Gimme Boer

Every May, as the city starts to heat up again, New Yorkers begin their annual pilgrimages down to Brighton Beach, a bustling post-Soviet-populated enclave on the shores of the Atlantic. This year, around the same time that beachgoers and babushkas alike were taking their first seasonal strolls along the neighborhood’s boardwalk, fifty-nine Afrikaners stepped off a plane at Dulles airport outside D.C., some 250 miles to the southwest. They were “refugees” of an alleged but completely fabricated genocide, welcomed with open arms by State Department officials.

At first glance, the south Brooklyn area, backdrop for this year’s Best Picture winner Anora, might seem like an odd point of comparison with President Trump’s targeted reopening of the nation’s refugee resettlement program. Trump had closed the program on his first day in office, leaving over 100,000 would-be escapees from conflict zones in limbo. State support would be focused instead on white South African farmers the administration claims are facing widespread violent attacks and being discriminated against by affirmative action. In reality, while only 7 percent of South Africans are white, they own 70 percent of the country’s land. (Black South Africans own only 4 percent.) And of the twenty-seven thousand murders that occur yearly in the country, only 0.1 percent of those happen on farms. There were six murders on farms between January and March of this year—down from twelve during the same time last year—and only one victim was white. 

No South African political parties, including those led by Afrikaners, have claimed there to be a genocide taking place. But right-wing TikTok users pushed videos of a radical minority party singing “Kill the Boer” at rallies, which Trump then played in the White House. Polls show a plurality of Americans support the Afrikaner refugees and think they are as deserving of resettlement as people from other countries, even if a majority who had an opinion don’t buy the genocide claims.

It would be easy to chalk this resettlement up to the influence of Elon Musk, until recently a key figure of the Trump administration and himself a white South African with a predilection for peddling false claims of Afrikaner victimization. (Grok, X’s in-house AI, recently came under fire for a malfunction in which it responded to every question asked of it with widely debunked claims about white genocide, no matter how unrelated the topic.) But the American public’s appreciation for their plight is far more deeply rooted than Musk and Trump’s racial favoritism and cruel trolling. Predominantly Dutch-descended white South Africans known as Boers or Afrikaners have long provided a screen onto which white Americans have projected fantasies about their own persecution, seeing themselves as parallel nations of rugged frontiersmen who battled the British, built a republic, and faced off with unruly natives.

In 1905, this fascination reached an early peak on Brighton Beach, where for a summer, the Great Boer War Spectacle—a massive-scale reenactment of the Second Boer War, a bloody struggle between the British and Boers that had ended just three years prior—reigned supreme. The show quickly became a bona fide sensation, visited sometimes by more than one hundred thousand New Yorkers per day. The reenactments featured nearly a thousand veterans from both sides of the conflict, as well as three hundred “Kaffirs, Basutos, Zulus, Matabeles, Swazies and representatives of other South African tribes,” who lived on the beach in traditional thatched huts inside enclosed areas known as kraals. In a move that may sound familiar, American government officials at all levels exerted exceptional effort on behalf of the Boers, facilitating their migration to the United States and enabling long-term settlement after the show had run its course. The black laborers who participated in the show would not receive the same support.

The Second Boer War was sparked, like most colonial conflicts, by the discovery of immense natural resources. Dutch colonists (along with a European hodgepodge, including some French Huguenots) had first begun settling in the Cape of Good Hope in the latter half of the seventeenth century in order to create a strategic station for the Dutch East India Company. The agricultural settlers who supplied the station called themselves Boers, or “farmers,” a Dutch word that kept its meaning in the Afrikaans language that descended from the first settlers’ native tongue. In 1814, the Dutch formally ceded control of the territory to the British, who had abolished the slave trade in their colonies the year after they conquered the Cape settlement in 1806. The ban came into effect in 1834 and was a major factor in Boers fleeing twenty years later to form two pastoral countries: the Orange Free State and the South African Republic. In 1884, the South African Republic won the independence the Orange Free State already had after waging a guerrilla war against the British.

The win was short-lived. In 1886 outside of Johannesburg, prospectors discovered what were then the largest gold deposits in the world, eventually leading to a redoubled Britain invasion in 1899 and their victory in 1902. The greatest losses in the campaign weren’t on the battlefield. Around a hundred thousand Boers, mostly women and children, were placed in concentration camps, where more than a quarter perished from starvation and disease; at least twelve thousand black Africans died there too.

