The other side of the Afrikaner 'refugee' coin — Americans who live/work/love in South Africa

Right now, South Africans are seized with the story of a few dozen Afrikaners who gained quick, privileged — and more than a little problematic — access to refugee status, allowing them to emigrate to the US.

They queue-jumped thousands of others around the world, many of whom had already been thoroughly vetted for immigration to the US as refugees, but who have been stopped in their tracks due to a halt by the Trump administration of refugee immigration into the US. Those waiting in that long queue are in addition to those who will continue to try their luck at crossing illicitly along the country’s southern border.

In South Africa, much has already been written about or spoken on broadcasts on radio or television (along with some funny, but sharp, biting humour on social media platforms) highlighting how a false claim of white Afrikaner farmer persecution and genocide was injected deeply into the mind of President Donald Trump — beginning with commentaries by Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show, back in 2018.

(In Trump’s recent statements, he has begun using the word “genocide”, despite the fact that circumstances fall vastly short of even approaching any standard under international law for such a charge. Such charges are, in fact, largely a sop to the Maga crowd in the US who concern themselves with things like “white replacement theory”.)

Regardless of any facts, the offer of refugee status solely for Afrikaners became one of the first executive orders signed by the new president. Now it is thoroughly entwined with harsh criticism of South Africa’s foreign policy choices. These range from South Africa’s warm ties with Russia, China and Iran, its pursuit of an International Court of Justice case against Israel over its military actions in Gaza, and, most recently, to the growing rancour over the themes of this year’s G20 meeting as set out by this year’s chair, South Africa. (A weird irony comes into play, as the US is supposed to be next year’s chair, even as its officials have now been enjoined from participating in any preparation or meetings for the upcoming summit.)

We are not going to retell in any depth the saga of the faux refugees. Instead, we want to examine a different story. It is the reverse of those four dozen or so South Africans who arrived in the US and were given a bizarre welcome at Dulles International Airport by two Trump administration deputy Cabinet secretaries.

The officials parroted the comments of their supreme leader about the faux genocide the travellers had just escaped, mirabile dictu. But those official welcomers then compared the new arrivals’ torments to those from the past circumstances of the two officials’ own families. One had a relative who had escaped the Nazi Holocaust, and as for the other, his spouse had fled persecution as a Christian by Iran’s theocratic government. That was an exceedingly odd, awkward, embarrassing moment.

It would be fascinating to know what the new arrivals felt about all this, but such revelations must wait until reporters track down some of them in their new abodes across the US and ask the “refugees” about their individual stories — and how they have come to view their new homeland.

But there is another story to be told. It parallels the one we have just witnessed, but may be even more interesting. It is the story of Americans who came to South Africa and made it their permanent home — and what they have come to feel about their choices.

Such a migration is not an entirely new phenomenon, of course. Back in the years of the early gold rush on the Witwatersrand, Americans, as with people of many other nationalities, came for the adventure of it and for the possibilities of making a fortune from mineral wealth — or from the demands for services from among those doing the actual mining.

John Hays Hammond was an adventurer, entrepreneur and mining engineer. (Photo: Collections / Wikipedia)

Major players

Most of those individuals may be forgotten now, but some were major players a century ago, including John Hays Hammond and Isidore Schlesinger.

Hammond was a mining engineer fresh from the rough and tumble of the American West’s vast mineral deposits. His story has been told by historian Charles van Onselen in his book The Cowboy Capitalist. Hammond came to South Africa, made his fortune, and, along the way, joined up with the infamous Jameson Raid. He became so famous as an adventurer-entrepreneur that he came close to being nominated by America’s Republican Party as its vice-presidential candidate in the 1916 election. There is a biopic in his life, for sure.

Schlesinger, meanwhile, actually made movies and was virtually the founder of the movie industry in South Africa. He leveraged his fortune from that and built an even larger one in property and real estate developments. (As a parenthetical note, my wife’s family lore says that many years ago, one of her grandmothers had come north from the Western Cape and worked as a household staff member for the Schlesingers, despite being a credentialled teacher.)

In the years that followed, many others have come from the US to live and work in South Africa. One American friend, Kenneth Walker, died recently after an award-winning career in the news business as a writer and broadcaster. He had been part of the famed ABC News Nightline broadcasts from South Africa in the late 1980s, and the ongoing drama of South Africa’s evolution towards becoming a democratic state so engaged him that he moved here permanently, becoming National Public Radio’s Africa bureau chief.

Later, he was the communications head for Care International in Africa, based in Johannesburg, until serious debilitating illnesses, then dialysis and kidney transplants, forced him to return to the US for his family support base. Kenneth had believed deeply in the possibilities of South Africa’s democratic experiment — and I miss the strength of his arguments, plus his insights and counsel.

For many Americans, it seems, there is something about South Africa that gets under one’s skin and doesn’t let go. For some, comparisons to and contrasts with America’s own history become a compelling story that animates one’s work and life.

