The narrative is that Musk has some long term grudge with USAID over this.
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USAID’s work in South Africa was an attempt to paper over the obviously communist and worker led anti-apartheid movement and take undue credit for ending apartheid. If you look it up, defenders of USAID love to say that they “laid the groundwork for ending apartheid” and “were an important part of ending apartheid” which is obviously just racist nonsense. No amount of US support or opposition would have been needed to ensure success or hinder the movement, it was an African movement by and for Africans whose time had come.
As you can tell, their role in being “anti-apartheid” was in line with their soft power goals and typical scope of work, but in this case since it was clear that they weren’t going to get their people in charge, they had to look like they were in the right side in order to legitimate themselves to the anti-apartheid movement that would be taking power.
Thanks for this detail. So much of the info I came across fits within this, where there is a big deal made out of the Reagan veto being overturned, Bush senior ‘changing course from Reagan’, etc. But when I skimmed the wiki page, I didn’t even see a reference to US being any significant force in ending the apartheid regime.