From the conflict’s onset, the American public roared with support for the Boer republics, especially among the masses of Irish immigrants who loathed the British. Political support was widespread, too. Senators from Georgia, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Colorado introduced official pro-Boer resolutions, with one from Illinois even connecting the conflict to the American Revolution, saying to Congress: “the war between monarchy and republicanism began in earnest July 4, 1776, and no treaty of peace has ever been concluded, nor ever will be, until this question is settled right.” Municipal governments in New York and Boston passed unanimous votes of sympathy, and politicos chattered about whether the President of South Africa should speak at the Democratic National Convention in 1900. Theodore Roosevelt, Republican Governor of New York when the conflict began and President upon its conclusion, was enraptured by the conquest, writing “the Boers must possess altogether exceptional qualities” and that their efforts were “as gallant a struggle as has ever been made.”

Political reality, however, dictated taking a softer stance. Just a year before the outbreak of the war, Britain had backed the United States in their own “splendid little war” against Spain. American officials were also sensitive to the hypocrisy of critiquing British imperialism while violently suppressing independence movements in the newly-controlled Philippines—where they, too, deployed brutal concentration camps—and remained officially neutral. But, never one to let neutrality stand in the way of profit, the United States shipped more than a hundred thousand horses and eighty thousand mules, as well as tens of thousands of tons of preserved meat, hay, and oats to British forces. Though less widespread than Boer support, the Brits also had backers among most American elites (often Anglo-Saxons who looked down on the descendants of supposedly lesser Europeans), as well as major publications, including those of William Randolph Hearst and the New York Times. Americans in fact fought on both sides of the conflict, though slightly more, roughly three hundred, joined the Boers.

If their sympathies were divided, Americans eventually united in their support of Boer immigration, with even the snootiest Anglos recognizing their shared investment in whiteness. (Growing immigration from Southern Europe also helped push previously divided northern Europeans to identify commonality.) A Massachusetts congressman—the maternal grandfather to John and Robert Kennedy—proposed that the entire Boer population, nearly half a million people, be resettled on American government land. Wealthy New Yorkers with Dutch ancestry worked on a plan to settle Boers on three hundred thousand acres in Wyoming. Arkansas formally offered five million acres, as did Colorado and seven more western states. William Jennings Bryan went so far as to say settlement of the “anti-imperialist” Boers—a description black Africans may have quibbled with—could revive the spirit of the United States. After the conflict, senior Boer officials visited the White House, where President Roosevelt took them shooting.

At the turn of the twentieth century, America was experiencing something of a national mid-life crisis, and like a suburban dad buying a convertible to make up for a lost sense of cool, coped by investing in something flashy. The 1890 census had declared the American frontier officially closed, and as cities teemed with the country’s largest waves of immigration to date, many Americans worried they could no longer send these unruly others to assimilate out West. Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis popularized the fear that an essential adventurous, democratic, and self-reliant aspect of national character might be lost—not to mention new markets for goods and sources of raw materials.

But Americans disconsolate at the loss of the frontier experience could indulge themselves with romanticized simulacra. The 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, themed for the Louisiana Purchase, provided a particularly potent setting for Wild West shows full of action-packed entertainment and heaping doses of nationalistic fantasy. Americans flocked to staged battles between cowboys and Indians as well as the event’s runaway hit—the first version of the Boer War Spectacle.

Alfred W. Lewis, a Canadian scout who had served on the British in South Africa, grasped both the nation’s fascination with the Boer conflict and the rising popularity of shows featuring idealized violence. He pitched a group of wealthy St. Louis businessmen on organizing some of the conflict’s veterans to play back their most daring exploits, eventually bringing over two hundred Boers, two hundred Brits, and about fifty black Africans. After a summer of smashing success, the show took to the road, touring the South with daily performances through the fall and winter. But interest proved fleeting there, perhaps due to the relative lack of urban immigration or the prevalence of its own Lost Cause mythology. With lackluster audiences, it quickly ran out of money. Its backers were forced to flip the show to a duo who conspired to bring it north: William Brady, a famous New York showman, and Orlando Harriman, the brother of the president of the Union Pacific railroad.

The pair acted quickly, purchasing a swampy stretch next to Coney Island. In just six weeks, they transformed the previously undeveloped expanse into what called itself the largest amusement development in the nation. More than eight hundred laborers constructed a mile-long boardwalk, laid the nation’s longest scenic railroad, refurbished a bathhouse, built 150 concessions plus a racetrack, and of course, created a fourteen-acre battlefield with grandstands seating twenty-eight thousand—almost ten thousand more seats than Madison Square Garden currently holds—complete with a rushing river. The project, including acquiring the land and shipping hundreds more soldiers, weaponry, and “natives” from Africa” cost a reported $2,225,000—around eighty million in today’s dollars.

