Dr. Premesh Lalu of the University of the Western Cape (UWC).

As Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US elections continues to reverberate both domestically and internationally, it is essential to confront the complex web of authoritarian politics, resurgent racism and nativism, technological power, and so-called “anarcho-capitalism” that the second Trump administration is bringing into public view. In this context, many observers have noted that key figures such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have deep roots in South Africa, suggesting that their influence on this new wave of authoritarianism may represent a new chapter in the story of South African apartheid.

To explore some of these issues in relation to South Africa’s turbulent history, I reached out to Premesh Lalu, who is the SA-UK Digital Humanities Chair in Culture and Technics at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) of the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa. In addition to being the former director of the CHR, Lalu is the author of Undoing Apartheid (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2022).

JC: We’re all trying to navigate this rapidly changing global scene right now: Trumpism, rising authoritarianism, genocide, climate crisis, the rise of AI, a range of resistance movements, and so much more. You’ve spent much of your career working through the idea of apartheid as a way to understand social realities. Could you start by explaining how you understand the concept itself?

PL: Apartheid existed long before it became a political reality as a state project of population control. Its early traces could be found in attempts to foster a cheap labour and transnational migrant labour system in South African gold and diamond mines before and after the Second World War. Its emergence as a state form was accompanied by a claim to solving liberalism’s inability to resolve the problem of differences based on nineteenth-century fictions of race, ethnicity, gender, and class by a twisted logic of exacerbating those differences.

“We should guard against giving Musk and Thiel and their fellow-travelers too much credit. We would do better to understand apartheid. In the PayPal Mafia, we are dealing with bloated egos, not unlike those who were the beneficiaries of apartheid in South Africa, among whom privilege passes as knowledge. What they possess is a false confidence conferred by an accident of history. ”

As a name invented to describe this political project, its meaning has shifted over time and across a spectrum of biological, cultural, natural, historical, territorial, and behavioural claims to negotiate the changing labour demands of capitalism. Some have claimed that it drew inspiration from the apparent failure of integration in the post-Reconstruction period in the USA, while seeking new models of labour efficiency to maximise profits for a minority who were given sole jurisdiction over the political sphere. As such it was marked by severe inequities that were policed through both extreme violence and more subtle but equally devastating psychic consequences in everyday life. The latter had its sources in the emerging and short-lived pseudo-science of psychophysics or psychotechnics in the early 1900s.

Apartheid replaced the political categories of individual and society with a patterning of salaried masses. With the benefit of experimental psychology, a sensory order began to take shape in everyday life that allowed for the modernisation of ideas of race after the demise of slavery. It also helped to re-define the labour regimes in both South Africa and the post-Antebellum US South at the turn of the twentieth-century - a feature that connected South African critics such as Sol Plaatjie, S.M. Molema, and Charlotte Maxeke with W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington in the USA in a trans-Atlantic exchange on the problem of race.

In South Africa, the field of psychotechnics was a mechanism used to distinguish between the so-called poor white question and what was officially known as the native question. The distinction between the two framings of population revealed itself in the introduction of a programme of job reservation, which promoted certain forms of employment for white constituencies while reserving lower-level jobs with extreme physical demands, for black workers.

Housing of gold mine workers, Johannesburg, 1954. (Photo: Touring Club Italiano, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

To configure this level of control, apartheid resembles a particular way of organising power around two poles – grand apartheid and petty apartheid. Grand apartheid was about social engineering. Petty apartheid was an effort to shape everyday life, one aimed at provoking war of racialised and ethnic parts that would summon the resources of a technocratic state to exercise control over feuding parts. Apartheid gets its name partly from the sciences of parts and wholes, or what in Germany was called Gestalt theory.

Overcoming apartheid means undoing the invention of difference serving narrow political interests to the ends of surpassing its deeply troubling manipulation of scientific reason that is the shared inheritance of all species on this planet.

I know this is a tremendously complicated issue, but could you summarize for us what we know about the end of formal apartheid in South Africa and what has come afterwards? Is it just a different form of apartheid? What has changed, and what has not?

Apartheid has been defeated for sure. What has returned globally in the person of Elon Musk is the farce that is the flipside of its tragedy crafted by its main ideologue, Hendrik Verwoerd. As we put the final nail in the coffin of apartheid, the exhaustion of enduring apartheid led to complacency. We seemed unable to ask what it would mean to live without the burden of racial, ethnic, gender and class oppression on this side of the grave of apartheid. Defeating apartheid was one thing. Shifting its structural inheritance is quite another.

Premesh Lalu’s book, *Undoing Apartheid*, published in 2022 by Polity.

