A Letter from Africa with Simon Kuper

The David McWilliams Podcast

David McWilliams

News & Politics

4.6 • 643 Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week I'm in South Africa on a book and speaking tour and am chatting at the Franschoek Literary Festival, so we are all South Africa today. A country of contradictions, rich in resources, vibrant in culture, yet S.A. is held back by inequality, corruption, and the long shadow of apartheid. In this episode, we explore its uneasy present and remarkable past: from Mandela’s legacy to Elon Musk’s childhood, from empire and race to why Donald Trump has fixated on white Afrikaners. We travel through Cape Town and Johannesburg, unpacking it all with FT journalist Simon Kuper, and along the way, we encounter pencil tests, Springboks, slabs of the Berlin Wall, and the political ghosts of the Cold War. Is South Africa being used, once again, as a pawn in someone else’s game?

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Transcript

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