The Totally Very Real White Genocide in South Africa with Dan Corder and Eugene Khoza [VIDEO]

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Totally Very Real White Genocide in South Africa"

Podcast Information:

• Title: What Now? with Trevor Noah
• Host/Producer: Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions
• Description: Trevor Noah engages in candid conversations with celebrities, thought leaders, and friends about contemporary issues. His discussions are marked by radical candor, authentic exchanges, and insightful reflections.
• Episode: The Totally Very Real White Genocide in South Africa with Dan Corder and Eugene Koza
• Release Date: June 26, 2025

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1. Introduction to the Debate on White Genocide

The episode delves into the contentious and highly debated topic of "white genocide" in South Africa. Trevor Noah is joined by guests Dan Corder and Eugene Koza to dissect the claims and explore the socio-political landscape that fuels such narratives.

Notable Quote:

• Trevor Noah [04:25]: "But I think that's the perfect setting for a conversation about genocide. About not just genocide. Not just genocide, guys, but a white genocide."

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2. Debunking the Myth of White Genocide

Dan Corder provides an in-depth analysis of how the notion of white genocide has been fabricated and disseminated. He attributes the spread of this myth to opportunistic individuals and divisive tactics employed on social media platforms and conservative media outlets.

Key Points:

• The concept has been propagated by "grifters" and "snake oil salesmen" in South Africa.
• Influential figures like Owen Strutz manipulate data to suggest escalating racial tensions without explicitly stating it constitutes genocide.
• Social media, particularly platforms like Twitter (now rebranded as X), play a crucial role in amplifying these false narratives.
• The involvement of high-profile personalities, including Elon Musk and Donald Trump, has globalized the discourse, making it a prominent issue in international discussions.

Notable Quotes:

• Dan Corder [07:05]: "Most of this cuck has taken place on the dark place formerly known as Twitter. Like aided and abetted by Elon Musk."
• Dan Corder [09:11]: "White economic empowerment is our history, it's a historical project that continues today."

---

3. The Role of Social Media and Influencers

The conversation highlights how social media algorithms and influential figures contribute to the spread of misinformation. Dan Corder criticizes the role of public figures in legitimizing unfounded claims, leading to widespread misconceptions.

Key Points:

• The amplification of white genocide rhetoric by platforms influenced by figures like Elon Musk.
• The strategy of using subtle insinuations rather than outright statements to manipulate public perception.
• The endorsement of these narratives by political leaders, notably during Trump's administration, which further entrenched the myth globally.

Notable Quotes:

• Dan Corder [09:11]: "Trump and the right wing love a white victim. All of their immigration stuff in America is about being terrified of the brown person."
• Dan Corder [10:04]: "There's never been... there's no white genocide happening right now."

---

4. Historical Context: Apartheid and Its Aftermath

The discussion transitions to South Africa's apartheid history, examining the enduring socio-economic disparities and the role of government policies in shaping contemporary issues.

Key Points:

• The apartheid government's systematic economic empowerment of white South Africans through extensive welfare programs.
• The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a pivotal moment in South Africa's transition to democracy, emphasizing forgiveness without sufficient restitution.
• Ongoing systemic issues, including corruption, inadequate service delivery, and persistent economic inequality, that continue to affect the majority black population.

Notable Quotes:

• Dan Corder [24:24]: "What need to happen is to say, hey, we did this deal at the end of apartheid because we wanted to find out what was going on."
• Dan Corder [36:00]: "The TRC first phase was beautiful, but since then, victims who were awarded financial restitution have not received it."

---

5. Media Bias and Racial Stereotypes

Trevor Noah and his guests critique the South African media for its disproportionate focus on white suffering while neglecting the ongoing struggles of black South Africans. They argue that this bias perpetuates racial stereotypes and hinders genuine empathy and understanding.

Key Points:

• Mainstream media's obsession with white victims versus the invisibility of black suffering and casualties.
• The use of coded language that obfuscates the racial undertones of certain issues, such as equating "crime" with blackness.
• The impact of media representation on public perception and the reinforcement of harmful stereotypes.

Notable Quotes:

• Dan Corder [105:25]: "The mainstream media obsesses over white suffering in a way that they don't over black suffering."
• Eugene Koza [107:33]: "We need a systematic solution for a systematic problem."

---

6. Crime, Socio-Economic Disparities, and Their Impact

The episode explores the multifaceted nature of crime in South Africa, emphasizing that while crime is indiscriminate, its impact is disproportionately felt by the black population due to entrenched socio-economic disparities.

Key Points:

• Crime affects all races, but systemic inequalities make black South Africans more vulnerable.
• The privatization of services like security has left certain communities, particularly black women, highly vulnerable.
• Misconceptions among white South Africans about crime being primarily a racial issue rather than a socio-economic one.

Notable Quotes:

• Dan Corder [62:00]: "The least protected in the most destitute conditions are black women."
• Dan Corder [69:30]: "The effect of the system is that you experience it as a race attack."

---

7. Unity Through Shared Adversity: The Case of ESKOM

Despite deep-rooted divisions, shared challenges like the nationwide power outages caused by ESKOM present opportunities for unity among South Africans from different racial backgrounds.

Key Points:

• ESKOM's failures serve as a common grievance that transcends racial lines, fostering collective frustration.
• The shared experience of struggling with basic services highlights the universal impact of systemic corruption and inefficiency.
• Such shared challenges can bridge societal divides and promote a sense of national solidarity.

Notable Quotes:

• Dan Corder [78:00]: "It's a common agreement that the ANC has failed us in terms of service delivery."
• Trevor Noah [79:30]: "ESKOM has made every South African experience the same thing, regardless of the color of their skin."

---

8. The Influence of Sports and National Pride

Sports, particularly teams like the Springboks (rugby) and Bafana Bafana (soccer), play a significant role in shaping national identity and unity. Successes and failures of these teams have profound psychological and emotional impacts on the nation's morale.

Key Points:

• Sports victories can unify disparate groups, fostering national pride and a shared sense of achievement.
• Conversely, failures or poor performances are often scapegoated and can exacerbate societal tensions.
• The symbolic role of sports in reflecting and influencing the nation's socio-political climate.

Notable Quotes:

• Dan Corder [87:05]: "If you look at South Africa's story, our worst moments, Democratic South Africa, our worst moments happen when Bafana Bafana is doing its worst."
• Trevor Noah [90:00]: "When Bafana Bafana loses, they label it as crime."

---

9. The Role of Individuals in National Discourse

Trevor Noah and Dan Corder reflect on their responsibilities and the pressures of being public figures addressing sensitive national issues. They emphasize the importance of honest dialogue and the challenges of overcoming societal division.

Key Points:

• The burden of representing and speaking for a divided nation.
• The necessity of collective effort and individual courage in addressing systemic problems.
• The impact of personal narratives and transparency in fostering genuine understanding and change.

Notable Quotes:

• Dan Corder [91:04]: "You're like Captain America. Because you are our guy who went to the world and showed America what it was like to look at America from outside of it."
• Trevor Noah [93:50]: "You forget every little piece of the puzzle that came together to make you who you are."

---

10. Moving Forward: Solutions and Call to Action

In the concluding segments, the hosts discuss potential pathways toward reconciliation and systemic change. They advocate for increased historical education, media reform, and collaborative efforts to bridge racial and socio-economic divides.

Key Points:

• Enhancing historical curricula to ensure younger generations understand apartheid's legacy and current inequalities.
• Reforming media practices to fairly represent the struggles of all racial groups.
• Promoting initiatives that encourage meaningful interactions and empathy among South Africans of different backgrounds.

Notable Quotes:

• Dan Corder [101:07]: "South Africa's media needs to change to care about black suffering properly."
• Trevor Noah [106:54]: "We are saying what South Africans are not privileged enough to say. And that's one way where the middle class and the Mandela experience or experiment can be used when in unison."

---

Conclusion

"The Totally Very Real White Genocide in South Africa" episode of "What Now? with Trevor Noah" provides a critical examination of the myths surrounding racial tensions in South Africa. Through candid dialogue, the hosts and guests challenge prevailing narratives, shedding light on historical injustices, media biases, and the socio-economic realities that continue to shape the nation's landscape. The conversation underscores the necessity for honest discourse, systemic reform, and collective empathy to foster a truly unified and equitable South Africa.

Transcript

[Trevor Noah]

This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. Here's one reason I think Apple Card is good for your wallet. It's designed to support your financial well being. It's a no fee credit card that offers smart payment suggestions to help you pay off your balance faster. Plus you can get daily cash back on every purchase every day so you can stress less about money and focus more on enjoying life. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from 18.24% to 28.49% based on creditworthiness rates as of January 1, 2025. Terms and more at applecard.com no guys@ my pick and pay, they know me as the kid who used to shoplift. Do you know what I mean? So at that pick and pay when I walk past they're like, well cash.

[Eugene Koza]

Padel, I hope this time you come in, you can extradite this man. Not a crime.

[Trevor Noah]

I saw Trevor. No. Even Trevor Noah.

[Dan]

Even Trevor.

[Trevor Noah]

He admitted criminal. Used to be a criminal in South Africa all the time. I wonder if we could do something. We could probably do something. We got to look at.

[Eugene Koza]

Cash, do your job.

[Trevor Noah]

Do your thing. Cash, do your thing. He admitted it on camera. He admitted it. This is what now with Trevor Noah. This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. Here's one reason I think Apple Card is good for your wallet. It's designed to support your financial well being. It's a no fee credit card that offers smart payment suggestions to help you pay off your balance faster. Plus you can get daily cash back on every purchase every day so you can stress less about money and focus more on enjoying life. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from 18.24% to 28 point based on creditworthiness rates as of January 1, 2025. Terms and [e-mail] this episode is brought to you by SurveyMonkey. Picture this. You're about to launch your new product or you're trying to improve a customer's experience and you need to know what people think. So how would you do that? SurveyMonkey is the easy, powerful way to get the answers you need. We're talking AI powered and next level genius mode. All you have to do is type your idea in a little box and boom. It builds the whole survey for you. That way you get to ask questions the way a survey scientist would, and they're really smart. Plus, SurveyMonkey doesn't just show you the responses. It uses powerful AI to dig in deep, find patterns, and spot trends so you can go ahead and make decisions with speed and confidence. So whether you're a business owner, a marketing manager, or work in HR, go get real insights with SurveyMonkey. Head to SurveyMonkey.com results for every conversation. He leans in. Eugene, I'm telling you, bro, we need to make that show. He leans in. Come on.

[Eugene Koza]

Game.

[Trevor Noah]

That's all. He investigates all the claims. What? He leans in. Eugene Koza is local detective.

[Eugene Koza]

How much? How many do we need to report these funds?

[Dan]

I'm also sensing that Eugene only asks questions of two words. How much?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, that's. That's.

[Dan]

Eugene. How many?

[Trevor Noah]

That's.

[Dan]

Eugene win last. It's just.

[Trevor Noah]

That's when you get in. That's when you get in. Dan, welcome. Welcome to the podcast. I. I apologize that you met me on a day that I'm with Eugene, because it means anything can happen here.

[Dan]

Good.

[Trevor Noah]

But I think that's the perfect setting for a conversation about genocide. About not just genocide. Not just genocide, guys, but a white genocide.

[Dan]

The white one.

[Trevor Noah]

A white genocide.

[Dan]

The Woolies genocide, which, as we know.

[Trevor Noah]

Is the west genocide.

[Eugene Koza]

Of all you know of which, how many have you committed this week?

[Trevor Noah]

Me?

[Eugene Koza]

Apparently, there's a lot of them in this country.

[Trevor Noah]

So, personally, I always start my week with a genocide or two. All South Africans. This is what we do. You know, my father always used to tell me, trevor, you must do genocides.

[Dan]

Sorry, you're Swiss, Father, you know.

[Trevor Noah]

Dan, don't spoil the jokes. Why are you spoiling the jokes, Dan? Now I have to reveal to everyone that my father was a white man who lived in South Africa and loved it. Damn it, Dan, you're spoiling the narrative.

[Dan]

Dan. I thought it would have been, like, an interesting narrative. And the Swiss white man is also committing my genocide.

[Trevor Noah]

This guy. You're revealing my backstory, Dan.

[Dan]

Oh, no one read the book.

[Trevor Noah]

No one.

[Dan]

Everyone read the book.

[Eugene Koza]

But.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay, so you know what? This is what I found particularly strange about this conversation. A lot of the time, I'll have a conversation with people, and we're trying to, like, figure something out moving forwards. I feel like for this conversation, we're trying to figure something else. We're trying to figure something out backwards. Right? Because I'll just put people on the timeline. So I. I know a lot of people in America A lot of people in the uk, et cetera, et cetera are going, what is happening in South Africa? A lot of people, like, we heard there's a genocide. We heard that white people are being mass slaughtered. There's the whole thing. So then the whole world woke up. So you guys live in South Africa? I was in New York. Then I saw the story start bubbling. So obviously I follow South African news. But you know, there's stories where it's like, guys, they don't come, like Eskom doesn't come. The story doesn't actually come to America. Right. This story started overlapping and slowly you started to realize that it became part of the news, like international news. Okay. Then it was interesting. International journalists stepped in and said, we want to get to the bottom of what's happening. Cause how could a genocide be happening under our noses? And we don't know about it, right? So the, the BBC, cnn, you name it. Yeah, I was even getting requests, people emailing me, hi, Trevor, are you safe? We heard there's a genocide.

[Eugene Koza]

I didn't ask if you're safe.

[Trevor Noah]

No, no one asked if I was safe. Cuz they're like, we know where you live.

[Dan]

It would be incredibly funny if Facebook asked you to check in as a white person each day about whether you were still breathing. That would be very good.

[Trevor Noah]

But what was interesting was as quickly as it blew up internationally, it dropped off. I saw conversations everywhere. One of them was, obviously, you went on Piers Morgan.

[Eugene Koza]

I went to my house.

[Trevor Noah]

You were in your house. And I don't know, maybe we start with this. Were you shocked, Dan, when you go on Piers Morgan and you almost. You're coming there to talk about the fact that there is no genocide. There's a whole panel of other people, you know, who are like half of them are there to say there is a genocide. And then they go, they go, there is no genocide. So maybe that's where I wanna start. Like, how is it that there's a conversation that's going all over the world about a thing that isn't actually happening? And I don't mean like isn't happening. Like some people feel it is, some people isn't. No, it isn't actually happening at all. So how did this start?