As I attempted to show in the opening pages of my book, Undoing Apartheid, Mandela emerged from prison to the euphoric cheers of a population who had found themselves encrusted by centuries of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. As he insinuates in the title of his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, the task was not simply to overcome apartheid, but to search for the further shore of freedom. In Mandela’s generous form of thinking, post-apartheid freedom would have to serve as a gift to the world.

South Africa’s transition is a complex political affair that will be studied for decades because of what it tells us about the end of the Cold War and the world that was to follow. At a very basic level, the speed of the transition and the negotiation process left many unable to grasp the full extent of what it means to be thrust into a global world order after years of isolation. The global movement of boycott and divestment from apartheid South Africa, definitely shortened the life of apartheid as a state project.

As a former political detainee in the 1980s, I understood very well what that solidarity looked like. It is beautifully captured in a piece of music called Weeping by a band called Bright Blue in the 1980s later re-recorded by Vusi Mahlasela. The song reminds us that apartheid also deliberately closed itself off from the world to enable the brutalisation of its population. Apartheid’s deliberate policy of isolationism began with its departure from the gold standard and declaration of a Republic in the 1960s that provided a cover for its deceptions and lies, not to mention torture and humiliation of a majority population, was abruptly lifted in the 1990s. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established as the rot of apartheid was exposed. But the term “reconciliation” could not keep to the speed with which the transition unfolded.

A young Charlotte Maxeke. (Photo: South African History Online, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

To engage in a structural and conceptual shift from such a complex made-up political project such as apartheid required a process of affirming the cultural and political intellectual histories that were pivotal to defeating apartheid. South Africa’s mineral revolutions gave rise to one of the earliest anti-colonial political movements on the continent.

This was a tradition of thought that had deep connections to intellectuals of race in the USA. In fact, it resulted in the first industrial schools of John Langalibalele Dube, a student of the Tuskegee Institute, and the campaign for education for girls led by Charlotte Maxeke, a graduate of Wilberforce College in Ohio. The speed of the transition meant that this deep understanding and effort to rise to the challenge of a twentieth-century racial order was unavailable as a resource to build a concept of post-apartheid freedom. At the heart of this early intellectual tradition were debates about the meaning of law, power, education, and technology as these defined changes to a racial order.

If we want to understand what has shifted in the exercise of power in our times, not only in South Africa but globally, we would do well to pass through the intellectual traditions that formed around the critique of apartheid. It would also be important to ask, with the benefit of hindsight, what was unforeseen in the critique of apartheid. I believe that is where we have landed in contemporary South Africa. As some of us have suggested, it may be where we need to set to work on building a post-partition world after apartheid.

As you know, there is now a long tradition of analysis using the category of apartheid to reference and explain all sorts of situations around the world. As far back as 2007, for example, Naomi Klein was referring to Israel’s burgeoning security industry in terms of “selling fences to an apartheid planet.” Many others have written about what they call the “new global apartheid.” How do you feel about this sort of analytical framework? And what are some of the emerging global realities that you would locate within the long history of apartheid?

Apartheid, as we like to say, was global to begin with. Naming particularly virulent forms of power that instrumentalise difference to the ends of political partition of course deserves the appellation apartheid, especially because it serves as a watchword. But we must be careful not to become complacent with this deceptive term, a made up word that for all intents and purposes conflated myth and reason with devastating consequences for the human condition. In other words, we should not see in the word merely a basis for comparativism or analogy.

Apartheid needs to be narrated as a mode of power, one which draws on an eclectic array of political perspectives and knowledge projects to create the illusion of coherence when in fact it masks a truer desire for chaos. How we narrate the story of apartheid as racism’s last word, but as the French philosopher Jacques Derrida reminded us, the last of many, is now more pressing than simply naming the appearance of difference as an example of apartheid.

Can you bring this into the headlines a bit for us? For example, where are we seeing attempts to “instrumentalise difference to the ends of political partition”? And where are we seeing attempts to “create the illusion of coherence” as a way to “mask a truer desire for chaos”? In other words, where and how is this happening in our world right now?

The experience of apartheid may be a useful point of departure for understanding the nature of authoritarianism currently unfolding globally. Apartheid depended on systems of classification to establish order in a socially fragmented society inherited from the periods of colonisation and industrialisation. This classificatory system was not entirely decided by the rule of law, although in the early years of apartheid, it was the most explicit expression of the making of a racially exclusive state.

With the help of a new science of psychophysics in the USA in the early 1900s, and later psychotechnics in South Africa, society as a whole was turned into a laboratory for extending a sensory order to everyday life. I believe what we are witnessing today is the coming to fruition of the early beginnings of a sensory order, which for all intents and purposes is a new form of authoritarianism.

