As some of you may or may not know, Starlink is still not available in South Africa despite being available in almost every other neighbouring African country. Many US companies still operate in South Africa despite the government mouthing off against the US so many times, straining relationships and costing them their precious handouts from the US government.
In the case of Starlink, the tl;dr is South Africa's racist policies prohibit white owned companies from doing business on certain levels and in certain sectors, especially infrastructure. Other US companies basically just go along with the South African government's racist laws or they possibly just grease the right palms to stay in business.
There is a bigger problem with Starlink specifically. Neither the South African government or any of the other big corporations really give a shit about rural infrastructure and definitely not high speed internet. Our cellphone providers have picked up the slack a little bit in rural areas but LTE/5G internet comes at a huge cost and they sell it to you by the GB instead of just unlimited internet.
Starlink will essentially offer a better deal virtually overnight if it were to launch in South Africa and such a disruption is unacceptable to the greasballs who run our cellphone infrastructure.