[Dan]

Yeah, so I think that over the last 10 years, a raft of genuinely very talented grifters in South Africa have snake oil salesman this idea without saying it themselves on the last step. So someone like owenstrutz is very clever. He will twist the data and decontextualize facts to make it look like something particularly bad is happening. And then he will go on Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson, and he'll never say there's a white genocide. He'll stop just before and then let people fill in where he's directing it to. Similarly, most of this cuck has taken place on the dark place formerly known as Twitter. Like aided and abetted by Elon Musk. And on Twitter, these big established public voices who need to have a degree of tetheredness to reality stop just short of saying this is the worst thing ever. Like with these race laws. They stopped just short of saying there are more race laws than apartheid, therefore it's worse than apartheid. But then they let the anonymous bot troll campaigns on Twitter, which are sometimes just useful idiots, but sometimes paid for campaigners, jump to the last level. So there was this X account called Twatterbas. There still is. And Elon Musk reposted a lot of his stuff. Twatterbas was just lying about a bunch of things. But what happened was the public figures did the groundwork to allow the lunatics to then lie on top of what they were saying. And then it ended up being Musk repeating and sharing these kinds of nonsense ideas all the way into the White House. And then when Trump went executive order time, that's when it became around the world.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, that's when it became. That's when it became.

[Dan]

Because frankly, I just feel like Trump and his right wing love a white victim. All of their immigration stuff in America is about be terrified of the brown person, be terrified of the non English speaking person. They love a white victim. But it's hard to find white victims, guys. The history of the world makes it pretty hard to find white victims. But if somebody could come along and concoct the down, downtrodden, tragic, in danger, white person beleaguered in South Africa and we can save them, then that ticks all of the boxes for that kind of campaign. And I don't know if you noticed, but it seemed like every single time for about two months, Trump had a bad day. He then tweeted about South Africa. We were the punching bag to change the narrative, to distract away, to misdirect from the other stuff that was going on in his life that would look dangerous. So I think that we were useful fodder. The way that's like our, our diplomat Ibram Rasool and then special envoy Ngabisi Jonas suddenly got covered by Breitbart News and Fox News. They were turned into these dangers because it was very Useful to fit the kind of MAGA narrative.

[Trevor Noah]

What happened 10 years ago? What am I missing? Like, I get that we're saying something started, but why did it start? I'm still intrigued by the why of it all. Do you know what I mean? Like, what is the purpose of starting a campaign to say there's a genocide where there is none? When are you Ginon was the first time you heard about it?

[Eugene Koza]

Not me. I was the same.

[Dan]

When did you get the email?

[Trevor Noah]

No, I'm being serious. No, but I'm being serious. When was the first time you ever heard about like white genocide in South Africa?

[Eugene Koza]

It was this year. It was when everyone caught onto it. I almost felt like I was part of living in another country because I looked outside and I was like, that's crazy. Where is this thing happening? And I checked on my neighbor, she was fine, but she hasn't been fine for a long time. Mental, four cats, one lady. I was like, what if it were to happen? It would start at number 43. But it wasn't happening. But I get what Dan is saying. I think there's a lot of victimhood that's going on. And a lot of what people don't speak about in South Africa is the minority that oppressed the majority is still playing victim 30 years later. That was a surprising thing. And I was saying to you the other time, I was like, the genius of this whole concocted plan was for the former oppressor who still oppresses some other people, to get an apology and a guarantee of nothing will happen to you. Whereas they'll never. They've never apologized. They showed me how organized they were as an Afrikaans community group. They have universities, they have unions, they have legal aid, they have everything.

[Trevor Noah]

They speak collectively.

[Eugene Koza]

They speak collectively, but they've never said collectively. Even after when apartheid was declared a crime against humanity, we are sorry for what our culture and our nation has contributed to the people of this country. But they could organize and say we are being killed.

[Trevor Noah]

Can I tell you? Can I tell you what I find interesting is I'll do shows, like in random places, right? Some more random than others. But let's say if I'm in Australia somewhere, whatever, a lot of South Africans will come. And it's a broad range of South Africans. But I have yet to meet a South African who left South Africa during apartheid or maybe even afterwards who says they supported it.

[Dan]

Yes, that's what I was about to say.

[Trevor Noah]

I have yet. Let me tell you something. I have, and I don't even mean this in like a. I just go. This was a system that was well run. It was supported.

[Eugene Koza]

It.

[Dan]

I mean, who voted for this? I'm just like, where are they, yo? Like. Like, where are all the people who had to have voted? I can't find a guy.

[Trevor Noah]

I can't find 20 of them. Even. No, even. Even the people you're talking about who are now leading these, like, pro Afrikaner, pro and like extreme. Because, I mean, we've got to be careful. Like, you can be pro Afrikaner totally, but not be like a heavy nationalist. And so there's like a split there, you know, 100%.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

But even the groups that are running far right leaning, if you say to them, do you support apartheid? Then they go, let me. I never. That was a terrible, terrible time. And I never. I never. Even then. I didn't. I had a picture of Mandela on my wall.

[Dan]

What, the Rivonia trial picture? Cause he was in jail for 27 years. I'm just like this grainy old picture. The one that you get at Robben island in the street suit, in the quarry, everyone.

[Eugene]

And. And they're like. They're like, I would have voted for him three times.

[Eugene Koza]

I could have.

[Trevor Noah]

He's a. Mandela was a great, great man. So I like, this is. This is. This is the thing that gets me. And maybe. Maybe that's what we need to spend our time digging into. It's going to be fun.

[Eugene Koza]

It's like the Afrikaans accent.

[Trevor Noah]

No, it's. It is a great accent, actually.

[Eugene Koza]

100%.

[Trevor Noah]

But it's like, you know, Dan, when you. When you talk about, like, white victimhood, it's been interesting seeing how this story stitches across the Atlantic Ocean. Stitches across, you know, like across the top of the. The African continent. Everywhere in the world, people have a story of being, you know, subjugated, oppressed, something. It's. It's the story as old as time. Right. But some of them are, like, straight up just pillaging, as my friend Eugene likes to say. Big fan of pillaging. No, there was a lot of pillaging, but then there's. There's this few. There's a few instances where people were actually, like, oppressed because of who they were.

[Eugene Koza]

Systematically.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, like systematically oppressed. Right. It's interesting how the label of victimhood, or like the coat of victimhood gets to be worn most proudly by the people who are generally the perpetrators in these stories. So here's something I found interesting. We like to think of Trump as being an outlier because Donald Trump is the one who rescued, you know, what is it, 49 for now?

[Dan]

It was. It was actually 59. I don't know why they didn't count it properly.

[Trevor Noah]

It was 59, right?

[Dan]

59.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. I always thought it was 59. Then people started saying 49 at the airport. Maybe 10 changed their mind. I don't know. But okay, the 49 or the 59 who were. Who were rescued, quote, unquote.

[Dan]

Yeah, the refugees.

[Trevor Noah]

A lot of people in America were saying to me, like, oh, my God, Trevor, it must be so strange for you seeing, I mean, like, Donald Trump. Then I was like, it's not that strange considering that Bill Clinton's administration gave thousands of visas to white South Africans only just before we had our first elections. Just think about it.

[Eugene Koza]

The election was open to escape.

[Trevor Noah]

Just think about it for a second. South Africa had just become a democracy. The world stage had agreed that apartheid. Apartheid is bad. Was a crime against humanity. The whole world had done this. But just before the election, Bill Clinton's administration, not Donald Trump, Bill Clinton's administration rescued 2,000 white South Africans. Cause they were like, hey, man, we know that you were the bad guys, but we've gotta help you escape from this situation.

[Eugene]

Cause now there's about to be different blood in the bloodbath.

[Trevor Noah]

But you see what I'm saying?

[Eugene]

Like, I'm saying the bloodbath had already happened. And now they're like, there might be white blood in this bloodbath. We have to go.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes, but there's never been. Okay, maybe I'm wrong, but there's never been. Dan, I don't want to put you on the spot.

[Eugene Koza]

As a what?

[Trevor Noah]

As a white. As a white.

[Dan]

Don't worry. As part of my. As part of my training to genocide, every. Every morning, I recite the names of every white person who has ever died in South Africa. So you can ask me about any white death.

[Trevor Noah]

So let me ask you this. Like, maybe there's something I don't know about. Like, when. When you are hanging out with white people alone, like, because you live in Cape Town or you spend a lot of time there, very white there, right? Not good or bad. It's just very white. When you're hanging out with, like, a group, like, when white people are alone in South Africa, do they think genuinely that they are being targeted? Like, honest question.

[Dan]

I think that for being white, yes. I think many. I think many white people do. I will say that all my friends know my politics, so they're on. Like, all of my friends have pretty much my politics. So in my friendship circles, no one is saying, oh, it's so hard. It's so horrible. It's so terrible. But I know because I've run WhatsApp lines when I was on 5fm, which is a historically wide radio station.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dan]

Breakfast show host there, my TV show, Quarter Report, and everything that a lot of people do feel that way, but it's some kind of fear of the destabilization of their privilege. Because the. The fear is as more and more black people become middle class, more and more black people become, you know, like get to the same level of wealth. And then white people think, okay, but what if I one day can't get a job one day be does this. Whatever. And I wanted to circle back on this, actually, to your question of what happened 10 years ago.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Dan]

I think that what happened was South Africa had the 2010 World Cup. We wacka wacka'd our way into our peak.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes.

[Dan]

Jacob Zuma came to power, and finally there was a black president who was all the bad things that white people thought black people were about.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, yeah, okay.

[Dan]

That's what happened. The state capture stuff, the Zuma corruption stuff. Suddenly the Rainbow Nation was popped. Nobody says that anymore. Nobody says Rainbow Nation anymore. That beautiful brand thing. The Desmond Tutu, the Mandela, then the mbeki. And then 2010 happened. Canine's wave youe Flag was much better than Shakira's Waka Waka. We all know this to be true. But those two songs happened. The World cup was incredible. We did the dream Rainbow Nation thing. And then service delivery started to collapse. Rampant corruption started to happen. The police started to fall apart. The whole country started to go. Things are not going very well. But the. But. But many white South Africans had the dangerous black president they'd been terrified of since the beginning. And that opened a space.

[Trevor Noah]

That's interesting.

[Dan]

It opened a space for white grifters to then go, we're in trouble now. They're coming for us. They're persecuting us. White economic empowerment, Bell Pottinger. All of this was fodder for white grifters to say, they're coming for us. We told you. We know the blacks were nice before this. We couldn't show that Tabu Mbeki was bad or Mandela was bad or Tutu was bad. But now things are objectively getting worse for lots of South Africans. Here's the black boogeyman we were telling you is coming. And then Malema came along. And this is more black boogeyman stuff. The terrifying black boogeyman and from there, it all devolved to where we are now.

[Trevor Noah]

It's interesting you say that. Cause you and I laugh about this a lot. But there's a thing that happens with people. And I mean, everyone can be guilty of this, by the way. I think any group. But, you know, where, let's say as black people, you're hanging out together and you'll say something about a black person, let's say who's in power. So, you know, you go like, Jacob Zuma. Jacob Zuma. This guy, this guy. And then you'll find someone will step into that fray and they'll say something where you're like, wait, we didn't mean it like that.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah, I know it's bad, but.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes, but. You know what I mean? But. But they'll say something, you know. You know, you'll be like, so much corruption. So they'll be like. They'll be like, yeah, but I mean, what do you expect? They like that.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

You're like, who's they?

[Eugene Koza]

Yes.

[Dan]

Well, so are you saying a black person?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, no, no. What I'm saying.

[Dan]

Black company.

[Trevor Noah]

What I'm saying is, to you, what you. What you've revealed, which is really interesting, is black people have the ability to separate an action that is black culturally and a person that is black that is just doing something.

[Dan]

Right. Okay.

[Trevor Noah]

Do you see what I'm saying?

[Dan]

Yeah, I hear you.

[Trevor Noah]

What I've noticed in a lot of these conversations is there are synonyms that are used for actions. So even when people are talking to Donald Trump in the White House, even when people are on the news or talking to Piers Morgan, even when they're going like, look, there might not be a genocide, but the crime. Yes, crime has become a synonym for.

[Dan]

Black, just like the community.

[Eugene Koza]

Same as corruption.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes, corruption is also a synonym for black.

[Dan]

The community, the townships.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes, like.

[Dan]

Like, it's all wink, nudge.

[Trevor Noah]

It's another way to say black.

[Dan]

Exactly. It's like the way that Black Lives Matter evolved into dei, which they're now so obsessed with. It's code word. And it's usually code word for the K word or the N word. Yeah, like, but it is, though.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah, but can I just say, as.

[Eugene]

A preference, the sequel.

[Dan]

Yes, exactly.

[Trevor Noah]

But I will say in just as a preference thing to anyone who's listening, I would prefer if you called me the crime than the N word. If you meet me in the streets and you say, like, look. Look at the crime walking across the street, I'll be less offended.

[Eugene Koza]

Under your regime, hip Hop will be so boring.

[Trevor Noah]

I'm just saying.

[Eugene Koza]

What up? My crime word? We can't afford that.

[Trevor Noah]

Already sounds better. Already sounds better.

[Eugene Koza]

You know what?

[Eugene]

And now it sounds like you're asking for trouble. Crime, please.

[Eugene Koza]

Are these crimes? You know, growing up, we always used to have this thing when people come to visit our house who would wait for the moment when they leave and then we would all gossip about them.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

As soon as they're gone, my mom would call you, we have our house back again. South Africans have never had their house back.

[Trevor Noah]

Damn.

[Eugene Koza]

We've never, We've never sat as black people and said, guys, let's. Let's gossip about them.

[Trevor Noah]

Damn.

[Dan]

Let's press.

[Eugene Koza]

We had to. We had to make nice very quickly.

[Trevor Noah]

If I had thumbs, I would snap. What?

[Eugene Koza]

We had to make nice very, very quickly. As soon as that ended, you had to be nice to the school governing body for your child to enter that school. You had to be nice to show that you're not like that kind of a crime in an estate, in a housing community, in a. You know, you had to. We had to be nice. So the ones that could. Played nice to be in those communities, the ones that couldn't afford played nice to work in those communities. We never had time to gossip as a family. So when it happened with Jacob Zuma, when we all said, but that guy.

[Trevor Noah]

Exactly.

[Eugene Koza]

And then other people heard us and said, that guy. They said, no, it's not our guy. Yeah, he's just a guy who's doing wrong.

[Dan]

Right.

[Eugene Koza]

And then the whole conversation got lost in money.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes.

[Eugene Koza]

And let's not also forget, if people were 15 when this conversation started in 2010, they were now 20.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

Joining the fray. And they had no idea about. Because when you try to remind kids about apartheid, you're wasting their time. But if you say now, you know, 15 year olds struggle to tell the difference between Jacobs and Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela is a guy on a. On a note, Jacob Zuma is real.