Alt-right members preparing to enter Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia, holding Nazi, Confederate, and Gadsden "Don't Tread on Me" flags in August 2017. (Photo: Anthony Crider, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

It is important to note that The Sensory Order (1952) is also the name of a book by Friedrich Hayek, a major theorist of neoliberalism, that originally appeared in the form of an essay written in 1920. Broadly speaking, under the sensory order the responsibility for classification is no longer entirely the prerogative of the state. Hayek proposed that the capacity to classify was already available in each individual’s innate cognitive functioning. The appeal to this level of classification meant taking a key function of the modern state in governing populations away from the state.

“I believe there is a valuable lesson to learn about how the human has evolved with technology in the story of apartheid that may explain how we got to where we are today. Beyond those who wield technology to the ends of destroying socialities and political infrastructures, we may yet find in the current expansion of technology a reason to orient the senses towards healthier relations to technology.”

The motivating factor in this argument towards a sensory order was economic, where pricing in the market was passed on to the consumer’s cognitive ability. You can see how the whole edifice of institution and state was short circuited by this logic to reach the market before there could be any political, moral, or ethical interference in the exercise of choice. The whole aim of the sensory order was to lay claim to the idea of consumer sovereignty. To shift from state to individual required erasing as far as possible institutional mediation in the decisions we make as humans, not to mention the need assigned to education for training the senses. This shift was accelerated by the expansion of technologies of communication and control in the late twentieth-century.

Apartheid may have been the first experiment of a sensory order. Through this sensory order, it transformed race from a state project to a decision made by individuals in everyday life. The result was not order but the constant threat of race war.

The effects of this short-circuiting of the institutional mechanisms that have organised human relations for better or worse, and its replacement with mechanised forms of control, much like under apartheid, has not reduced the conflict between state and population. The new authoritarianism has gathered a series of names to describe this conflict - anarcho-capitalism, techno-feudalism, planetary governmentality - each of which tell a truth about the chaos that has been unleashed on the world by a break up of the interplay of institution and interpretation that mediated the making of the modern political and cultural system. Apartheid was the source specifically of anarcho-capitalism, which in the USA is attributed in part to the so-called “PayPal Mafia,” some of whom developed their anti-institutional attitudes in the repressive militarised conditions of whites-only education in Southern Africa.

The issue of the “PayPal Mafia” has been generating increasing attention since the US elections, for obvious reasons. In the Guardian, for example, Chris McGreal recently wrote about the apartheid roots of Musk and Peter Thiel. Interestingly, he writes that Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, “was the Canadian leader of a fringe political movement originating in the US, Technocracy Incorporated, that advocated abolishing democracy in favor of government by elite technicians but which took on overtones of fascism with its uniforms and salutes.” This leads me to wonder about the relationship between what you’ve described as the “sensory order” of apartheid and the contemporary forces propelling us into a post-human future. As Quinn Slobodian recently noted, the so-called “radical accelerationists” who now have access to state power in the US claim to be aiming at a complete demolition of the modern idea of sovereignty. We know that many of the people who have embraced this vision are heavily invested in AI. How do you see these developments in relation to the long trajectory of apartheid that you have been sketching for us?

We should guard against giving Musk and Thiel and their fellow-travelers too much credit. We would do better to understand apartheid. In the PayPal Mafia, we are dealing with bloated egos, not unlike those who were the beneficiaries of apartheid in South Africa, among whom privilege passes as knowledge. What they possess is a false confidence conferred by an accident of history.

A protest sign in Boston MA on February 5 2025 depicts Donald Trump and Elon Musk kissing. (Photo: Mmangan333, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Mostly, those who now profess to be against bureaucracy are involved in a deceptive plot. In South Africa, their anti-institutionalism comes in the wake of the protectionism that had been offered white South Africans since the 1920s in South Africa. Think about job reservation, the protectionism of the Pact Government in South Africa, or the Native Urban Areas Act of 1924, and introduction of politics of the colour bar. So, the people who today seek to liquidate state and institutions are the beneficiaries of the racialised forms of these very structures in the 1920s. I am saying that Elon Musk is a product of affirmative action.

Bust of H.F. Verwoerd in Meyerton, Gauteng, South Africa in 2008. The bust was removed in 2011. (Photo: Ossewa, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

When state bureaucracy offers a technocratic advantage on the road to securing privilege, then it is not only admissible but cherished. When bureaucracy gets in the way of unfettered advantage, then it becomes a problem. In this respect, the anarcho-capitalists, the name I prefer for the likes of Musk and Thiel, are not very different from the ideologues of apartheid in South Africa. Hendrik Verwoerd, for example, is identified in history as a pragmatist in his political orientation, a technocrat who employed an empirical science to govern populations. Seldom mentioned is the fact his so-called pragmatism was aimed at benefiting an ethnic minority of white South Africans who were bound to his patronage network. But the deceptive plots were less about the biographies of the individuals who commanded a racial order than the mechanisms they used in what was ultimately a deceptive plot.

