MALAIKA MAHLATSI

For many years, Mesut Özil was regarded as one of the best players in the German national football team. Between 2011 and 2016, he was voted German national team player of the year a total of five times. He was loved deeply by Germans, who saw him as one of their own.

And Özil was one of their own. After all, he was born and raised in the city of Gelsenkirchen, in the west German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. But he was not just a German – a fact that he would repeat many times, stating in 2018, “I have two hearts, one German and one Turkish” – he was also proudly of Turkish descent.

Özil is a third-generation Turkish immigrant and a practising Muslim who, according to German media, recites from the Holy Quran when he enters the field.

There is no bolder declaration of Özil’s allegiance to Türkiye, a Muslim-majority country, than his commitment to his faith. Germany, like most of Western Europe, is the belly of Islamophobia. So, for Özil, regarded one of the most influential German players, a man who was once the most expensive German player in the world, following a $50m (R887,42m) transfer from Real Madrid to Arsenal,, this was a bold statement.

But Özil retired from international football in 2018 after Germany was eliminated from the Fifa World Cup at the group stage. Despite being part of a team comprising other renowned stars, he was singled out for the country’s dismal performance. He was made a scapegoat for the failures of the German national team, as if he alone had underperformed.

The Germans had conveniently forgotten that just four years prior, their national team had been crowned champions of the same tournament, and that Özil had played an instrumental role in that. This time around, he was the problem, and he alone was to blame for their brutal elimination.

The reason Özil was scapegoated on the field had nothing to do with his form. It was because – just a month before the 2018 Fifa World Cup – he and his German-Turkish teammate, Ilkay Gündogan, had posed for a picture with Türkiye president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in front of the media.

Erdoğan is regarded by many in Western Europe, and certainly in Germany, as a “dictator”. And so, what for Özil was an act of paying respect to the highest office of his family’s country was deemed by Germans as showing support for a “dictator”. His Germanness came into question, and this led him to retire from the national team in July 2018. He released a statement on his social media that detailed the precariousness of national belonging, making the profound point: “I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose.”

I was reminded of Özil on Tuesday morning when US president, Donald Trump, in response to his former ally, billionaire Elon Musk, referred to him being South African. On Monday, Musk criticised members of Congress who had voted for a debt increase bill championed by Trump. He went on to state that the members of Congress who voted for the bill would lose their primary elections in 2027, “if it is the last thing I do on this Earth”.

Trump responded by saying that without subsidies for his electric vehicles, “Elon would probably have to close shop and head back home to SA”. Though born in SA, Musk emigrated to Canada in 1989 and became a citizen shortly thereafter. In 2002, he became a dual American citizen.

Over the past few months, Trump has held Musk up as a patriotic and great American. But now, when things have soured between them, he refers to him as a South African, despite Musk’s disassociation and contempt for our country.

It’s a reminder to Musk and all Africans that they are only of the West when they are “good”. As soon as they misbehave, they’re reminded of their place – that they are immigrants from “s*ithole nations”, to borrow Trump’s infamous words.