[Dan]

And then there are so many people who I talk to. One of the things that disturbs me the most in my work is how many people under the age of 25 don't know what, what the TRC was.

[Eugene Koza]

Yes.

[Dan]

So like if I, if I was king for a day. Number one, every South African does history to matric. Number two, we overhaul the matric syllabus because you need. There's too much Cold War in there. There's too much. Why do we.

[Eugene Koza]

Who's studying about the Vietnam War?

[Dan]

Who gives a fuck about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Who cares?

[Trevor Noah]

It almost happened.

[Dan]

But it didn't happen, Dan.

[Trevor Noah]

It almost happened.

[Dan]

Of course, this guy.

[Trevor Noah]

Do you know how close they were, Dan?

[Dan]

So must we put. Put Guy Fawkes in the syllabus because it almost happened.

[Trevor Noah]

It almost happened, Dan.

[Eugene Koza]

That's right.

[Dan]

It almost happened. But, like, my fundamental point is that even, like, I think a lot about how we only know the headlines of apartheid, settler colonialism and before. But even now, younger generations don't know that stuff. And in a country which is so systemically defined even today by all of that, people who don't know that stuff have an inability to truly appreciate the dynamics that exist within our country. And the only way to help people to understand is to say, hey, we did this deal at the end of apartheid because we wanted to find out what was going on. The apartheid government was putting burning tens of thousands of pieces of paper the records of their evils. Some people made a choice that we would offer amnesty in exchange for finding out what really happened and trying to get some kind of closure. Some people disagreed on that, like. Like Biko's family, for example. Because right now an inquiry has been opened up into why the NPA didn't pursue court cases against some people from apartheid who did not get amnesty. They were supposed to be pursued.

[Trevor Noah]

Right. So let's just take a step back. So for those who don't know.

[Dan]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

Let's just break this down for them, because, yeah, you're right. A lot of people don't know. A lot of people will be listening to this or watching this and going, wait, what happened?

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Because I know a lot of the world thinks of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the gold standard in terms of a peaceful transfer of power. It is considered the gold standard of the bloodless revolution.

[Eugene Koza]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

Right. So nowhere in the world, and this is true, nowhere in the world has there been a revolution where a minority who oppressed a majority, gave up power, but then didn't see mass bloodshed. This is just.

[Eugene Koza]

It's no retribution.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, Right. And everyone looks at the TRC as the gold standard. They go, wow, what an amazing experience. A country that experienced so much trauma and so much pain came together and said, we're gonna speak about this. We're gonna air it on television. The whole country's gonna be privy to it. And regardless of how heinous these crimes are, we're gonna speak about them. And the key aspect of it is.

[Dan]

Those who come forward to admit.

[Trevor Noah]

To admit what they did reveal it from the shadows, they will be given amnesty.

[Eugene Koza]

And that's if. That's if their evidence is proven to be true. Yes, they point us to the graves.

[Dan]

And if it is sincere. Sincere, because Tutu was very human about it. He was like, we want to feel like this is genuine remorse because, like, functionally we want remorseful people, but we also for the victims, you have to see remorse as a victim or you're not gonna feel closure or feel like this person is really sorry.

[Trevor Noah]

Right. And so that's how the story was. Yeah, but that's how the story sort of ended for the woman.

[Eugene Koza]

100%.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes, it was. What a beautiful story. These people admitted mass killings and mass tortures and all of these things. And the people, they did it to forgave them, the ones who were left alive.

[Eugene Koza]

And then when they left those TRC meetings, the black people got into taxis again and drove to the township in their four room house.

[Trevor Noah]

But what I'm saying of their s. I'm saying. But you see that story.

[Eugene Koza]

Yes, that.

[Trevor Noah]

That's where the story.

[Eugene Koza]

And they drove back to their suburbs and privilege.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes, but I'm saying that's you. You're adding to the story. I'm saying the story.

[Eugene Koza]

No, no, 100%, I'm agreeing with you.

[Trevor Noah]

You know, like happily ever after.

[Dan]

That's the end of.

[Trevor Noah]

That's where it ends on. And then everyone cried, everyone hugged each other, and then everything was perfect.

[Eugene Koza]

I always say, to make sure that the revolution doesn't continue, you have to kill the young of the revolutionaries. The one thing that that system did, it has still had remnants of those people running private schools now. And these former schools that were called Model C schools, they had to make sure that these kids that were first wave to go inside these privileged schools and Model C schools have the accent of the people that they were supposed.

[Dan]

To not like and submit to the culture.

[Eugene Koza]

It was very weird. Yeah, you now you're playing cricket. You in that little cap, you're playing rugby.

[Dan]

Learning what Leon Shuster is, then you.

[Trevor Noah]

At home is amazing. Don't. Slender Leon Sha on my podcast, slander and guys, don't. Don't dare anyone.

[Dan]

I had to go learn, let anyone.

[Trevor Noah]

Step into my world. And Slender Leonard Shuster, I saw South African slandering that man a few years ago. I was like, yo, guys, if I was here, I would have fought for that man. I would have fought for that man.

[Dan]

The way.

[Trevor Noah]

Can I tell you something? The way. I know there's a tangent, but the way Leon Shuster exposed racism in South Africa, I. I think we owe Leon Schuster. Almost as much as we owe the trc, because Leon Schuster, Leon Shuster showed us how much was still buried in South African culture. That man could have edited out every K word, every racist, every. That man went as an Indian.

[Eugene Koza]

He could have angered people without being a person of color.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes.

[Eugene Koza]

But he chose.

[Trevor Noah]

He went as an Indian. And then people like, ah, it's blackface. What? No, it wasn't black. He was in disguise. There's a difference. Blackface is mocking a person for their race. This man went in disguise. He went as an Indian person to a white person's world. He went as a black person to a white person's world, went as a white person. He did everything but what he showed me, even as a child, I won't lie. TRC was one thing. Leon Schuster, for me, was one of the most informative experiences I had about.

[Dan]

South Africa because I was like, educational.

[Trevor Noah]

Because I was like, oh, this is what's happening when no one knows anyone's.

[Eugene Koza]

Watching, when no one's looking. This is how they speak to their workers, petrol attendants.

[Trevor Noah]

This is how they speak to somebody when they think something's gone wrong. That. Yo, that was. Sorry, but I interrupted, but that, to me, that was like.

[Eugene]

Can I add to Leon Shuster before we continue? Besides, like, I understand, like, the. The optics of it right now feels weird, but as non white people growing up at that time, the first time we ever saw a non white person getting one over a white person was in a Leon Schuster film. The first time we ever saw a non white person winning a situation, whatever that situation is, was in a Leon Schuster film. And yes, later in life, Mama Bones is blackface. But the pranks. The pranks are.

[Trevor Noah]

No, the pranks are flawless.

[Eugene]

The pranks are flawless. Flawless. In my opinion.

[Trevor Noah]

The Franks are flawless. Absolutely flawless.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah. So the. The integration and the mix happened quite quickly. And you come from that generation, you and I, where if you went to a multiracial school or a mixed school or form Model C school, and your parents have a different accent than yours, but your parents, when they're moving around the world, around South Africa, their world, they could speak to more black people than you could.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

So that became. That generation grew up. And then that generation sang in unison to the choir of black people are corrupt. This ANC government is messing up any everything, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, there's many things about this government that you can say, but one thing it is. It's integrated and made lots of people rich who are not black. There's a lot of things that the South African government can do. And I always say drive around in the road on the highways in your suburb and see a car that is a plumber, a person that's an electrician, and see if there's a black name in that van in that truck. There was a system that people understood very well when apartheid ended that there'll be a lot of shortcomings.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

When it comes to service delivery. In fact, the government itself will struggle to maintain their own infrastructure. So we will maintain their infrastructure and create businesses that make money. I swear. Now the, the blackouts that Eskom caused had caused to have many more white millionaires in business than there are black.

[Trevor Noah]

Millionaires from the solar business. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know anything from the power generation.

[Eugene Koza]

I don't know any, any, any black solar installer that I can call. But the same people who are like this, this thing is rubbish. They were the ones 250000 rand will climb on your roof, will make this thing happen for you. Then I'm like, yeah, but it's the same everywhere. It's the, even the police are being helped by private security that's owned by white people. Do you understand what I'm saying? And I've had this conversation so many times and I'm like this country is so weird that we come from. We can watch documentaries and see how black people were policed by white people in the 70s and the 80s. And I'm saying what's so different now.

[Trevor Noah]

When you move around four ways which it's been privatized.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah, but what's different? Yeah, yeah. So armed response. I'm not talking about the guard at your security gate. Cuz those are not allowed to carry firearms in the first place. So you're not as safe as you think you are. The response is armed, meaning the person that comes.

[Trevor Noah]

So let me ask you this then. Let me ask you this. Do you, do you think. Because this, it's, it's interesting to see these perspectives. Right. Because when I listen to the conversations that are being had and I see what people are discussing, I notice two very different positions that people have to take. And it's really interesting. It sort of goes back to what you, what you said at the beginning of the conversation. I noticed it when you went on Piers Morgan. Black South Africans have to start every conversation with white people. You're not in danger. We swear. We have nothing against you. We love you. We love you very much. We love you so much. We love you we want you here. We love you. We love you. Please join us. You know, we love you. Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa's president, had to go to the White House, sit with Trump and go, ah, we love white people. We love them. Everyone is welcome in our country. Every. We love them. We love them. And Trump's there. He's like, you hate the whites. You hate them. He's like, no, we love even you. We love you.

[Eugene Koza]

We love where the plane would give you.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. He even said if we had. I wish. Had a plane to give you. I wish we imagine. Imagine that level that you're coming from, right? And these are people who, for the most part, I mean, you know the statistics. You. You know, like a lot of the numbers. But if you look at. For the most part, those are the people who have less than nothing. And it was designed that way. Right. But their role is still to coddle white South Africans and say, hey, look, you're safe. And you, you're going to be, you know, but it's interesting how. And again, we've got to be very careful of this because there are many cool whites on the. I mean, here's one of them. You're sitting here with us until you do something crazy, then. And your brother, and your brother, wherever.

[Eugene Koza]

He is, who has a funny podcast called godonk. What a legend.

[Trevor Noah]

No, but, like. But. And I, you know, and this is. This is the reason I. The reason I hop on this is not. Not to be, like, politically correct or anything. I think it's. I think it's because I never want to be in a position where people allow us to divide and conquer ourselves.

[Eugene Koza]

Of course.

[Trevor Noah]

Do you know what I mean? There are tons of white South Africans, tons. Who are proudly South African, who stay in the country, who contribute, who integrate, who speak Zulu, dance. You know what I mean? Like, things that. And people might be like, ah, dancing. I'm like, no, no, no, guys. There was a cultural stigma that came with many of these things that is now being adopted by a different generation, which is beautiful. Do you know what I mean?

[Eugene Koza]

100%.

[Trevor Noah]

But there's still a world where white people go. The crime that happens to them seems to be more significant than the crime that was always happening. Like, people will go, you know, crime wasn't this bad during apartheid. Then I go, guys, but the whole. The whole country was a crime.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah, yeah, crime scene.

[Dan]

And crime wasn't bad in your area during apartheid is what you actually mean. Because one of. For me, one of the wildest things about apartheid is they didn't do a census of black South Africans. So we only found out even how many people there were in South Africa, including people of color. In 1995. 6. In 1995, 6 was the first census.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, you're lying.

[Dan]

People real. And I have reread that census so many times because it's the first time you find out how many South Africans had no schools, no hospitals, no surge. No, because white South Africa had no interest in finding that out. One, because they weren't going to service it, but two, because they didn't want to let anybody else find out how bad it was. So this is another thing like the trc as important as the TRC to funding. And what. What had happened in South Africa was that census in 96 found out what South Africa was then for the first time. And we didn't know that before then. And so. But a lot of people don't even know what was going on in that census. So what I do on the show quite often is I just go, okay, white South Africa. Let's just talk for a second. Guess how many white South Africans had no electricity in 1996. Guess how many black South Africans. And the stats are unreal in the disparity. I'm trying to remember some off the top of my head, but it was something like, okay, the one I can remember is there were like 6 million black people or black. Yeah, 6 million black people living in informal dwellings in 1996. And there was less.

[Trevor Noah]

Just to be clear, when people say informal shacks. Yeah, we're not talking about, like. Yeah, we're talking about it is a non house.

[Dan]

Totally. And how many white South Africans. I think there was like less than 50,000. Like, and people don't know that. And that's when I say again, like, you need to understand. Oh, 30 years is so long. No, it's fucking not.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, it's nothing.

[Dan]

Not when that is what you're trying to recover from. And I know that some people think that I bat for the A and see, which I obviously don't, if you look at all my material, but your shirt says otherwise. This is the Springboks and nothing else.

[Eugene Koza]

Comrade D, as we call we have.

[Trevor Noah]

Revealed you com 10 now's the time.

[Dan]

Revolutionary greetings.

[Trevor Noah]

But no, we're going to continue this conversation right after this short outbreak.

[Dan]

Something that's so important to understand about even looking at today's stats of how many people live here, there, whatever, is that if you know how bad it was in South Africa in 1996, to then see how much good Mandela's ANC did. The RDP rollout of houses was one of the most record breakingly large housing programs in human history. And if you, if you look now, they stopped doing it. And enduring Mbeki's reign, everything started to go wrong. And then since Zuma and even in Ramaphosa, they're doing virtually nothing. And the state is decrepit and awful and they've done terrible things that we can't forgive them for. But consider where they got from 96 to about 2006. Unbelievable. Building of a country from dire inequality to giving so many South Africans things that they could have never imagined happening. And we need to know that we all need to understand what was in that census in 1996 to get that in this rainbow nation. Cute thing while the TRC was happening, that's the country that apartheid and settler colonialism left us.

[Trevor Noah]

Well, you know what it goes to. And I think this is a conversation that a lot of people struggle with. People don't understand that there is a distinct difference between the apology and then in some way shape or form the retribution or someone amending or. You know what I mean, the restitution. Right. Where's the restitution?

[Dan]

Exactly.

[Eugene]

Can I step in here quickly? There's a quote and I don't know who, who to attribute it to, but it's, you can just say they say is. I'm not sure of their gender. So yeah, they is better. They, they, they said that South Africa is what happened when forgiveness was given before guilt was admitted. Yeah, that's why we find ourselves here.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah.