After years as an American diplomat, Virginia Blaser settled in South Africa for a second career in business. Here she is enjoying an outdoor, evening concert. (Photo: Supplied)

Digging deeper

To dig deeper into this question — with this refugee story as a backdrop — I reached out to several American friends who are long-time residents of South Africa to gain insights into why they have chosen to move to South Africa. This can be fascinating given the way the news here is filled with the story of South Africans going to the US as Trump’s refugees — or the many vicissitudes of living in South Africa. Those I asked included academics, business people and people in the arts. These are their stories.

Composer, conductor, sculptor and author Robert Maxym explained that in the early 1990s, his orchestral conducting career as an American resident in Europe encountered stumbling blocks in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet empire and then new EU guidelines on hiring foreign artists.

Looking for new worlds to conquer, he had come to South Africa as a guest conductor for orchestral programmes in various cities. Increasingly intrigued, he had met musicians like Mzilikazi Khumalo, Sibongile Khumalo and Sipho “Hotstix” Mabuse at our house. Then a theatrical set designer told him, “South Africa will hook you under the smallest fingernail and never let go!” He was right, said Maxym.

Robert Maxym conducts Mzilikazi Khumalo's great secular oratorio, 'Ushaka' in Pretoria. (Photo: Supplied)

As my friend wrote to me, “The prospect of actually being able to influence the cultural life of an emerging democracy, in crisis but with such potential, and this through music, was irresistible. Once I arrived in South Africa, I threw myself headlong into efforts in the disadvantaged townships of Atteridgeville, Mamelodi, Soshanguve and elsewhere. I had a full year of conducting and CD recording engagements in Pretoria, Joburg, Durban and elsewhere, including the National Youth Orchestra.”

Then remarried, “this solidified my resolve to stay here and keep on creating, in music, art, sculpture and writing. The birth of my two children made this a no-brainer. I was here, hooked, and not likely to change [my] venue.”

Another retired American, the former diplomat Virginia Blaser, put it this way, “Why South Africa? Why Cape Town? Honestly, it was both more accidental and more deliberate than it probably looks from the outside. After 34 years of living everywhere but home, we actually tried to repatriate. We spent several years of home leaves exploring the US, looking for that mythical perfect landing spot for retirement. But every place somehow felt like wearing someone else’s shoes — close, but not quite right.”

She added that she and her family realised Cape Town was their future home. “We found a great house we could actually afford. The school — AISCT [American International School in Cape Town] — offered an American curriculum with rare AP [advanced placement] Capstone accreditation (one of only two on the continent), giving our youngest something her three older siblings never had: the chance to grow up and graduate from the same school. What a luxury after 14 schools across four continents.”

She said medical care in South Africa is excellent, “the food and wine are world class, and on most days, the weather behaves (except, let’s be honest, Newlands in June and July could take a few lessons from San Diego). And with Cape Town’s improving air links — including the new direct to the US — I can still keep my passport busy.”

Similar to Robert Maxym’s observations, Virginia Blaser explains, “The bigger reason is harder to quantify. Cape Town didn’t just welcome us — it somehow claimed us. It’s one thing to be accepted, but it’s another to feel like you still have something meaningful to contribute. Here, we do … Cape Town lets me live locally while staying globally connected. And it reminds me, every day, that there is still important work to do — and good people to do it with.”

Early in his engagements with South Africa, David Coplan joined up with Afrojazz legends Philip Tabane (guitar) and Mabe Thabojane (traditional percussion). David Coplan speaks with another American who has become permanently resident in South Africa, saxophonist Salim Washington. (Photo: Supplied)

Expanded worldview

Meanwhile, US entrepreneur Herman Warren told me that when he arrived in South Africa in 1996, he was “expecting to stay no longer than three months. Twenty-nine years later, I am still here, and I now call this country home. From the outset, and even now, I’ve been drawn to South Africa’s intentional efforts to forge a national consensus and a shared story.”

The scenic wonders of the country still excite him, but “living here has taken me far beyond my comfort zone, both personally and professionally. It has expanded my worldview, exposing me to perspectives and developments well beyond American shores.”

There are challenges. “Load shedding is something I hope never to become accepting of. The deterioration of infrastructure, rising lawlessness and crime often leave me more on edge than I’d like. Yet perhaps the most unsettling development over this period has been witnessing the country I left — the United States — take political turns I once believed unthinkable.” This hints that the opportunities and challenges in South Africa can seem more hopeful than those in today’s United States.

Businessman Herman Warren (left) on a long mountain-biking expedition with friends. (Photo: Supplied)

And then there is Professor David Coplan. In a farewell letter to colleagues in his field of anthropology he wrote as he was stepping back from active teaching, Coplan explained he first began to focus his career on West Africa, drawn to the riches of the percussion music he loved.

