Speaking to the MailOnline, Errol said he’s proud to watch his son “accepting who he is”. He said: "I think for the first time Elon was accepting who he is. Until recently, he’s been a sort of character on a stage.
“When you come from South Africa, Lefties think you’re a Nazi. To succeed, you need to be accepted by them so my sons, [Elon and younger brother Kimbal, a hugely successful restaurateur], started to become these flaming liberals – turning away from South Africa and their roots, which included me. Finally, Elon was embracing his heritage and his destiny.”
In a separate interview, Errol explained how right-wing poltics were at the core of his family’s history. Elon’s maternal grandparents relocated from Canada to South Africa in the early 1900s as they knew the Afrikaner government was a stronghold of support for Nazism outside of Germany.
"They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff. But they didn’t know, I don’t think they knew what the Nazis were doing. But they [the grandparents] were in the German Nazi party but in Canada. And they sympathise with the Germans. "
The Afrikaners weren’t disenfranchised. The National Party held seats in parliament from shortly after its founding in 1914 and JBM Hertzog was prime minister from 1924-1939. The first prime minister of the Union of South Africa was Louis Botha, who was a Boer veteran.
The United Party was a centre-right party that was an alliance of Anglophone and Afrikaner whites as well as coloureds (n.b. for Americans: not what you’re likely thinking, so click the link). They lost the 1948 election to the far-right National Party, at which point the government of South Africa became dominated for 40 years by far-right Afrikaner grievance politics.
The most notable English-speaking member of parliament during apartheid was Helen Suzman.