[Eugene]

Forgiveness was given before guilt was admitted. And that like statement alone speaks to every single thing you guys have been speaking about now.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah, no one said sorry.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's a. But it's not even just like be like, even if you say everyone said sorry. You know, I think of, I think of some of the lessons that, you know, they'll teach you. You know, couples therapists, for instance, relationship therapists. One of the things they, if you read the books, they'll always talk about something very specific. And they go, in a relationship, if you're with somebody and they wrong you, right? So they talk about like infidelity. And I think like Esther Perel has it in some of her books and stuff. They go, A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that the infidelity ends when the person admits to it and seeks forgiveness. But that's actually the beginning of the journey. Because now what has to happen is the person who has wronged their partner has to spend all their time. And I know this sounds crazy. Spend all their time showing their partner that they haven't forgotten their transaction. The transgression.

[Dan]

It's the rebuild.

[Trevor Noah]

You literally. And people who hear this would be like, wait, what? But think about how many times, whether it's on TV or in real life, you've heard people who've had some sort of infidelity in a relationship go, you know, like, their partner brings it up and it's like, ah, this again. I already said sorry. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know why the person brought it up again? Because you don't anymore. And if the person feels like you don't. Yeah. If the person feels like you have gotten over it before they have, they're going to bring it up.

[Dan]

Your example is actually really good because something that I think about is that white South Africans have never earned black South Africans trust.

[Trevor Noah]

No, that.

[Dan]

That is another part of the post TRC conversation. An apology is not enough. You guys.

[Trevor Noah]

Africa couldn't say Mbeki. Yeah, guys, guys. That used to blow my mind.

[Dan]

You have to work harder than that.

[Trevor Noah]

The president of the country, his name was Tabo Becky. No clicks, no nothing.

[Dan]

Not even one challenging thing.

[Trevor Noah]

Do you know what I mean? No, Mbeki. People without fail would go, yeah, President Mabeki. Then you'd go like, mbeki, Mabeki. Then you're like, mbeki. They'd be like, oh, I can't say it.

[Dan]

Of course you can.

[Trevor Noah]

Then I go, but let some tennis player come along who's at Wimbledon from Eastern Europe. And they'll have a name that yo, all consonants, no vowels. I've never seen these people struggle, you know, where you're like, so you can say that name, but Mbeki. Why can't you say. Can you say M? Can you say be? But it felt like. It always felt like to me, it was. It wasn't so much that they couldn't say.

[Dan]

It wouldn't bother.

[Trevor Noah]

It felt like it was like, no, it's not even wouldn't bother.

[Eugene Koza]

It felt like it was a silent revolution. It was a silent protest.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, it felt like they were. It felt like they were giving something up. Yeah, I'm gonna make your sounds. And that's why, genuinely, like, when I look at my brother's generation, my brother's 20 years younger than me. My youngest brother, right? Yo, the kids that he goes to school with, they don't bat an eyelid at any of this. Mbeki, nothing to them genuinely Nothing. Genuinely, genuinely nothing. When I look at like young white kids growing up now, I can't speak for all of them, but I know from my generation already, like when we went to school versus the kids now, yo, bruh, these kids, so many of them don't see it as a, like a, an inferior thing. Cause they've seen rich black, they've seen poor black, they've seen corrupt black, they've seen, you know what I mean?

[Dan]

Like, they've also had famous black people in their lives, which is a really, really big deal. It's like really, really important to understand the extent to which celebrity agenda sets what we should bother to learn, do and care about. Like, like, like the fact that, like the fact that young white South Africans know my pimpy and they know and oxen chair and they can talk about all of those things. Rabada right now at the crickets. I don't know when this comes out. Also Americans, you don't know what I'm talking about with this. Anyway, so Tyler's a good one. Tyler's another good one.

[Trevor Noah]

You know what I mean? Just, just that alone. You're right.

[Dan]

Actually, people make the effort for their heroes. And white South Africans are black heroes now, at least some. And that is. It makes a huge, huge, huge difference to your understanding of what is worth putting your effort into actually learning to care about and do.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah, but I think South Africa became a poster child for diplomacy. We almost had to, as a country, put our best foot forward. And the ones who could speak the better English had to be sent out there in the world to go and apologize on behalf of the transgressors. And two systems were adopte to make sure that that happens. So our government swapped retribution for restitution. BE is not an ANC manufactured program. It's an apartheid system program. It existed before for white people to benefit from government contracts. Tenders were not invented by the anc. They were invented by the apartheid government.

[Trevor Noah]

Well, I mean they. For every government, if we're fair.

[Eugene Koza]

But I'm not.

[Trevor Noah]

Every government in the world has a tender system to. What you're saying is in South Africa a lot of people think tenders were invented by the anc.

[Eugene]

Yeah, because the word tenderpreneur did not exist during apartheid. Yeah, but 10 entrepreneurs exist.

[Dan]

Yes, but like, what is colonialism and apartheid if not white economic empowerment? That's exactly what it is. And that's actually what I feel like more South Africans should start doing is using the same language to show the comparison.

[Trevor Noah]

Can I tell you what it is. Sorry, I'll tell you this before you go forward.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

I'll tell you this. This is where I think a lot of these things actually start falling down. And I think it's interesting because there are parallels. In the United States, for the most part, it boils down to marketing and it boils down to implementation. Right. I think it was Lil Wayne who said, real G's move in silence. Like lasagna. Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

Or La nyaza in the Eastern Cape.

[Trevor Noah]

You know what's so profound about that when you think about it is during apartheid, right? During any of these systems in America, even they weren't as explicit as people think about saying, we are helping you because you are white. They denied people because they were black, but they didn't say to white people, we are helping you because you are white. So what they said was, hey, guys, there's a system called welfare.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

If you cannot afford to buy food and you cannot afford to have a house, the government will help you. There's a system called what would assist? There's Medicare, there's Medicaid, there's health care, there's pension. What is pension? No. When you're old, the government will look after you because you need to be looked after. Everyone deserves to be looked after. But then what they would do is they would just exclude black people from everyone. So now people grew up in a world thinking everyone gets looked after because they deserve to be. You are a single mother, you are a widow, a widower, you're an orphan.

[Eugene Koza]

You'Re injured, you're disabled, you're injured, you're.

[Trevor Noah]

Disabled, it doesn't matter. Everyone deserves to be looked after. And then they excluded from the everyone. Then what happens? Then what happens? Laws start to change, right? So in America, what happened? They said, okay, no, now black people can go to the school. Now black people can go swim in a swimming pool. Immediately from that moment. You see it in American history, you see it in South Africa. I grew up with public pools, right? That when I was growing up, it was batshit crazy to have a swimming pool in your house. Guys.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

I don't think you understand. Even now when I look at people, I go like, guys, you know when you fly, you know when you're landing in any city in the world and you look down, people don't understand how crazy it is to have a body of water in the backyard of your house that is for your soul consumption. Just you and your family have 50,000 liters of water at your disposal for your occasional use, guys. When I was growing up, there was one pool in the neighborhood and it was run by the government. And everyone went there and we swam together and then we all went home because you don't swim every day and that's life, you know what I mean? But it was interesting to see when they said black people are going to come to the pool. People then said, we'll get our own pools, we're getting our own pools. And then what happened? The pools all shut down. I don't.

[Eugene Koza]

Business.

[Trevor Noah]

I don't even think there's a, there's a. Yeah, you're right. I don't even think there's a public pool anywhere. Anywhere that I know of.

[Dan]

So just on, on what you were talking about just now is one of the most extraordinary acts of welfare to pull people out of poverty was in the 1950s when the apartheid government dedicated nearly all of its tax revenue to pulling poor white Afrikaners out of poverty. And that was massive, massive welfare grants, unemployment grants, job seekers grants, illness and childhood and old age grants. And when I talk about white economic empowerment and I've covered it in this way specifically, a lot of people try to like muddy the waters and gray what happened during apartheid. And so what I do is I go, okay, let's go and look at the apartheid government's official record of the policies that they did. Because you can't fight with me on that. It's on the record, it's in our government policies. That is what they did systematically from 1948 all the way through until about the mid-1960s. And, and if they were providing food parcels or if they were doing construction or whatever, they were only giving the tenders to white Africana owned companies. And so if you look at some of the biggest companies in South Africa today, those are companies that the apartheid government made, made to gain Afrikaner wealth. But it goes further back than that. Even pre apartheid in the 1920s, more and more big companies were hiring skilled black South African workers, particularly on the mines and to do construction in and around Johannesburg. White Africana in particular, unskilled workers protested and went on strike. And in response to keep their vote, the apartheid government created. Sorry. The pre apartheid government, the union government made public works infrastructure programs like they built things dedicated like the dam, hard to besput, hard to be a sport dam. And they only hired white people. They made public works infrastructure projects to create jobs only for white people.

[Eugene Koza]

And interesting fact, that land, that land was donated.

[Dan]

Yes.

[Eugene Koza]

Was owned by a single person who said, you guys can have it so.

[Dan]

When you're talking about America, what I find fascinating in American politics, as you will know, is that very, very often if the left says a branded thing, the right will twist it on the same branding to make it seem similar. So black lives matter, Blue lives matter. Yeah, stop the steel, stop the whatever, right? In South Africa, if we started saying white economic empowerment is our history, people would go, oh, it's just like bee, except be doesn't go nearly as far in the disempowerment of one group of people or the benefiting of another. If we all just started saying we over and over again, people would understand what apartheid's actual economic project was. Because in the history books you do need to learn about the crimes, you do need to learn about the like aberrations of justice and the violations of people's human rights. But you also need to deal with the economic superpower of creating white wealth. And if we as a country started to think about apartheid like that, we would better understand that redress laws and policies like bee now both work need to happen and are helping the still disempowered.

[Trevor Noah]

It's funny you say that. I was having a conversation with a gentleman in London who had left South Africa, South African guy, and he was talking to me about like his journey. And he goes, he's like, oh, Trevor, you know, I left South Africa, our family, we had to leave. And you know, it's just terrible. And I was like, yeah, you know, crime is really bad and corruption, we can't get under control. We gotta work on these things. He's like, yeah, yeah, you know, it's just really bad. And you know, and I just feel like, look, you know, and you know when someone starts couching comments. Cause look, and here's the thing, I'm not like, I just, let's be honest, trivet, like be like to have black economic empowerment, like, what are you saying? And you know, and come on, man, why don't we just say we start from scratch, everyone's equal, we just start from scratch. And he said it in a really earnest way. He said, trevor, isn't it making it worse when a government says that black people or people who are Indian or like they should get help just because of what happened? But my kids weren't around for that. So my kid goes to school with a kid who's black. They started at the same time.

[Eugene Koza]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

So they have the same footing. And I was like, okay, this is an interesting way to think of it. Now let me ask you a question. Would you be Willing to give your entire bank account and your housing away to a black family. So now I'm gonna ask you, as a white South African, to give a black family every house and your car and your money in the bank. Give it all to them. And he went, no, I would never do that. Then I said, okay, but why would you not do that? So it's not because I've worked for this. I said, okay, but now if I did take it all from you, if I took it all from you, talking from the first investment all the way, if I took it all from you, what would your problem be? He's like, no, you've taken everything. I've worked. I said, yes, but your son is starting from scratch. So your son will make the money for you.

[Dan]

Should be fine.

[Trevor Noah]

Then he's like, no, but I mean, do you know how long it took me to work for this? And I can't just give it to you and my son. I have to pay for him to go to school. Then I said, okay, so now, why is it that you are able to understand the power of the compound interest and the compound wealth that you have acquired over generations, and yet you're unable to acknowledge it? For every black person who was never allowed to acquire any wealth from their generations, most of us imagine living in a world where most of us are the first generation of our families that ever tipped the needle above one. Most black families in South Africa lived from zero, and all you did was. Didn't get to one. You just did this to get to the next month, and then it was zero, and then it went below zero, and then you just tried to get above. And then back below zero, and then you tried to get. Most of us are the first generation of, like, excess, I would call it, but with.

[Eugene Koza]

And we were.

[Trevor Noah]

We're like a mega minority.

[Eugene Koza]

You can even do one better.

[Trevor Noah]

You always want to one better. What kind of friendship is this, guys?

[Eugene Koza]

For the. After the first elections in 94, that was the first generation of black people to say and do what they like.

[Trevor Noah]

That's wild, dude. Yeah, just think about that for a.

[Eugene Koza]

Second and do what you like.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

And people take that for granted. And I'm always thinking to my wonder.

[Trevor Noah]

Who was the first black person who just, like, wiggled?

[Eugene Koza]

I was like, yay.

[Trevor Noah]

Just at.

[Eugene Koza]

Okay.

[Trevor Noah]

Just like the first. Because. No, just. Okay, think about this for a second. We take this for granted now. We all take this for granted. There was a time in South Africa, not eight, because a time makes it sound like it was like black and White pictures.

[Eugene Koza]

And then all of a sudden, there was color. Everything was good.

[Trevor Noah]

This is when there's color pictures. There's color footage, color pictures. Black people couldn't walk in the street randomly. If you shook the wrong way, you were taken away. Do you know what I mean? But now I want to know, because obviously there's very meaningful things. I'm sure some. Some people like. Some people, like, are going to school.

[Eugene Koza]

Is this your. Is this how you purport sincerity?

[Dan]

I've just mention this is very sincere look. But I can see how hard you are fighting. No, no, this is very inside of you right now. His cheeks are battling his brain.

[Trevor Noah]

This is very sincere.

[Dan]

Look at you. And I can see how hard you're working. Look, look at.

[Trevor Noah]

Some people were like.

[Eugene Koza]

He'S made many Russian men cry.

[Trevor Noah]

You know, some people like, I'm going to go to school. I'm going to start a business. I'm going to. But I wonder, there must have been some black people who are just like. Because I know we think of it in a meaningful way all the time, but you know how wonderful it is to be able to act the fool in life with no repercussions. And I mean this in like a. In a sincere.

[Eugene Koza]

You do that for a living.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, but there was no comedy during our.

[Eugene Koza]

But they were saying, yeah, we should know.

[Trevor Noah]

There was none.

[Eugene Koza]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

What is it? They had the same rule of, like the Bible. If three or more are gathered.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah. Then from an island, literally.

[Trevor Noah]

But it was though, they said if, like, how many people. How many black people was it once you passed a certain amount of black people? They said it was a political gathering inherently.

[Eugene]

You guys would be safe because it's one and a half black people, one and a half white people.

[Trevor Noah]

With this guy with this shirt.

[Eugene Koza]

With this shirt with Undercover bra.

[Trevor Noah]

Da. With Undercar, my man. Actually, actually, this is a good question to ask you. This is a good question to ask you. Why do you think white people get almost double angry with white people who speak out? Because I've seen my comments. I've seen, like, black people, but they'll just go, yeah, you, you, whatever. You know, they run the gamut from you're delusional to you're a monkey. But it's the usual, whatever. Dan, when you speak, hey, my man, let me tell you something. You make. And I won't say white people. In fact, I'll separate groups. You, as a white person, when you speak, you make racists very angry.