Then, in “1976, I became derailed into South Africa by a summer job, as researcher for a proposed documentary on black township music. Like so many others from abroad, I got sucked into the country’s quicksand pre-mix of intellectual fascination and political praxis. Once in, I couldn’t get out. I spent a lot of time enjoying the generous collegial hospitality offered by the anthropologists at Wits. The only problem was that my personal adventures as an ethnographic homme engagé had led to my detention (suspicion of terrorism) and temporary permanent expulsion from South Africa.

“By the time I finished my doctoral thesis, ‘The Urbanization of African Performing Arts in South Africa’, in 1980, I had become an exile: not from my native land but from that of my intellectual commitment. It helped that New York, my first permanent posting, was home to so many South African exiles. I busied myself with writing ‘In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre’ (1985), and conducting new fieldwork in Lesotho (an appropriate location for exiles from South Africa at the time). In 1989 I fibbed to the South African handelskantoor (‘trade mission’: euphemism for embassy) in Maseru and spent three weeks as a visiting lecturer at UCT.

“In the meantime, I was serving time teaching mostly black and Hispanic suburban New York undergrads about South Africa. The main message I was able to get across, apart from the country’s diversity, was that despite apartheid, black South Africans (still) had culture and even knew how to have fun on a Saturday night. In short, American students learned to their amazement that ‘people were living there.’

“My visit to UCT was followed up with a year there as a Fulbright Fellow in 1991: a time of miracle and wonder. On a day in July I was able to congratulate my colleagues on the repeal of all the major legislative pillars of apartheid except the racial franchise. Even the Population Registration Act, which defined who was what, was gone. I went home. A colleague in New York asked if I was happy to be back from Africa. ‘No,’ I said. 'You never are.’”

Taking up a teaching post at UCT in 1993, he had been admonished by a colleague, “‘You know the country might collapse and you will have to return home as a refugee?’ ‘We must prevent this from happening,’ I retorted, ‘And if we don’t, we’ll know we tried.’”

Eventually moving on to the University of the Witwatersrand, Coplan tackled the “building up a group of dynamic, youngish or at least young-at-heart urban researchers, who also extended their sites and sights through social networks extending deep into the countryside, Africa and, if possible, the real world.”

But, he added, in the public realm, “We must carry on with our attempts to influence public policy by ‘speaking truth to power’, but at the same time reclaim the intellectual issues of cultural diversity and social instrumentality as the signature of an [empathetic] humanity.”

Now retired but still active, Coplan concluded, “What of myself in that cheerful or grumpy (depending how one performs it) ante-room to death called retirement? For me, it is my plan not to hang on, but I hope to move on, not to sell my laurels in the academic flea market but to acquire new ones in some other milieu. As for my vanished future, a man is known by the company that keeps him on after retirement. As for my vanished youth, as Bob Dylan put it, ‘Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.’”

Martha Bridgman takes a break from editing the 'South African journal of international affairs' to smell the flowers. (Photo: Supplied)

‘There is a vibrancy’

Meanwhile, Martha Bridgman, editor of the South African Journal of International Affairs for Jan Smuts House, but living in Cape Town, explained, “There is a vibrancy in the social dynamics that I enjoy. Perhaps it is the circles I move in, but people CARE about big questions.  This was true in the late 1980s, [when she first came to South Africa] and it is true now.

“There is a musicality in the languages all around me, wherever I go here, that I enjoy. Once I got over the idea that efficiency is king, I rather grew to enjoy the way people here focus on other elements of a problem. Getting from A to B in a straight line is not the priority, it is the way you greet people along the way that matters!

“I am often astounded at how beautiful my surroundings are — granted, I do live in Cape Town…. There are places so remote here that there is still no phone reception, no internet, only silence and space to roam.  The occasional leopard print in the sand makes it the more exciting.”

Opportunities, personal reasons and random events that turn into inevitable choices, like who one marries, and real challenges to address all seem to be the key themes for my interlocutors. But what of my story? After three diplomatic postings in South Africa, beginning in 1975 and going onward to 2003, plus three years in Eswatini (then called Swaziland) in the mid-1980s, I, too, was caught up by the saga that has been and continues to be South Africa’s circumstances.

As my retirement in October 2003 beckoned, my South African-born wife (we were married in 1976 in Swaziland because of apartheid’s legal restrictions), cheerily announced over breakfast one day, “Now that you are retiring, you should know I am staying here. So, what are your plans?”

The immediate choice seemed to be between returning to the Washington, DC, area as just one more retired diplomat looking for things to do, or staying on in South Africa to tackle some of the challenges posed by its history and contemporary circumstances, now that I had built up some knowledge of the place and had longterm friendships.

So I replied just as cheerfully, “Okay, I’m sure I can find things to do. But remember, we have to buy a house because the government is going to want its official residence back from us soon!” And so we, too, stayed.

Twenty-two years later, we’re still here; still engaged; still busy. Like Robert Maxym’s friend had warned, “South Africa will hook you under the smallest fingernail and never let go.”

And so it has. DM