The X of Apartheid

During Apartheid in South Africa, authorities would mark the homes of Indigenous people with an X, destined for demolition to make way for white housing. Over time, the X became a symbol of resistance, signifying “We are the marked ones.”

In the municipal elections of October 1988, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and other anti-apartheid resistance groups, such as the United Democratic Front, refused to participate, arguing that the elections were not free but rather an attempt to legitimize racist power. The X again became a controversial symbol, as it signified participation in illegitimate elections by marking an X on the ballot. The union distributed leaflets that read:

“X is for apartheid: X is for poverty: X is for high rent: X is for oppression.”

The X became, once again, the symbol of South African Apartheid.

It was the year that whites, and especially wealthy whites, became very nervous in South Africa, as nervous as Batista’s Cubans had been in 1959. According to Nelson Mandela, the Cuban Revolution, which supported the Angolan independence movement (against the colonial government backed by Washington and Cuban mercenaries working for the CIA), was fundamental to the fall of Apartheid in South Africa. It wasn’t the 1988 or 1989 elections that made the difference.

In 1989, months after the anti-X campaign, the Musk family sent their 17-year-old son, Elon, to study in Canada. Twenty years later, Musk would privatize Twitter, a source of income and power even greater than the Musk family’s emerald mines in Africa.

It was unnecessary, and surely a coincidence or a harmless slip of the tongue, that immediately after taking over Twitter, he changed a globally recognized name to X, a symbol still resisted by users of non-English languages ​​who cannot conjugate a letter (in English, a noun can become a verb without changing its morphology, simply by its position in a sentence) and continue to say «twittear» (to tweet).

Jorge Majfud, Feb. 2026