[Eugene Koza]

No, uncomfortable.

[Trevor Noah]

Uncomfortable is an understatement. This guy Gets death threats where I'm reading his comments like, yo, and you know, where I'm like, hey, Dan. Yeah, no, here, my man. Yeah, no, okay. Properly.

[Dan]

Yeah, So I believe that the most threatening thing to a white supremacist is not a person of color. It's a white person who disagrees with them. Because white people listen to white people instinctively more than they listen to people of other races. And I think that that is true of all different kinds of intersections. Men listen to men easily in a way they don't listen to women. Straight people listen to other straight people in a way instantly that they don't listen to queer people.

[Trevor Noah]

So you think it's a power thing.

[Dan]

I think that if somebody has an agenda of trying to create a world in which black people are less so black people like this for white people to all agree with them with. The most threatening thing to them is a white person who goes, you're wrong. Because that white person can make other white people think, oh, maybe he is wrong. Maybe black people aren't actually like this. Maybe it's not like that. When I talk, it's a direct threat to their project of convincing white people that black people are like this and a threat and whatever. And so, I mean, yeah, lots of death threats, lots of sometimes hilarious comments, to be fair, because most bigots online are not funny or intelligent. They just say dumb shit. I was once called son of the soy. And that's objectively hilarious.

[Trevor Noah]

As in like soybeans.

[Dan]

Yeah, cuz son of the soil, son of the soy. And I was like, you thought about that? That's good. Like you worked a little bit like that.

[Trevor Noah]

That was nice. That's poetic. I like poetic racism.

[Dan]

You are my favorite hater.

[Trevor Noah]

Poetic hatred, poetic racism. That's. That's good. I like that.

[Dan]

But, but I think also that for four white people who disagree with me, I think some of them aren't doing a project for trying to convince everybody that black people are worse. Some of them just have deep seated unacknowledged racism within themselves that goes like this. When I'm called a race traitor, me, when I'm called a race traitor. What it shows about the person accusing me of being a race traitor is that they conceive of races as teams. My team is the white team. Dan, you're white. You're on my team automatically. And teams compete in sport. So you need, as a white person down on the white team. We need to be working together to look after our team. If you say anything that criticizes white people or heaven, forget the forgive the democratic fucking alliance, then you are a race traitor, which means that you are harming the white project, the white team's attempt to win, and you are strengthening another team's attempt to win. That is a fundamentally subliminally racist conception of how race should be most important in the way that you build power and protect community. That you should sacrifice truth in order.

[Eugene Koza]

To protect the team.

[Dan]

The white team. Exactly. And so I think that for some white South Africans who don't like what I'm saying, you'll see in my comments, it's almost never a counterfactual or a counter argument. No, it's always a personal attack.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Dan]

And it's.

[Trevor Noah]

They'll say, how can you do this to your people?

[Dan]

Yeah, you're gay, you're a black lover, whatever that means. Like, like, like, like all of these different.

[Trevor Noah]

Love. Blacks love them. No, but you know what I mean. Just drive down the street and see them on the side of the road and like.

[Dan]

Yeah. And the other thing that they love to say is like, yeah, of course you love Joburg, which obviously means like a wink. You like black women, Dan. Or no, black, black men. Specifically because people love accusing any man they dislike of being gay, as though it's somehow a problem.

[Eugene Koza]

You hear that, Trevor?

[Dan]

And then I don't even know what.

[Eugene Koza]

No, I don't know what. What are we talking about?

[Trevor Noah]

You hit me with that and I'm like, I'm still trying to figure out what that means.

[Dan]

But sorry, just, just to finish the same conversation we're talking about is the Cape Town versus Joburg conversation. So you said Cape Town, very, very white. Right. Predominantly Cape Town international is very white. Cape Town, South Africa is not. They're completely different worlds. I have quite often, I think very reasonably critiqued the housing crisis, the Airbnb crisis. Some of the DA's decisions rule in Cape Town even in. As though they've also done a lot of really good stuff and built an in part world class city. If I criticize Cape Town, it's the same. Oh, it's, it's racialized. They say you're a race traitor. They're saying Cape Town, but they mean white. Just like you were saying earlier. Crime means black. Joburg means black. Cape Town means white. You are criticizing us, our team.

[Eugene Koza]

Why are you doing that?

[Dan]

Our home base in this game of tag.

[Eugene Koza]

But I guess the revolution has always wanted to adopt one single white person here and there to just kind of, to just kind of get through to the. You, you and You. You might think it's funny, but you're actually right. Joe Slovo, was that for the anc?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

Father Chaskison, was that for. For Desmond. So there was always one where they're like, you need to roll with this guy. And when we started doing comedy, to get the gigs that you want to get, you must have a white agent.

[Trevor Noah]

You had to have a white agent.

[Eugene Koza]

There has to be someone who says he will show up, he will come, demand a certain.

[Trevor Noah]

No, he had to vouch for you.

[Eugene Koza]

Vouch.

[Trevor Noah]

Vouch hard people like Joe Parker. This is a white comedian who was having to promise white companies that a black performer was worth having. Not even, like, trust. He would have to vouch and go, I promise you this person is worth having at your event. Please trust me on this.

[Eugene Koza]

And remember the handholding that we used to suffer before. The person will show up with you.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

Make the introduction, shake hands.

[Trevor Noah]

Just stand there, make them comfortable. Like, literally. So we would go and perform.

[Dan]

No, sorry. I mean, like. I mean, like, act like a shop.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, yeah.

[Dan]

Because. Because. Because they believe that you are irresponsible and can't hide yourself.

[Eugene Koza]

Do you even own a jacket?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

Someone come meets you in the car. Where's your.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Can you do a tie? You know what I'm saying? Can you tie 100? Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

100. So there's. There's always that. There's always those stats that a person in 2025 can still quote, freshen their mind. We don't even need to go as far as apartheid is. But I always think people get lost in the stats. There's very simple stats in this country. White people are the minority. White people, as a minority, they're the most educated as a number of people than black people. They have gainful employment more than black people. They out gun us, they out welfare us. They outlive us.

[Dan]

People forget the outlive, which is really important.

[Eugene Koza]

Yes.

[Dan]

In terms of medical, health care, in terms of nutrition, in terms of a lack of. Because early childhood malnutrition is what stunts so many young black children. It's the first five to six years where you do not have enough food. And you. And all of the early childhood nutrition research in the world talks about how people are physically stunted. They're mentally stunted.

[Trevor Noah]

Mentally is the big one. If you don't have enough.

[Dan]

Totally. But I mean, the other thing that we were talking about, about around the Piers Morgan thing is the safest people in South Africa are white men.

[Eugene Koza]

Yes.

[Dan]

Because of all the infrastructure which creates secure Neighborhoods, high walls, electric fences, good, safe working environments, good cars, firearms. Yeah, well, sometimes firearms. Sometimes. Sometimes firearms. But then, and then the most vulnerable are black women because again, the least protected in the most destitute conditions. Very, very often.

[Eugene Koza]

And most vulnerable at the same time.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes. And, and in all communities as well.

[Dan]

Yes.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

So I, I always say to people, if you want to know what equality looks like, drive around any township, any black neighborhood, or anywhere where there's black men gathered as a group, whether they're traveling together or going to watch soccer. And tell me what size pants they wear. Just as a, as an average, between all of them in townships and in squatter camps, very small, very thin. That's malnutrition.

[Trevor Noah]

Huh?

[Eugene Koza]

You can't put them next to their counterpart who is of another race, especially white. And from muscle mass to the size of their pants, not being overweight, the size of their pants.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, I know what you mean.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah. That's, that's, that's what tells you what this systematic system has been able to do and still survives and thrives under these conditions because of what they eat, what they know, how much they walk versus how much they exercise.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

Because if, if hard work was a real thing, most black women that spend most of their youth in transit from 4 in the morning up until 6 in the evening would be wealthy.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

So I don't buy it any. Anyone tells me, you know, to work hard, I'm like, I know plenty of people doing well that don't work hard at all. And I know enough people just be on the highway and see what, who's in a bus and a mini bus. And even, even middle class black women now are working harder.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

And they're still working and complaining about being underpaid and having more responsibility and still finding themselves in these situations. When I go to self defense classes and I, and I'm in a group and I'm usually, are you teaching or you. No, when I'm attending.

[Trevor Noah]

Okay.

[Eugene Koza]

And I'm, and I'm one of, or two of 20 and I see how to identify a threat and I'm like, hold on, you talking about me here? I don't see a threat the same way.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

My other counterparts who are in this training course see a threat when I'm driving. I'm not as paranoid. I don't look around at a black guy crossing a car.

[Trevor Noah]

But you know why?

[Dan]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

You know why?

[Eugene Koza]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

It comes back to the flattening of people.

[Eugene Koza]

Tell us more. You know what? The flattening of people Is.

[Trevor Noah]

It's as simple as this. The flattening of people.

[Dan]

I listen to this podcast. I know.

[Trevor Noah]

I know you guys.

[Eugene Koza]

I. I'll.

[Trevor Noah]

I'll tell you. I'll tell you what. So I remember years ago, I read a paper that was breaking down what was commonly referred to as, like, a. A racist stereotype, you know, where people go, all Asians look the same. Right. And so. So someone went out and actually did a study, and they found that to people who have never grown up with any Asian people around them, all Asians do look the same.

[Eugene Koza]

True.

[Trevor Noah]

Because you are unable to differentiate the features. And you're unable.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

You're unable to distinguish them.

[Eugene Koza]

Yes.

[Dan]

So it's an exposure problem.

[Trevor Noah]

It's completely an exposure thing. And then they tracked it between people and they found it's not that one race of people is inherently unable or able to identify another group. Group. It's all just about exposure. So you come back to South Africa. Black people were forcibly exposed in a section to white people, right? Because they had to work for them. They had to work in the mines, they had to work in the houses. They had to work. You know what I mean? But that's still a slither of them. Many black people lived a life completely isolated from white people. And so many black people, funny enough, can't tell the difference. Like, half of my family cannot tell the difference between any of my white friends. Like, if I brought you, Dan, now to my house, I promise you, some of them would go, I would like to see you again. I swear to God. Yes, I swear to God. They go, oh, nice to see you again. Then I'll be like, no, this is not him.

[Dan]

I mean, I am a redhead, so it's my friend.

[Trevor Noah]

My friend. They'll just think, on that day in particular, there was something not to say. Something. Yes, Something. They. Oh, it's your jacket. No, but.

[Dan]

But.

[Trevor Noah]

And I used to be shocked. I'd be like. I'd be so shocked by how, like, half my family. Then when I sat with it and I went, oh, wow, these are all the people in my family who were never exposed to white people. Right? And the flip happens now you look at it through the lens of crime, right? You live in a country where, from your birth, you were kept away from black people. You were not shown black people except to say, like, this is the khafar, the danger, the threat, right? You were never introduced to black people. You were never. There was no meaningful interaction with black people. The country then becomes integrated. Now, South Africa is a rainbow Nation. We're all together, but we're not. We all know.

[Dan]

Correct.

[Trevor Noah]

So there was white flight. White people immediately fled to little enclaves where they're like, can we be safe here? And now there were fewer black people that they were interacting with. But now what happens? Where are the only black people they interact with? With a beggar at the street corner and somebody who's robbing them, a teller, somebody who's serving them, somebody who's. But these are not human interactions where you actually study another person's features and you look at. It's not, it's not, it's. It's not a space where you see the human on the other side.

[Dan]

There's no encounter.

[Trevor Noah]

Right, Exactly. It's just like a fleeting encounter. And so the one thing I think of, and I know it's like a weird way to phrase it, but where I feel sorry or understanding for white people as I go. If your only interaction with black people is when they rob you, you will then think that crime is black because you, even apart from your actions, have been part of a system that didn't let you hang out with. You know what I mean? Cause it's not like white people were allowed. You know what I mean? To be fair, white people weren't allowed to hang out with black people. And I always go like, one of the worst things that happened was also a crime.

[Eugene Koza]

That association was a crime.

[Trevor Noah]

One of the strangest things about racism that we forget is, and I think I will attribute this quote, Ryan was Nelson Mandela, who said he learned in his time in Robin island that one of the hardest aspects of racism. And this is not the quote, but basically he was saying is.

[Eugene]

So it wasn't him.

[Trevor Noah]

No. I'll tell you when it starts. I'll tell you. I'll tell you when the quote starts. Cuz I'm giving you the context first. He spent a lot of. He spent a lot of time at Robin Island. A lot of like, pretty much all his time. And he made friends with most of his prison guards.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

And it got to the point where at Robben island they knew the, the administration knew. You could not let Nelson Mandela or any of his cohorts associate with a prison guard for longer than like a few months. Because the prison guards started to see them as human beings and they started to treat them differently.

[Dan]

Right.

[Trevor Noah]

Because Mandela would greet them, he'd ask them about their families, he would talk about himself as a human being. He'd wish them happy birthday, say. But it wasn't just him.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

People make it seem like Mandela was the Saints guy.

[Dan]

No, he was cohorts.

[Trevor Noah]

He was a human. That's all he was. He was just being a human.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

And the other. Other people who were imprisoned with him would do the same thing to the point where the prison guards went, what.

[Eugene Koza]

Did you say this guy did again? Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Like, he doesn't seem like the. The animal that you said he is.

[Dan]

Because bigotry requires dehumanization, and separation is a big one. So no exposure.

[Trevor Noah]

No exposure.

[Dan]

Which allows for dehumanization.

[Trevor Noah]

No exposure. And so they did that. And that's when Mandela said, in that process, he learned that in a system of oppression, you have to free not only the prisoner, but also the guard. And that's the thing I think we never, like, we really never get into in South Africa, and I see it in the US as well, is that white people are also suffering from a system that was created by their ancestors.

[Dan]

In a different way.

[Trevor Noah]

Because now I'm like, yo, white people are terrified in a way that they don't have to be. I know this is gonna sound crazy. You are not being hijacked because you are white. You are being hijacked because you have the car that the people want. Now you must ask yourself why you have that car. I'm not saying blame yourself, but I'm just saying the chances of you being robbed or hijacked are directly proportional to how much things you have have. You having the things is directly proportional to how much you benefited from the system before you. But again, I'm not saying it's your fault.

[Dan]

The effect of the system is that you experience it as a race attack.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes.

[Dan]

You experience it as. Because of your skin color.

