It must have been a disorientating week for Leon Schreiber. No sooner had the DA MP been appointed Minister of Home Affairs in the new Government of National Unity than he learnt on X (formerly Twitter) that everything he thought he knew about himself, and his origins, was a racist lie.
Schreiber had long believed that he was born in September 1988 in the then Cape Province, as his birth certificate indicated. On Sunday evening, shortly after his appointment was announced, an anonymous Wikipedia user in the Eastern Cape updated Schreiber’s profile with the explosive revelation that Schreiber had in fact been born in Borrowdale, Harare, Zimbabwe. Not long after that another Wikipedia user updated his nationality to “Zimbabwean]]n”.
However, other users pushed back and, after some edits back and forth, by Monday morning Schreiber’s place of birth was changed back to South Africa. However, the up-and-coming influencer Mehmet Vefa Dag - who is often retweeted in RET circles - then sought to expose the sinister nature of Schreiber’s origins and the cover-up, he believed, that had just occurred.
In a series of widely circulated posts on X on Monday morning Dag - who originally hails from Turkey and is not known to be the world’s greatest friend of the Jewish people – set about revealing Schreiber’s “true” origins through screenshots of the minister’s Wikipedia page.
“Leon Amos”, Dag wrote in an early post, is “unknown man” and a “danger for our home affairs”, now “children Israel will flock into our country.” In a follow up post he asked how a “Zimbabwean foreigner” like Schreiber could be given such a key post in government. Moreover, he pointed out, there was a cover-up underway as Schreiber’s place of birth “was changed 5 hours ago from Zimbabwe to South Africa, this is happening while South Africa is watching.”