I refuse to buy Tesla cars because of Elon and his background of profiting from the mining of emeralds in apartheid Zambia. Elon has worked hard to erase his origin from the minds of potential customers but I could never forget. Elon is also the reason no company will buy Tesla. Elon would have to be all the way out of the picture.
Apartheid was a political ideology that did not happen in Zambia. The very existence of a place called “Zambia” only came about after their colonial independence. “Apartheid Zambia” is not and was not a thing and is a stupid phrase to anyone who knows the history of the area.
Furthermore, Musk fled South Africa in order to avoid being conscripted into the apartheid SA army.
He’s a person with rough edges, but tieing him in with apartheid is a bit much.
Social apartheid is de facto segregation, no laws are strictly necessary, but often support it. It’s most prominent aspect is seen in the division of white/black capital. Zambia is very much a country with vastly wealthier white demographic.
“ On the eve of independence in 1964, 2 percent of Zambia’s 3.5 million people were white, but they controlled everything in a system resembling apartheid.”
The point is that Zambia is a place white colonizers have been exploiting forever and the Musk family certainly has been doing business in south east Africa for some time.
It’s absolutely apples to apples. Don’t back track now. You proposed to treat the man differently due to his line of ancestry. That’s racist.
I’ve personally experienced this line of “ethnic expectations.” All it does is to put the target in a box marked “probably racist” for no other reason than the conditions of their birth.
Everyone comes from a lineage that committed great violence in the competition for resources vis-a-vis other groups. If your ancestors did not do that, you would not be alive today.
Let us not forget the Zambians, themselves foreign Bantu invaders who genocided the native Khoison population (but perhaps the Khoisons genocided who was there before them).
In fact, the Xhosa tribe (a Bantu tribe famous for the clicks in their language, and for producing Nelson Mandela) got those clicks from the Khoisan tribes (the original clickers) by committing a massive genocide and taking all their land. The linguist John McWhorter gives an explanation of how this happens in his Great Courses series.
I've seen this "Elon comes from stolen emerald money" story a lot, but as best I can tell, the following is true:
- Elon's father claims in the mid-80s he bought a partial stake in an emerald mine in Zambia. There is no paper trail of this ownership, so we are taking his dad at his word here.
- Zambia was already independent at the time and in no way an apartheid state. The ruling party was ideologically socialist and African nationalist.
- This partial ownership of the mine obviously did not make Elon a super wealthy kid, as he moved to Canada for university, gradudated with $100K in student debt, and according to roommates and friends at the time, he was notoriously frugal.
So it seems like even if Elon's father is telling the truth here and the mine even existed, that wealth didn't seem to be significant enough to give Elon a huge boost when he came to North America.
There are definitely a ton of things to criticize Elon for, but I am not sure the emeralds is one of them.
