Afrikaner Boers arriving in Argentina in 1906 (Wikimedia Commons licence: CC BY-SA 4.0)
Mixed receptions: Dollar princesses and bittereinders
“The Prince of Wales is really wonderful. I mean, even if he was not a prince, he would be wonderful, because even if he was not a prince, he would be able to make his living playing the ukulele, if he had a little more practice.” – Anita Loos, 1925, from Gentlemen prefer blondes
“There is always a British title going a-begging – always some decayed or degenerative or semi-drunken peer, whose fortunes are on the verge of black ruin, ready and willing to devour, monster-like, … an American virgin, provided bags of bullion are flung, with her, into his capacious maw.” – Marie Corelli, 1905
The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and the British Film Institute have just held their first ever film festival at sea on the “new” Cunard liner Queen Mary. Her predecessor, the first Queen Mary, carried tens of thousands of American soldiers to join the war, and if there was a Victoria Cross for ships, she would have been awarded it.
My wife and I joined the latest iteration of the Queen in Southampton for the eight-day crossing to New York. It was a marvellous trip, offering intellectually stimulating classic movies with accompanying lectures. I recommend the hilarious Gentlemen prefer blondes, a much underrated film about prohibition America, based on a huge best-seller in the ’20s by Anita Loos, and with a happy ending; whereas the Great Gatsby, published in the same year (1925), is a book also about prohibition America, but with a tragic ending. I'll return to Loos’s book a bit later. There’s a parabolic link with the Afrikaner refugees heading for Washington currently.
Our sons have American godfathers, one on the east coast and one on the west coast, and so we bolted on visits accordingly. A convenient sleeper train from New York to Seattle, via Chicago, takes three days and nights, with a decent dining car as part of an inexpensive package, and this provided an invaluable opportunity to meet fellow locals and get their take on recent events.
My first visit to America was way back in 1981. These were the days of so-called constructive engagement – a carrot and stick approach – and Ronald Reagan, who was president at the time, was determined that Pretoria should remain an anti-communist ally, while simultaneously being encouraged to dump apartheid. He and Thatcher worked in harness to achieve this, and Mandela and De Klerk jointly shared the Nobel Peace Prize as a reward.
In any event, even though I subsequently visited America on several further occasions, I didn’t now know what to expect from Trump’s America. For months, Trump has been so demonised in the international press, including the South African press, that I was prepared for anything. Would the debonair Juan, of Juan in America (1931), the eponymous hero of Scottish writer Eric Linklater, still recognise the place? What would PG Wodehouse make of it all? Would Bertie Wooster still find his way around?
In fact, I needn’t have worried. If anything, there was enough marvellous mania going around in New York to rival anything, even by the standards of Carl Hiaasen, America’s greatest contemporary comic writer. On my second day in New York, I switched on the TV and there was the great man (Trump) in person, being interviewed by a reporter1. It was a kind of fireside chat, very relaxed and confidingly personal. The reporter asked Trump whether he regarded himself as a nationalist. “Oh, yes,” replied the president instantly, drawing himself up: “I am a nationalist – an American nationalist!”
He looked and sounded – with exactly the same expression, in that moment – like the National Party leaders of my day – Afrikaans nationalists to a man: people like John Vorster, Dr Treurnicht, Connie Mulder, Pik Botha and others. A long list of names. Promoters of Christian National Education, die rooi gevaar, sanksies, selfstandigheid, adapt or die, swartgevaar, interests not friends, etc. The Uncle Trump interview loped along, using different terms for the same kind of patriotic appeal: tariffs, immigrants, religion, America being screwed by the entire world, draining the swamp and so on.
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Americans are much more old-fashioned than the chattering classes overseas realise. They are enormously hospitable and charming, and very courteous to one another in real life. In general, almost everyone I spoke to seemed pretty calm about Trump, and hardly ever mentioned his name, preferring instead to talk about “the president” if it came up at all, in the context of where they stood as Republicans or Democrats.
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America, the new sovereign America, suddenly became much more explicable for me when examined through this prism. Almost every encounter I had with ordinary Americans thereafter was freighted with such old-school sentiments. Americans are much more old-fashioned than the chattering classes overseas realise. They are enormously hospitable and charming, and very courteous to one another in real life. In general, almost everyone I spoke to seemed pretty calm about Trump, and hardly ever mentioned his name, preferring instead to talk about “the president” if it came up at all, in the context of where they stood as Republicans or Democrats. The guy who got most stick from Democrats was more likely to be Elon Musk.