[Trevor Noah]

Because you're like, how else is this happening? It's not happening to anyone else. It's how you're seeing it. And then the people you hang out with, they're also white. They also got robbed. They also got someone kidnapped. They also. So you go, this happens to us more. You get what I'm saying?

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah, yeah. No. 100%. I think that's why, even at that young age, I was not impressed by Zi winning an Oscar. I was like, this is the movie. Yeah. The movie.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Dan]

It plays into the fantasy.

[Eugene Koza]

Plays into the fantasy and the stereotype. And yay. They're angry and jumping walls and taking things because they are on the other side of a planet.

[Dan]

The miracle is that this animal brought the baby back. Like, we never thought miracle.

[Eugene Koza]

They do that.

[Dan]

Oh, wow. You see, we didn't know a Black person could do that.

[Trevor Noah]

And cosplaying as a racist girl.

[Eugene Koza]

See me driving. I don't know.

[Trevor Noah]

Z.

[Eugene Koza]

The same space.

[Dan]

It's very safe.

[Eugene Koza]

I bring my kids here all the time.

[Trevor Noah]

But, yeah, you're right.

[Eugene Koza]

Yes. So there were. There were those situations where there were more movies about that and series and the incentivization to create stereotypes is very huge in this country, in television. And I'm glad at my house we don't have mainstream television. But I'm saying in this country, everywhere in this country. Tina. Tina. We live it.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

Full factor. You know, when I go to the US and watch your tv, and I'm like, you guys are not watching tv. You're watching commercials the whole day. Tina. Here we watch reality shows that purport the stereotype of how black single women behave, about how taxi drivers behave, our taxi owners, and about women with taxi owners and people who are fighting for a home in the township. All those rhetorics are live and happening. And seasons get renewed. Season 10 of People Fighting for a family home in the township.

[Trevor Noah]

You know, what about. So you don't know. You know, it's funny when you say that. I realize sometimes when you have these conversations with people, you. You just do this next time you're hanging out in a group of South Africans who are talking, what, have three.

[Eugene Koza]

Microphones, and if you want, okay, you.

[Trevor Noah]

Have them on your iPhone. But, like, if you sit around and have these conversations, you'll see if you sit around and have these conversations. Notice how differently people respond when you include yourself in. In being aggrieved, right?

[Eugene Koza]

Yes, yes.

[Trevor Noah]

Depending on the color of your skin. It's. It's a really crazy thing.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

So I will see a white South African say, and. Doesn't always happen, but when it does, it's really funny. White South African goal. Yeah, man. This crime, you know, I don't feel safe and blah, blah. Another white South African go, yeah, me too. I just, you know, it's just. It's terrible. And then a black South African will say, yeah, hey, you never know when they come in. And then the white South Africans will look at them like. I mean, they'll look at them like, no, no, but we. But we're, like, afraid of them. You know what I mean? They. They. Sometimes they look at a black person like, no, but you can. Like, it's your cousin.

[Dan]

You can.

[Trevor Noah]

You can ask him not. You can ask him not to take your car. I can't do anything, Okay? I can't do anything. Think about it. My Becky it's just you and your. It's you and your cousin.

[Eugene Koza]

You're safe.

[Eugene]

And white people think that black people's houses with burglar bars is to keep them in.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes, but you know what? It's a. And I think. I think don't feel sorry for this man. No, but you know what I mean, Dan, it's like, to your point, I think that's maybe one of the greatest disservices and injustices we did in our system. And by the way, I am somebody who is actually quite. For what happened with the trc. I know a lot of people have issues, and a lot of people go, it was wrong. And this and this and this. I think it was innovative. I think it was the first time it's ever been done. I don't think it's ever been done anywhere else.

[Dan]

People. Not in that way.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah. People always try and propose it.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

But I think with any system or any idea, there's going to be the implementation. And you realize, oh, we could improve on that. Like a constitution. You can always improve a constitution. But its starting point, especially that part.

[Eugene Koza]

That says South Africa belongs to everyone who lives in it.

[Dan]

You don't like that part?

[Eugene Koza]

No.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Trevor Noah]

This is a conversation for another day.

[Dan]

That's a podcast.

[Trevor Noah]

This is a conversation for another day. No, so what I mean is, like, you can always improve a constitution. You can always improve an idea. I think the trc, first time out. My goodness.

[Eugene Koza]

Incredible.

[Trevor Noah]

What an attempt to mend and to bridge the gaps in a nation where people were separated in a way that most nations have never experienced. Right. But I think the one thing we have yet to do and we have never done is gone. Hey, what is that? Exposure therapy that people need?

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

And like. And sort of an involuntary exposure therapy.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

You know, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, Dale, and we were talking about how at our school they had a program where, because we were the first generation that was like, literally, you and I were the first generation. How old are you, Dan?

[Dan]

31.

[Trevor Noah]

31. Yeah. So we were the first generation of kids that went to school with kids of a different race.

[Dan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Literally. I sometimes think about how crazy that was when I go, like, literally the first year in my school that there were black kids, Indian kids, colored kids with white kids. That was the first time that had ever happened.

[Dan]

You guys were round one. You were the first child. We were literally experiments, yo.

[Trevor Noah]

Our teachers.

[Dan]

So wrong.

[Trevor Noah]

Our teachers had never seen a black child in front of them in a classroom.

[Eugene Koza]

Before our parents had to wear their Sunday best. You're the first drop off.

[Trevor Noah]

Drop off? Our parents didn't even know what a drop off was.

[Eugene Koza]

I mean, drop off.

[Trevor Noah]

Just think about that as a concept. I remember being shocked that when I went to school, kids were dropped off by their parents in a vehicle that they owned. Like, one child got out of one car. Meanwhile, when the black kids got there, it looked like a circus trick where like one car and they'd open a door and then like so many, you 15, you. And. And that's how we just traveled around. The back of every bucky, the back of every van was all of us, you know what I mean? But that exposure, like our school had this program where they went, we want every kid to go and stay at another kid's house who they're friends with. They weren't even like, they weren't like a stranger.

[Dan]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

But they said, hey, you guys are friends.

[Eugene Koza]

But it was a deliberate program, yo.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

It was amazing to see to talking about like exposure therapy. It was amazing to see how the black kids weren't particularly surprised by what they experienced because many of them had moms who were working for white people. So they had seen a glimpse of.

[Dan]

A white light sense of it. Yeah, for sure.

[Trevor Noah]

Let me tell you something. Every single white kid who went to go and live with a black family for a weekend, every single one of them went home and said the same thing. They said, mom and dad, do you know how black people live? And not in like a righteous way. Just as like a child, like a curious way, like a 14 year old, 15 year old. They went, yum junction. Do you know how they live? Do you know how they come to school every day? Do you know that they have to take three buses to get to other people with strangers? Do you know that they don't have hot water in the morning at their house?

[Dan]

You.

[Trevor Noah]

You have to make a fire and then heat it up. And then they call that out and then you have to do it again for each person. And they have to, you know, they all. They don't have their own bathrooms, you know that. Their toilets outside. I go to school with this kid. I see myself as his direct, like competition in that way. But I'm going, how is he doing math when he woke up like that.

[Eugene Koza]

Does it in the dark.

[Trevor Noah]

How is he playing cricket with me.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

Or playing soccer with me. How does he have the energy when he ate like that?

[Dan]

And that goes back to the, the conversation you had with that guy in London about like Starting completely equal from scratch. And about bee laws and redress laws and justice and transformation laws. It's that exact conversation.

[Trevor Noah]

We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.

[Dan]

Trevor, I wanted to. I wanted to suggest something, though, because we've been talking about exposure, but there's something along with that which is about getting South Africans to empathize with each other. So a positive example is the Springboks. If we all feel proud of the Springboks box for, like, making South African.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Like, it cool and, like, good to be South African to be proud. But, like, ironically, one thing that quite often doesn't perfectly cut through all, all classes in a capitalist society, but does further than anything else to create empathy, is service delivery failure.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah.

[Dan]

So one of the best ways for South Africans to empathically get together is to go escom.

[Eugene Koza]

Yes.

[Dan]

And to go the police.

[Eugene Koza]

Yes.

[Dan]

I have seen black and white South Africans.

[Trevor Noah]

ESKOM has brought us together.

[Dan]

Like, it's brought. No, no, it has. It's a joke. And. And it's the truth.

[Trevor Noah]

It's true.

[Dan]

Right?

[Trevor Noah]

It's true.

[Dan]

A. A common agreement that the ANC has failed us in terms of service delivery and other things that, you know, potholes on the road.

[Trevor Noah]

But can I tell you what I like about ESKOM more than the anc?

[Dan]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

The ANC is politics. So what ends up happening is people then fall into that trap of making it a synonym for black.

[Eugene Koza]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

So they go, look at what the ANC has done to South Africa. Then you go, like. Then a black person will say, yeah, no, he. I'm going to start my own political party. Then they're like, no, no, but you might do the same thing. I mean, look at what the ANC has done. Then you're like, oh, okay, You' What I like about ESKOM is it's this nameless, faceless power utility.

[Dan]

Yeah, yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

And what it has done, and this is something that is like. It's. It's crazy to say, but eskom, the power provider in South Africa, has done something that has never happened in South Africa. It has made every South African experience the same thing, regardless of the color of their skin.

[Dan]

Exactly.

[Trevor Noah]

This is the first time in our history when a black person and a white person can sit together and go, you're stage eight. We have the exact same problem. And to your point, we take for granted how it's sad that it has to be a problem, but it's like, that is something that is so fundamentally powerful is for two people to go, hey man, you live in a township, I live in a suburb. But we both, we hate Eskom.

[Dan]

We get it. It's kind of amazing.

[Eugene Koza]

And those are the small victories that as South Africans we tend to miss. I mean, the biggest victory for the TRC was not justice, which would have been great for the victims and the families of the victims, but overall for South Africans was to see these authoritarians who were backed by the state machinery to decimate black people being told to sit down and shut the up.

[Trevor Noah]

Damn.

[Eugene Koza]

That had never happened happened. It happened live with everyone watching. Desmond Duto and whoever was in the pan could say to them, you, this is not flak blast. You're going to sit down, you're going to listen and you're going to answer these questions. That was the overall resounding victory for all South Africans watching, not the fact that they point us to the grave. So if their protest was to bait fast and stay the course and not snitch on each other, well, that's for him and his grave to take two. But for us as South Africans, as we're all watching and we saw this mild mannered man, Desmond Tutu, disabling them with kindness, but subtly telling them as well to sit down and shut the up. For the first time ever that was more powerful to South Africans than Mandela's fist in the air after wearing his wife's glasses standing outside the library. You know, those are good friends. Listen, he looked good after pulling up in a crecida, you know, so those that for us as, as black people sitting there all together and was repeating the news cycle was the biggest victory.

[Dan]

Do you think? It's not the same, but we're talking about things that provide unity and agreement. Do you think that the largely black South African led but many different race groups in South Africa communally telling the refugees to Totsinson Footsek was similar. It was like, you guys off. Yes, we don't want you here. You're completely wrong. We all agree that you've benefited by going to America off of a lie that we all as a country reject. Yes, we all as a country, we all as a country say farm murders are not disproportionate or more brutal than all other murders.

[Trevor Noah]

Well, you see, but even there's no genocide if you pause. I think it's also. This is like something that's guys branding, man. If there's one thing I've learned in observing American politics, don't mess around with branding, especially right wing, as you say, right Right wing branding is flawless. You know what I mean?

[Eugene Koza]

Left wing branding tested left win.

[Trevor Noah]

Left wing branding is often academic and, and like ephemeral at best. It's like, what does that mean?

[Dan]

You need a slogan, you need a yo.

[Trevor Noah]

Just think about it for a second, guys. Farm murders. Guys, why is a murder labeled differently than any other murder?

[Dan]

Totally white genocide.

[Trevor Noah]

But. But I'm like, guys, there are murders happening every single day in South Africa everywhere. They've never been given a special time title.

[Dan]

Also, farm murders implies owners when most of them are laborers or people who just happen to live on the farm. But the branding is wink nudge suggestive that it is the owners who are wink nudge white.

[Eugene Koza]

And you're right to add to that robberies and farms are actually the problem. And the same farmers are not willing to disclose what is being robbed in those farms. As we all know, palms are not cash flash businesses. There's a tractor, there's a baki. Yeah, there's equipment. But what else is there inside your game farm that is worth more than your car in a safe this big?

[Dan]

And it's also, what is it?

[Eugene Koza]

Firearms.

[Dan]

I don't know the stats of ownership of firearms.

[Trevor Noah]

They are expensive.

[Dan]

Yeah, they are very expensive. Yeah.

[Eugene Koza]

The robbery is of the firearm. So if you have to think about someone who has a cachet of firearms because they cater to guests that come from overseas that can fly in their firearms.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh yeah, that's true.

[Eugene Koza]

The kudus and the buffaloes. Now there's 4,500,000 rands worth of firearms and ammunition in a safe. And you've got laborers that don't live or that are not registered to be in this country, right next to the border of the place where they come from, guess what they're going to take in your house.

[Dan]

Something that's also, I mean, what about your iPhone? Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I mean, the nature of rural South Africa is that very, very often a farm is the only place with any kind of asset value for 100 square kilometers and everybody else living in that area are impoverished people living in townships. And that's just a crime story about class. If you only have one really successful high value asset business in a whole area where everyone else doesn't have food to eat, what do you think is going to happen? It's like completely a class dynamic function happening in rural areas where the farms are the only places worth robbing because that's the only places of any kind of value.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, but I think sometimes when we say that, we actually lose part of an argument. It muddies it. I'll tell you why. So sometimes when we say these things, it makes people go, oh, so you're saying I'm only getting robbed because I have the money. Yeah, but I don't want to be robbed. I don't want to be killed. You get what I'm saying? No, no. And that's not what you're saying. I know this is gonna sound crazier, but I think people need to understand in South Africa, I'll say there's two statements. Number one, crime affects everyone. Do you know what I mean? Crime is not. Is not gonna discriminate against your race. Your what? But to your point, the people who are least affected by crime in South Africa are white men.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

The same ones who are crying the most.

[Dan]

Yeah. And by the way, you know what I mean? And this is my particular.

[Trevor Noah]

But our crime does not discriminate. In fact, you remember that story of who was that guy who came to South Africa on a honeymoon? Sh. Divani. Do you remember the story?

[Eugene Koza]

Remember when we love this jacket? Jacket.

[Dan]

Wife dies in the township.

[Eugene Koza]

Remember when you love this jacket?

[Trevor Noah]

I love this jacket.

[Eugene Koza]

We love this jacket.

[Trevor Noah]

We.

[Eugene Koza]

I love this jacket.