If at one level, the crafting of a politics of privilege relied on myth-making, the order of servitude was determined by a hyper-rational strategy of social engineering. One has to begin to challenge this kind of arbitrary and ambiguous authority by suspecting it of being empty and vacuous. When we see a figure like Hendrik Verwoerd as a lab technician, rather than as an architect of apartheid, we are better placed to understand what became of the state under apartheid. To diminish the ego complex surrounding the purveyors of the liquidation of state and institution, immediately exposes the magical thinking that binds and upholds their privilege.

Put simply, chipping away at the self-proclaimed boyhood heroism of the billionaire class exposes how they have respectively turned science fiction into a business plan. To make sense of this convenient and confusing mix of reason and unreason in our times, it would help to dig a little deeper into the history of apartheid.

Beyond its mythic claims, we would do well to understand the sources of its scientific claims. These lie in the disciplines of Psychophysics and psychotechnics as I was saying earlier. Here Verwoerd was influenced by the work of American psychologist, Hugo Munsterberg, a major proponent of psychotechnics whose work focused on the achievement of labour efficiency. The German Sociologist, Siegfried Krakauer suggests that one of the unintended consequences of this science of excessive measurement was the creation of the idea of the salaried class, that is a class identifiable by consumption rather than production.

The long process of turning workers into consumers redefined the meaning of culture, which in turn spurred technological expansion to ensure faster access to the market. Political sovereignty was being replaced by consumer sovereignty. The expansion of technological resources, its automation through the science of cybernetics, and the invention of the internet have each had a profound effect on the nature of work and consumption. The revolution in communication has now transformed the salaried class into immaterial labour who are jettisoned to ever-more technical forms of life. Rather than only being consumers of goods, the populations of the world have been mostly turned into consumers of what technology has to offer.

“If you think of apartheid as a self-perpetuating machine staffed by technocrats narrated as a science fiction, then what we have learnt in South Africa is that undoing its machinery will have to properly understand how capital, race, and knowledge came to be suffused with a forms of speculation that now threaten the existence of our planet.”

To this end, the very idea of a state and public sphere, with their complex web of institutions and educational and aesthetic functions, are rendered obsolete so that the control and manipulation of society can take place in relative obscurity. This new order of technopoly or technocracy depends on diminishing human capacities of memory, judgment, and imagination that allow individuals to see themselves as a part of community and the world. If we recall what Charlie Chaplin predicted many years back, we are reduced to machine men and machine women, without recourse to feelings, and little room to create a coherent image of the world. We have been turned into mere circuits, receptors of signals, in a political game that pronounces bureaucracy only to effect more bureaucracy to increasingly devastating effect.

I believe there is a valuable lesson to learn about how the human has evolved with technology in the story of apartheid that may explain how we got to where we are today. Beyond those who wield technology to the ends of destroying socialities and political infrastructures, we may yet find in the current expansion of technology a reason to orient the senses towards healthier relations to technology. The example comes from the field of Artificial Intelligence, a field that has become the source of major anxiety and concern.

To put it simply, this recent iteration of the digital should not simply be measured as a balance sheet of additions and subtractions. Perhaps, a better approach would be to ask which other forms of sentient intelligence, beyond that ascribed to humans, would be necessary to care for our planet. Is it possible that other conceptions of intelligence, perhaps in animal and plant life, may very well offer us a better prospect than those who seem hell-bent on trapping us in a science fiction that has technology as an endpoint. This expanded sense of intelligence may help to surpass Musk and company’s boyhood fantasies of heroic escape into outer space in their science fiction.

More than the phantasmagoria of this science fiction we should turn to the magical realism that served millions who have had to deal with oppressive conditions of imperial orders in history. Magical realism may be exactly what will allow us to eke out a more generous form of life through an affirmation of humanity. If science fiction leads to an apocalyptic sensibility on which oligarchy thrives, magical realism combines science with the specifically human attributes of memory, judgment, and imagination to withstand the speed of machines.

If you think of apartheid as a self-perpetuating machine staffed by technocrats narrated as a science fiction, then what we have learnt in South Africa is that undoing its machinery will have to properly understand how capital, race, and knowledge came to be suffused with a forms of speculation that now threaten the existence of our planet.