So, Trump the nationalist: in a curious echo of synchronicity, a few days later, I found myself strolling into that same Afrikaans landscape of long ago that I was so familiar with, through the lens of South Africa’s greatest photographer, the late David Goldblatt. A major exhibition of his work was being staged at the Yale University Art Gallery. Entitled No ulterior motive, the showing invited students to engage with issues of history, justice and inequality through the Goldblatt lens.
As the curators accurately noted, instead of capturing the dramatic and often violent moments that defined the era, he focused on the quieter, everyday experiences of people navigating systemic injustice. His work serves as a reminder that history is shaped not just by major events, but by the lives of ordinary people who live through them. The photographs featured several key themes: informality, dialogue and assembly.
Just so. Here were atmospheric black and white pictures, evocatively bringing to life packed early morning trains carrying black workers to the city. Or the interiors of simple dwellings, both black and white. Villages with the tall spire of the dominant Dutch Reformed Church, stern dominies, nagmaal. Other photos captured life on the farms: tractors, mealies, the simple needs.
All very sixties and seventies, and as Goldblatt observed: “The use of colour during apartheid would have been inappropriate. It would have enhanced the beautiful and the personal, whereas black and white photographs more effectively documented the external dramatic contradictions that defined this earlier period.”2 One photo of a stage crowded with dark-suited NP politicians and their equally besuited wives – possibly at an agricultural festival; those stern faces, unsmiling, like prophets in no doubt – reminds of Trump himself: a prophet of certitudes, adamantine convictions and allegedly deep protestant religious beliefs, especially following his recent near-death experience at the hands of a sniper.
It therefore comes as little surprise that he has expanded American hospitality to include protestant Bible-carrying Afrikaans refugees (not a word to be used in quotes, as some newspapers are doing, since it simply denotes a search for refuge) who feel destabilised by the likes of Julius Malema issuing political statements threatening to “kill the farmer, kill the boer”. This, while the Ramaphosa government seemingly still wants to take away their language as a medium of education, and property without compensation, while at the same time insisting that black economic empowerment remains a valid policy, notwithstanding that a concession may be made in this respect to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service.
President Ramaphosa labelled the initial group of 49 refugees as “cowards”, although they do allegedly satisfy the UN definition of what constitutes refugee status – notably a threatened minority. By that definition, the Pilgrim Fathers settling America in 1620 were refugees from England as well. They wanted religious freedom. Besides, as the senior civil servant deputed to welcome the new Afrikaans arrivals to Washington told the press, they will assimilate well.
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South Africans do tend to adapt to the open-space American way of life, in the same way that they have adapted to places like Australia and Canada. In Trump’s eyes, they are the right stuff.
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He is probably not wrong. South Africans do tend to adapt to the open-space American way of life, in the same way that they have adapted to places like Australia and Canada. In Trump’s eyes, they are the right stuff.
Of course, one must also bear in mind that this is not the first time that South Africans, in particular Afrikaners, have sought refuge abroad. The most notable migratory wave was directly after the Boer War in 1902, which ended with a British victory. It involved something in the order of 650 bittereinders who simply could not stomach the thought of living under English occupation. Many had lost their farms, owing to Kitchener’s scorched earth policy, and so they sent a fellow spirit, Louis Baumann, to Argentina to manage the establishment of a new Afrikaans colony.
Nobody would ever have called them cowards. They were some of the finest soldiers that ever rode a horse, fighting to the bitter end, refusing to surrender. Hard men, whose wives barely survived the British concentration camps. Some had lost children to disease in those camps. Eventually, they arrived in clusters, on British ships, together with their ox wagons, and the Argentine government provided them with free farmland and tents. Today, four generations later, they have integrated thoroughly. Argentina’s gain, South Africa’s loss.
It is noteworthy, too, that a country like Wales also sent migrants to Argentina, and for many of the same reasons. Welsh-speaking, they feared a loss of national identity, owing to the imposition of the English language in Welsh schools and the armed forces. A colony of Wales sprang up in Patagonia. Today, in Wales, it’s the reverse of the medal. Bilingual state schools require Welsh alongside English, and you'll have difficulty getting a job if you can’t speak Welsh. Thatcher was ironically the trigger for the extraordinary expansion of the Welsh language, authorising state radio and television stations dedicated to Welsh-language programmes and broadcasts.
A number of other countries in the world have also taken in Afrikaans-speaking South Africans. Angola is one, where the Afrikaans population is estimated at 2 500 today. There are 15 other countries with quite large South African migrant populations as well, including many Afrikaans speakers. America has 24 000, Australia 48 000 and the UK 251 000. Even Zambia has 117 000.3
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The entire question of migrants is a hot topic in Europe, a litmus of the direction of politics in most EU countries, including Brexit Britain. As more and more illegal migrants take to the small boats, the difficulty of stopping them is challenging the conscience of liberal democrats.