[Trevor Noah]

Thank you. Okay. So sorry. For those who don't know, Shirendavani was. It was a story of. I think it was an English national and he came to South Africa for his honey honeymoon. And then he was. He was on honeymoon with his. With his new wife, and then she was tragically killed. And his story was that they got kidnapped by South Africans with black South Africans kidnapped them and then murdered her. And then he escaped. Somehow they let him go and he was. And that was. That was the story. And I will never forget this till the day I die. Because it's one of the. One of the darkest. It's like macabre because it's dark, but it's strangely funny, especially the further you get from it time wise. So literally, South Africans were like, no, if they killed her, they, like, we'd kill you also.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah. You're the biggest threat here as a man.

[Trevor Noah]

And he was like, no, they. They killed her. But then they let. They're like, hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And in the same way I say that it's like the same thing, I go, like, with this, you know, white genocide, it's like, guys, guys, guys, guys, guys. Here our crime comes for everyone. We here, we have democratic crime, have something equal opportunity crime, indiscriminate crime. Our crime time, it's not black empowered. It's not white. Empowered. Have something, someone will try and take it from you. Now, we're not saying we're for that, but we are saying that it's. You know what I mean? That's the reality of it is like we're living in a world. But I would love to go back to what you're saying about like the shared empathy is, I mean, is there actually a way that that can happen?

[Dan]

What do you mean actually?

[Trevor Noah]

So you were saying like the Springboks, you know, like the national rugby team. I will say this is just, and this is just like a side opinion of mine. I personally blame Bafana. Bafana.

[Dan]

Yes, of course.

[Trevor Noah]

Personally, personally. If you look at South Africa's story, our worst moments, Democratic South Africa, our worst moments happen when Bafana Bafana is doing its worst.

[Eugene Koza]

You're engaging me too much on this.

[Trevor Noah]

But I'm saying, look at, but I'm saying, okay, our, our soccer team.

[Eugene Koza]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

Our football team. Guys, when it's at its worst, the country, that team has an outsized weight on his shoulders that I think they need to acknowledge.

[Dan]

And K the Chiefs.

[Trevor Noah]

Guys, you look at, you look at, you look at 2010, you know what? Part of the reason 2010 was so good for us, cuz we were in the World cup, we didn't have to qualify for. We were definitely going to be in it.

[Dan]

Yes.

[Trevor Noah]

1998, that whole period, that honeymoon. What were we doing as, as the, the soccer team in the country, we were winning. Do you get what I'm saying? And I think, I know this is a stretch, but I do think there's also an element in South Africa of when the rugby team wins, the whites have won. Blacks support the rugby team as well. But the apparatus of it is still seen as like, oh, the white institution did a thing right. When the cricket team wins, they go, yeah, you see the white thing won. When Bafana. Bafana loses. Crime. You see those crimes? Did you see how they were playing? Yeah, it's crime. That and I'm being serious.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah, yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

And that's why I say like, like Bafana Bafana has an outsized influence on how the country sees itself. Many of my Brazilian friends have said the same thing. They go, they go, when the Brazilian national team is doing well, Brazil is doing well. When we're doing terribly, you'll see more protests, more violence, more everything. And it might just be confirmation bias, but I do think there's something to how the collective experiences is its reality based on like a few I think.

[Dan]

It'S a consensus decision of how we're doing expressed in a very, very small representative example that makes us feel proud.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes, that's true.

[Dan]

It's like, it's like our very best are the best at the world at a thing that the world cares about. And soccer is the most extreme version of that because soccer is bigger than any religion, it's bigger than any nation, it's the most practiced cultural thing on the planet. It. And we are a football nation first and foremost, particularly amongst black South Africans. We're a football nation first and foremost. And so if football, soccer, our best 11, the boys ban our best stock are good, we feel good. But if our best offering is getting trashed by or say drawing with Lesotho and no disrespect to Lesotho, but you know how South Africans feel about. Listen, that was heavy disrespectful. You see how South Africans talk about. I'm just saying we all saw how South Africa, even black South African talk when Luda said they wanted half of.

[Trevor Noah]

The Free State back.

[Dan]

That we all saw that. No, but what I'm saying is it speaks to our pride in ourselves, our own self value, even if we are not the players. The same way that that like, frankly, and this is both funny and not a joke. When K Chiefs won the Nedbank cup first victory in ten years, many nine year old kids saw their dads happier than they had ever seen them in their whole lives.

[Trevor Noah]

That's true.

[Dan]

There were nine year olds who had seen their dad dads joyful, truly in a childlike manner for the first time in their whole lives because of that one resounding victory. Exactly.

[Eugene]

Terrible. Nine year olds should have done better.

[Dan]

Yeah. Once they should have been, by the way.

[Eugene]

They should have made their parents happier.

[Dan]

But what I'm trying to say is, right, when Tyler does really well, it does have a psychic emotional effect on how we feel. When you do really well, it has a psychic. I do have a question for you.

[Trevor Noah]

You Truth.

[Dan]

Sorry, I've been. I've. I thought of this a bit earlier but like with your success, it made so many of us feel proud. Not just people in the industry, but South Africans going our very best are at the level of the very best. And so we will all very and remain deeply invested in you as a project, as a successful person. Charlize Throne is the same. Tyler is the same. But what I've been thinking about with you recently is that, that you're almost like Captain South Africa to South Africans. You're like Captain America. Because you are our guy who went to the world and showed America what it was like to look at America from outside of it. And you became the center of all of these massive, vital discussions about race and class and world identity and stuff. And so people expect you to be our Captain America, our shield, the one who defends us in the face of everything, almost, who has to do country duty, patriotic duty. People say, oh, Trevor must tell Trump that he's wrong about South Africa. Trevor must tell Elon Musk to stop doing this. And I've always genuinely wanted to ask what that's like for you, because there's this weird thing that you need to be our greatest South African patriot because of how we as a country conceive of you. And I'm quite interested to know what that's like for you to go through.

[Trevor Noah]

So let me start by saying this. If I meet Trump, one on one, guys on site. Hey, guys, my man. I'm telling him. Telling him everything.

[Eugene Koza]

Everything.

[Trevor Noah]

You. He. Us.

[Eugene Koza]

Ha. Hey, wait, are you telling me that Trump will learn what this means from you?

[Trevor Noah]

My man, Trump. Trump knows it. He's halfway there. Those things we also. No, no, no, no. You know, I mean, you're very kind, I think. How do I think of it? For me, so the first and most important thing is I do not believe most of the hype, okay? Because I have friends who humble me very regularly. So, no. But on the real is, I go. One of the most beautiful things I've learned throughout history is how the stories that we flattened to sort of like, lift up individuals are oftentimes a much more complex tapestry than we think. So we say Nelson Mandela, but if we're honest, the list of names that is in and around it is so massive that you're like, oh, this guy was not really, like, the thing.

[Dan]

It didn't live and die by him.

[Trevor Noah]

No. And now I'm not saying Nelson Mandela. I'm not gonna be like, oh, Nelson Mandela didn't do much. No, I'm not saying that. But I'm saying you forget that this was an apparatus. You forget that this was strategic. Martin Luther King Jr. Another example, you know, everyone from his wife, and this is often the case, by the way, with many of these great men, the wife is the person who's doing, like, most of, if not half of the work or more. And their name doesn't live on in the exact same way. You know, writing the speeches, building the strategy, fighting when they're in prison for 27 years, etc. So I think it's easy for people to think of Captain America, but I'm like, yo, man, the Wakandans made that shield. You know what I mean? Who's that vibranium coming from? Do you know what I mean?

[Eugene Koza]

Who built his.

[Trevor Noah]

Because that guy doesn't know how to make a costume. Who put him in that fridge? Who pumped that medicine into his veins? Who made him. The guy went to training. Who's training him? How? They sort of. I think if you ever make the mistake of thinking that you as an individual are a superhero, you then forget every little piece of the puzzle that came together to make you who you are. So I just go, I'm just, I like, I love football. So for me, life, Football isn't an analogy for life always. But I go, the thing I love about football, soccer, the sport is you really learn very quickly. You are just in a team.

[Eugene Koza]

Team.

[Trevor Noah]

Every position on the team.

[Dan]

Vital, vital. Strikers get all the credits all the time.

[Trevor Noah]

Yo, man, strikers get all the credit. But let me tell you something. Good luck being a striker who gets all the credits when your defender lets you down, when your midfielder lets you down, when your goalkeeper lets you down. Just good luck on that. So for me, genuinely, I, I. And it helps me alleviate some of the pressure because I go, I don't take the acclaim the same way. I don't take the pressure totally. Because I go, so you can be grateful. I'm like, hey, thank you. I did my best, and I'm honored that anyone could think that. But at the same time, when someone's like, ah, you must tell them. I do think it's funny if someone's like, trevor, you must tell Trump, then I'm like, my man, I would love to see the world you think I live in. I love the fact that you think I live next door to the White House.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

And then every morning I drive out and Trump is there. Beep, beep. Hey. Ah, man. Ah, Ah. I wish that was the case.

[Eugene Koza]

You're not visualizing that sort of.

[Trevor Noah]

Sorry, but you know what I'm saying?

[Eugene Koza]

Sorry, I got, I got. Sorry.

[Trevor Noah]

Look, no, I, I, I wish that was the case, but I, but I.

[Dan]

Yeah, I think, I just think it's an interesting thing that you go through in, in the way that South Africans perceive of you versus what?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, I'm with you.

[Dan]

But I also, the truth of your.

[Trevor Noah]

Career, I also find it's, it's, it's also semi generational.

[Dan]

Oh, interesting.

[Trevor Noah]

There are many South Africans who are certain generations who sort of don't see me like that. They just see me as, like, a fun ambassador, like our kid who made it right. There's people who are older than me who go like, oh, well done, Mbafanas. Well done. Then there's people who are my age who are like, ah, my man. Ah, nice to see you. I've seen younger ones who are just like. I'm like a mythical figure to them. I honestly think everyone has a role to play. And I don't mean this in like a. Like a Kumbaya kind of way. Yeah, I think everyone has a role to play. And we take for granted how much of an impact that role who has. We all take it for granted. But that's something that my mom left with me, like, man. And you and I have a similar story with, like, our moms, man. My mom, I remember we'd, like, go somewhere random. A school that's got a church event on a weekend. So it's a school, but it's now it's church for the weekend. We'd walk in onto the grounds, there'd be papers lying on the ground, you know, like packets of chips that have been thrown away by the school kids. My mom would start picking them up. Guys, these things are infinite. As the wind blows, so do they. My mom would start picking them up. I would stand there like, what are you doing? It's a Sunday. We're here for a church. She'd be like, ehwena, help me. But I'm like, mom, first of all, it's not our school. It's a Sunday. Come on, man. She's like, yay. Then I'm like, yep. And then she would always say, if I'm not gonna clean it, who's gonna clean it then? Cause everyone else is walking past here saying, it's not my problem. And I think we take for granted. And this is. This is where it's, like, difficult in life. And I think it's for all things. It's you and your personal relationships. It's you and your community, you and your society, you as a nation. Two things can be true at the same time. There's a duality that exists that's difficult for people to deal with because sometimes we're fighting against someone who's trying to flatten it. And so then we become flat ourselves.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

So someone goes, there's genocide of white people in South Africa. And then you go, like, south Africa's great. Then you're like, now you can't address the things that are happening in South Africa because this Person is trying to flatten it. You want to deal with the corruption in the government, but, you know, when you say, yes, there's corruption, they go, yes, the blacks. Then you're like, no, you're using my acknowledgement to empower your racism. But I'm actually trying to work on a problem that needs to be solved. Do you know what I mean? And so I think if you think of it in those small interactions, like, guys white people take for granted. You know, you said it in the beginning, Eugene. White people take for granted how much leeway and grace black people have given them in South Africa. And not like a you're lucky thing, but like, as an ubuntu thing, like real levels of it. Real. And some of it is, you know, internalized oppression maybe, but some of it is just like, yo, man, we're still people. We're still people. And I think like a white person, the average white person takes for granted how their tone of voice, the way they interact with a black person, the way they. And I've seen the difference. I've seen some white people who think the person who cleans their house is lucky to have that job.

[Eugene Koza]

Job.

[Dan]

Yeah, yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

And then I've seen white people who go, yo, man, this person has been cleaning my family's home for maybe two generations even.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

This person has watched and raised my children.

[Dan]

Correct.

[Trevor Noah]

This person has cooked food for my entire family for decades. How is it that they still don't have a driver's license?

[Dan]

Yeah, I hear you.

[Trevor Noah]

How is it that this person. Person who has watched us, they've moved.

[Eugene Koza]

Houses with us, relocated their lives, but.

[Trevor Noah]

How is it that this person hasn't moved houses?

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

So what has happened in our world? Because now if that person was a blood relative, I don't think you would be as proud of yourself.

[Dan]

Yeah, for sure.

[Trevor Noah]

I don't think you'd be able to look at yourself going like, oh, yeah, no. My. My aunt has lived with us for 40 years. She raised me and my. And. And my brothers and sisters forsaken their.

[Eugene Koza]

Own kids and their livelihood.

[Trevor Noah]

Every day when she goes. Goes home, she walks for 10, 20 minutes, then catches a transport, then to another transport, to another transport that takes her three and a half hours to get home.

[Dan]

Yeah, for sure.

[Trevor Noah]

That's my aunt.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

No one would be proud of that.

[Dan]

Wouldn't tolerate it either. Wouldn't allow it to happen.

[Trevor Noah]

And so that. That.

[Eugene Koza]

Sorry. Sorry.

[Trevor Noah]

No.

[Eugene Koza]

Even the. The safety conversation with domestic workers versus the people that. Other people that live in the house who are Family members, they would know how to protect themselves. Where the firearm is, where the panic button is, where the. Who to call. But the person who stays there in the house alone.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes.

[Eugene Koza]

Apparently, according to people, they're exempt to being violated. But here's my thing.

[Trevor Noah]

They answer to your point, actually, to expand on that. And you do say this, Dan, and I think it's important to hit on.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

There are so many times when these farm murders are spoken about and the same people who are going, talking to Trump, going around the world, parading the story, they completely ignore everyone else who also lost their lives in that same robbery or that that same attack. A house on a farm was robbed, was raided.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

The people who were on it were killed. Two of them maybe, three of them maybe were white. The remaining people aren't even counted. And I always say to people, that's probably one of the greatest injustices that black people have suffered throughout time is that even in the worst atrocities go to the Holocaust. Germans counted Jewish people meticulously. We've got a book and numbers the same Germans in Namibia estimates how many black people were killed in those concentration camps. Estimates.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Trevor Noah]

We still don't know. We still. The only reason we know numbers from even the slave trade was because of.