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The entire question of migrants is a hot topic in Europe, a litmus of the direction of politics in most EU countries, including Brexit Britain. As more and more illegal migrants take to the small boats, the difficulty of stopping them is challenging the conscience of liberal democrats. Only in Trump’s America have border controls succeeded. He is not a liberal democrat, but an American nationalist, and as such marches to a different drumbeat.
Shrewd observers of the dilemmas that migration throws up, for both the migrants themselves as well as the receiving countries, are interrogating the notion of “should we stay or should we go”. A recent book by Alice Austen, 33 Place Brugmann, is about how a diverse group of Belgians responded to the Nazi occupation in 1940. It is not easy to flee, and besides, where would one go? Fleeing is dangerous and expensive. Would they be welcomed by the inhabitants of their destination? Other writers, like Erich Maria Remarque, have also examined things from the refugees’ point of view.
We must not suppose that all migrants – some of whom may be seeking refuge, as this particular group of Afrikaners are – will be universally welcomed in their new host country. Very few people will feel empathy for them. Some may feel they had it coming after the years of apartheid; others will be baffled that they don’t look like waifs dressed in rags from the wastes of Gaza. Certainly, they don’t resemble your typical refugee haunting the nightly television news.
But this brings me back to Anita Loos and Gentlemen prefer blondes, and also a different kind of migrant/refugee who is light years away from today’s stereotypical refugees. These were the several hundred American women, grouped together as the “dollar princesses”, who, over a period between 1870 and 1914, married into the British peerage (102 of them) and the British upper classes (many more). In fact, in the latter case, while many were indeed rich heiresses in search of a title, not all were rich, and some were referred to as sad poachers of men.
The interesting thing is that, as in the case of the recent Afrikaans group of refugees heading for the USA, the dollar princesses as a distinct migrant group attracted the same kind of criticism. The preface to a wonderful exhibition of artist John Sargent’s portraits of the dollar princesses states: “From President Roosevelt to the local press, American and British opposition to the heiresses' transatlantic marriages was consistent and fierce.”
And Roosevelt, sounding just as disapproving as Ramaphosa, complained: “I thoroughly dislike these international marriages.” He was echoing a generally held narrative that these women were taking the wealth out of America and pouring it into an undeserving land of decaying mansions and spendthrift aristocrats.
Roosevelt was mild in his criticism compared with Marie Corelli, quoted in the Sargent prospectus: “There is always a British title going a-begging – always some decayed or degenerative or semi-drunken peer, whose fortunes are on the verge of black ruin, ready and willing to devour, monster-like, … an American virgin, provided bags of bullion are flung, with her, into his capacious maw.” The British were even more cruel to the new arrivals, who were characterised as “strange and abnormal creatures” who were lowering the birth rate of the all-important male heir of the English aristocracy.
All this was catnip to Anita Loos. Her heroine, circa 1920s in the flapper era, was engaged in exactly the same game as all the other dollar princesses, fending off a series of callow aristocratic flatterers until eventually – well, you must read the book. As late as 1989, the dollar princesses were still attracting notoriety. Maureen Montgomery, in her book Gilded prostitution, says: “Stereotyping usually involved people of a different nationality, social class or gender, but the American heiress stereotype embraces all three.”
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The truth is that people emigrate for all sorts of reasons. Some flee dangerous settings, others are attracted to better job prospects, and yet others are drawn to family reconnections and so forth. I wouldn’t be too hard on the latest examples. It always requires courage to transplant oneself, and requires an enormous mental and emotional effort to integrate and adapt into any new country.
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The truth is that people emigrate for all sorts of reasons. Some flee dangerous settings, others are attracted to better job prospects, and yet others are drawn to family reconnections and so forth. I wouldn’t be too hard on the latest examples. It always requires courage to transplant oneself, and requires an enormous mental and emotional effort to integrate and adapt into any new country. There will always be a risk that you will be grouped and labelled like the dollar princesses or the latest Afrikaner refugees, and the successful émigré will simply shrug it off like water off a duck’s back, to reprise a well-known South African phrase.
End notes
1 Fox, 17 March 2025.
2 Sargent’s American portraits, English Heritage, Kenwood, London. Until 5 October 2025.
3 Joshua Project. Afrikaners and religion.
Also read:
Revisiting the end of the world: an interview on language identity and displacement
"In die gront van die wint" – dagboekaantekeninge oor ses dae met die Boere van Patagonië
Migrants: fear of the "Other" changing the face of politics in Europe
The post A movie festival, visits to the USA, Afrikaner refugees and Donald Trump first appeared on LitNet.
The post A movie festival, visits to the USA, Afrikaner refugees and Donald Trump appeared first on LitNet.