[Eugene Koza]

Books, because of stock accounting. But not even.

[Trevor Noah]

But not accounting of humans. Accounting of money.

[Dan]

You need to say.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes, but I'm saying like that that's. And I think that's one of the big things in South Africa is like if, if we, if we think of it that way, it's not saying to a white person, be guilty. Don't forget guilt.

[Eugene Koza]

Leave it.

[Trevor Noah]

Forget guilt for a moment. Because guilt now makes it. Then it's easy for someone to be like, but I wasn't here. I wasn't here, bro. Yeah, it's fine, my man.

[Eugene Koza]

Why do they.

[Trevor Noah]

It's fine.

[Eugene Koza]

Why, why, why do.

[Trevor Noah]

You also.

[Eugene Koza]

Which. Which part of the syllabus is it for white female teachers that teaches them these two lines?

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, but you see that.

[Eugene Koza]

Where does that.

[Trevor Noah]

But all of that, bro, come from all of that?

[Eugene Koza]

What makes it okay for.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes.

[Eugene Koza]

A person of authority to stand in front of a class where school fees are being paid and minds are saved and say those words without consequence after. It's not a she been here, but.

[Trevor Noah]

Because remember, where is a she bean. But that's my thing is she's right. It's not a shebeen here. And she beans are loud places.

[Dan]

But in that instance, not ideal teaching environment.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah, but.

[Trevor Noah]

But in that instance, you are using Shabeen as a synonym for what? This is not a place of blackness, man. Don't be black here, man.

[Dan]

Yeah, I want to off of what you just said about the uncaringness towards black dad death versus the hyper fixation on white death or like victims of white crime. One of the things, the great things that frustrates me about South Africa is that overwhelming mainstream media obsesses over and cares over white suffering in a way that they don't over black suffering. So I often say if a black person sneezes near a white person, it's a news headline, whereas many black people will die and it won't even become a report. So that comes from, during apartheid, all of the massive media companies, their, their buying audience was wide readers, swat, Khafa and all of the rest. But since apartheid, the capitalist incentive to continue to cater to a paying reading, literate, highly educated audiences meant obsession over white plight without reporting on black death and black suffering and impoverished people's suffering. And then it also comes down to something that you always talk about, which is language, which is so important because if broadly the biggest media in the country and the hyper commercialized media is broadcasting in English and Afrikaans, it's just less likely that anyone's ever going to think what does the Zulu community want to read about? What does the Hosa community care about? Which often then means people dying, people really, really suffering. And so if you come to South Africa and you read our biggest news sites365 Days of the year, something extraordinarily horrific needs to happen to a black person before it's news.

[Trevor Noah]

Yes.

[Dan]

Something unbelievably Tabo Besta needs to happen to hear about that where exactly. Whereas smaller infractions. And again, whenever we talk about crime, as you said earlier, we can't debase it. We can't. I'm not saying that these crimes don't matter. I'm just saying smaller, less harmful crimes when white people are the victims become explosions.

[Eugene Koza]

Yeah.

[Dan]

And for that explosion to happen for a black victim, it needs to be horrific. Like think about how Tabo Bester never ever, and there are other reasons why the Oscar Pistorius case was so massive. But Tabo Bester versus Oscar Pistorius, and I know it's horrible to be in count when people have died, but Tabo Bester, all of his victims, the horrific that he did for such a long time versus the coverage of Oscar Pastorius because Reaver was a white victim. And again, not debasing Reaver at all, the tragedy every Single, what I'm trying to talk about is how South Africa's media needs to change to care about black suffering properly. And they may actually find out that that's, in a purely capitalistic way, really good business. Because most people in South Africa are black and want to know about their lives and their lived experience.

[Eugene Koza]

You know, what Dan is saying is absolutely true. And I even go a step further, and I say there's a systematic way that the media has kept a white, a black majority that is influential and exposed to technology busy and distracted. Because every time something happens that's big, something else happens in the pipeline that kind of distracts us from this whole thing. For example, as black people, we are forced to always take the moral high ground when things happen. Apartheid. We are being told we must be emotionally mature. It wasn't me, it was the system. Now you guys are in schools. Yes. But I'm like, no, now you're expecting me to cure something that was caused by a system with my emotions. So how about a system gets created to cure what that system managed to do?

[Trevor Noah]

Amen.

[Eugene Koza]

So we need a systematic problem. I mean, systematic solution for a systematic problem. And let me deal with my emotions and spend my time the way I like. But the fact that we are always distracted. And when something happens, people go to a country and purport whatever they purport. Then we look at our local economy and politics. Something seismic always happens right in the middle of that. And I'm going, we're such a small country that that kind of manipulation can happen.

[Dan]

Happen totally. And what I want to add to that, Looping back to the tr. Oops, sorry. Looping back to the TRC is one of the terrible things about the TRC that the country is constantly being distracted away from, is that many victims were awarded financial restitution and have not got.

[Eugene Koza]

It yet till today.

[Trevor Noah]

Wait, what?

[Dan]

2025.

[Trevor Noah]

I didn't know that.

[Dan]

And every single year, the remaining victor, the remaining people who were awarded financial.

[Trevor Noah]

Compensation, they had, haven't received it.

[Dan]

And many of them have died now. And every year they get together and they demand from the justice upon where is our money? And they're dying. And the TRC you were talking about, first phase, was beautiful. But since then, people who who were not given amnesty have not been charged. Inquiries are now being opened. But it's 2025. The Cradock Four have been long dead in the ground and only now that case is being investigated when in the early 2000s, those were the people who were supposed to be investigated First. And thousands and thousands of people who were awarded victims who are awarded financial compensation from the TRC are still begging the government to give them the money that they should have got in like 2002. But we are so distracted as a country that that doesn't make the news that you two, who are both very informed, didn't know about it.

[Trevor Noah]

Yeah, I didn't know that at all.

[Dan]

And I only found out four months ago because my brother was working at the kind of conference gathering where all of the still alive victims came and said, said, where is our fucking money? And so yes, we do need to talk about how South Africa also, I mean, I'm sure you guys saw recently, South Africa is the most online country in the world. We're the most phone addicted country in the world in terms of screen time. We're like number one in the world.

[Trevor Noah]

I did not see that.

[Dan]

We're number one in like corruption and that.

[Trevor Noah]

Wow, I didn't see that.

[Dan]

And rugby, those are our strengths. But despite of all of that, we are a deeply easily distracted nation. And that means that we don't know things as basic as there are victims of the TRC who have not yet got compensation in 2025. It's crazy.

[Eugene Koza]

You don't even know when the by elections are. The average South African doesn't know when the byelections are. They're not advertised. The parties discuss amongst themselves, then they go along, select a person and the by elections happen. Ten people show up, the award is won. So there's a lot of people. And, and I did say this, I said in a pot in McG's podcast a few years ago, I said there's a systematic approach to distracting South Africans digitally. So these, I've said this, it's on record. So these facts that you're saying make sense. I did say it. I said if you maybe switch off your phone a little bit and maybe not look at the hashtags and not look at what videos are trending, maybe dig deeper. There's something there. From every crisis that we've experienced in this country, it all starts out with something else happening. Pot Bellinger style. What was it again? Bell Pottinger style on the side, purporting to be something else. And then all of a sudden we don't know that the by elections happen or this person got annexed as a mayor or Helen Zilla now is trying to be the mayor of we is it all after you've just done the roast, now you're using that as a platform to launch your mayorship in the same city that you. But we, when we say this, we look like we're speaking from a place of privilege. And because we are speaking from a place of privilege, we can afford not to use technology as an escape goat, but as a vessel to get this information. So. But I think that is our problem right now in South Africa. I think it's our nature to be, be accepting, to be willing to try to forgive, to move forward. But we've never had our own house to ourselves when the visitors have left and speak the truth amongst each other as a family and decide how we're going to do this life thing with the, with the neighbors and how we feel about our relatives who keep showing up and making it as if all we've done here was waste our time and not build a wall that's high enough. That's what we need to be having in this country. But I feel like people like you, Dan, and I'm not saying saying you as a white person, I'm saying you as a brave person to forsake everything that could go wrong. We live in that corporate world where calls will stop because you've said something that you are not supposed to say and you're not toeing the line. But for you to say, I'm not doing this because I work for a channel. I'm not doing this because I'm white. I'm doing this because I know that is the ultimate sacrifice in the modern day era. It's not picking up an AK47 and going to the trenches and trying to live in Lusaka and fight from there. It's you saying something and people like us who want to say something. We're not going to be people's favorites. Our calls are going to dry up a little bit. People are going to be offended in some way where they make a decision. But at the end of the day, we are saying what South Africans are not privileged enough to say. And that's one way where I think the middle class and the Mandela experience or experiment can be used when in unison. People who come from three different backgrounds can sing with one voice and go. But are we looking carefully at what is being said here?

[Dan]

Yeah, I think that's incredibly kind. Thank you. What I will, what I will. I love how every week a different political party is paying my bills according to South Africa. I've had Eff Soros, Putin, Da Freedom Front plus like every week. And something that I like about what is starting to happen in South Africa is people are starting to recognize that there are people who are clearly bought and paid for and spoken for to push an agenda. And you can spot it. You know the position they're gonna take on everything, what they're gonna talk about and not talk about. But slowly but surely, what America has, which you know better than, I guess anyone else in this room, is people. America has people who you broadly know their politics, but you definitely know that they're saying what they really think. Because now and again, say, Jon Stewart will say, fuck these Democrats, they're fucking this up so badly. South Africa is slowly getting to the point now where if you. People like you, who consistently say what they think and everyone goes, ah, but that's not part of the agenda that I thought he was a part of. If you do that for long enough, eventually people will go, ah, no, fuck, Eugene's just saying what he thinks. And then they can really believe what you think because they don't think you're bought, paid for and spoken for. And that's my project is I just need to keep talking. I just need to keep saying exactly what I think. And after long enough, people will go, yeah. Eight weeks of the year, we think he's ANC. 12 weeks of the year, we think He's DA. 20 weeks of the year, we think, think he's MK. He's probably just saying what he genuinely thinks.

[Eugene]

But if people really know you truly.

[Trevor Noah]

He'S truly a member of the rainbow nation. That's what people.

[Eugene]

If people really know Dan, they know that his real money comes from collecting all the checks of coming second and Eric Tinkler look alike competition.

[Trevor Noah]

That's a deep cut. You see, you still want to call him the butt of the joke.

[Dan]

I am. Football is my religion. I know more about Eric Tinkler than I know about some of my siblings. Brother. Like, I know it's deep.

[Trevor Noah]

You think, you think this guy, butt of the joke, man, ladies and gentlemen, the only reason he's the butt is because he'll shit on you. This one, he'll shit on you from a high height. Yo, man. Dan, thank you, man. Thanks for joining us.

[Dan]

Thank you, man.

[Trevor Noah]

But to Eugene's point, thank. Because I think we take for granted that any issue worth discussing or fighting or moving in and around is not meant to be held by one person.

[Dan]

Right?

[Trevor Noah]

You know, and that's, that's where I think we've. We've always gotta come around on these issues, is if we think this is a white people thing, we've lost it. If we think it's a black People thing. We've lost it. If we. It's like, no, no, no. It's a people thing. And I think speaking about it from everybody's perspective just lends a little credence to it. And so that. That was really one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. Cause I loved just seeing from. And I could see in your eyes is the moment when you're sitting with people on Piers Morgan. Everyone has come. The premise is like, white genocide in South Africa. And immediately everyone proceeds to say, there is no white genocide. There is no, like, literally everyone calls. I'll say to Eugene, you know what it's the equivalent of in South Africa? It's like people have phoned the police, called the police, and they said, I'm getting murdered. Someone's murdering me right now. And the police come to their house, and they go, where's the murder? And they go, okay, there's not actually a murder. But while you're here, can we talk about. Can we just talk about how every time I come home, she tells me to put my shoes on and the police are like, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait. Where's the crime, though?

[Dan]

Exactly what you're doing?

[Trevor Noah]

Well, it's not a crime per se, but can you not see how.

[Dan]

And it could one day become a crime?

[Trevor Noah]

Yes. And I think that's what a lot of these people did, which I'm glad you. You call out as bs. They used the most heinous word they could think of. They used the word that would grab attention.

[Dan]

Exactly.

[Trevor Noah]

To then expose what, if we're honest, are gripes. Gripes that everyone has a right to have, by the way. I'm not saying you shouldn't be angry about equally. No, but they're gripes that we share equally. And to your point, and to what you said as well, we don't even share it equally, because on the. In South Africa, if you want to run to the White House and you want to ask them for help.

[Eugene Koza]

Help.

[Trevor Noah]

Talk about black women. Do you know what I'm saying? If you said to me like, hey, man, Trump is coming here because what's happening to black women in South Africa is unacceptable, then I'd go, hey, man, Trump, absolutely. Get in here and do your thing. Does that make sense? But you're not. You know what I mean? You've used your power and your access to it to go and argue about gripes. Because fundamentally, the last thing I'll say on this is, I have never in my life seen refugees with Samsonite luggage. I have never in my life seen refugees fleeing a five bedroom house. You know what I mean? And I'm not saying it just in terms of wealth, because I understand as a refugee, you can be pushed out, optionally evacuating, just because.

[Dan]

And crucially, I've never seen a refugee leave his mother behind. He'll fetch her later, bruh.

[Eugene Koza]

I've never seen a refugee doing viewings at their house on a Sunday afternoon. I mean, there's a drip bedroom.

[Dan]

It's a lovely area.

[Trevor Noah]

Yo, bruh, have you never seen a refugee selling their quarry before they leave?

[Eugene Koza]

It's your turn now. You've never seen a refugee do what?

[Trevor Noah]

These are the games we play in South Africa as kids.

[Eugene Koza]

Okay, I'll take it and then you can. I've never seen a refugee with cholesterol before.

[Dan]

That's good. I'm not going to be there. Thank you, Eugene.

[Trevor Noah]

Oh, man. No, man, this was great, Dan. Eugene. This was too much fun. Quick confession. This actually wasn't the. We were actually planning to kill you.

[Dan]

When you got here.

[Trevor Noah]

But that's why I brought you gifts.

[Dan]

To try and. To try and.

[Trevor Noah]

You know what, Dan? You're one of the good ones, man. You're one of the good ones.

[Dan]

Thanks, man. I appreciate it.

[Trevor Noah]

What now with Trevor Noah is produced by Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin and Jody Avigan. Our senior producer is Jess Hackle. Claire Slaughter is our producer. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannis Brown. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next Thursday for another episode of what Now.

[Dan]

Sa.