When the showmen arrived in boxcars from the South, Brady called them “the sorriest-looking crew in Christendom . . . chilly, starved, dirty, dismal—and fighting mad.” Black Africans, required to wear traditional garb, had it worse. “These poor fellows were almost frozen. . . . Their clothing is not suitable for this climate,” according to one reporter.  But despite poor conditions and frequent conflict between opposing soldiers, they were ready to perform by the attraction’s May 27 opening date. Full page ads in the New York Times and the Sun trumpeted the show as “Stupendous In Size—Vivid In Realism—Intensely Dramatic” and made specific mention of 150 Boer women and children, as well as three hundred “impressively picturesque” black Africans, including women and children, who were brought to live in the “African Village” adjacent to the battlefield which “[depicted] life in Africa with perfect truth.”

The show staged enormous and dazzling performances of the conflict’s key battles. Rifles blazed continuously, and cannons, including the famous British gun “Long Cecil,” named for Cecil Rhodes, boomed incessantly, much to the annoyance of local neighbors. Hundreds of horses “shot” during the show were trained to lay down and play dead. At its conclusion, each side performed their national anthem and displayed their flags, before all joined together to sing the Star-Spangled Banner and salute the stars and stripes. The Times called it “the kind of show that makes the red blood tingle and sends the thrills of patriotic fervor up and down the spine,” though the paper was decidedly less positive about the “brisk races between ugly little black Basutes mounted on ugly little ponies.”

The show proved outrageously popular. After a single sold-out week, performances were upped from twice to four times a day. But despite support from hundreds of thousands of adoring fans, profits could not cover the extravagant construction costs. Many veterans brought over for the show went largely unpaid, and in September, courts mandated the seizure of the development. Some soldiers returned to South Africa; some likely melted into American towns named for Boer cities, like Pretoria, Georgia or Kruger, Pennsylvania. Others ventured to South America to work as mercenaries. As Brady wagered later, “I’ll bet there are little Latin-looking girls and boys in Guatemala and San Salvador today whose names are Smith and Dykgraaf because their papas were hornswoggled into coming over to fight the Boer War for the delectation of the St. Louis World’s Fair.”

The experience of black Africans, to the extent that it was recorded at all, differed greatly from their Boer counterparts. Despite consisting of an ethnically diverse collection of at least six sociolinguistic groups, Alfred Lewis generally referred to all black Africans by the flattened term “Kaffirs,” a derogatory South African term derived from the Arabic word for “infidels.”

Black Americans in St. Louis, however, where the first version of the show was held, offered the Africans solidarity. One local only identified as “Kaffir Tom” helped lead a work stoppage, then encouraged the Africans to fight for their liberty. “The half-clad blacks rushed to a lumber pile and seized sticks, which they brandished like their native war spears, at the same time hurling words of defiance at the British and the Boers,” per a local paper’s account, but the soldiers ultimately beat them and brought them back to camp. Later, another local citizen named Willeltha Smith helped fifteen African laborers leave the show after they were denied the $4 wage they had been promised. White soldiers again attacked the laborers, but police intervened, and the laborers departed to become coal heavers. Another twenty left to move into the city.

The limited reports of their experiences in New York are bleaker. After arriving to the city nearly frozen, black African laborers staged a “revolt,” according to the Brooklyn Citizen, demanding to wear warmer clothing “instead of their costumes that consist largely of their ebony skins.” As no clothes were readily provided, “one gay chief of the Basutos was robed in a woman’s waist and a short pair of riding pants, the extremity of his legs being bare.” The group was technically “allowed” by the show organizers to wander to Coney Island like their British and Boer counterparts, but they were immediately stopped and harassed by police.

The show concluded on Labor Day, when these laborers once again received a pittance from their work. It remains unclear what happened to most of the group, but a dozen “half-starved Kaffirs” were found wandering Coney Island weeks later in ragged clothes, having been denied the $105 they were promised as well as the return trip to South Africa they had agreed to before coming to St. Louis. They were promptly arrested on vagrancy. In a saga that dragged on for months, the British government refused to claim them as subjects or pay for their transportation, arguing they snuck into the United States “as tramps.” President Roosevelt ignored direct pleas to intervene on their behalf. The laborers asked for employment, but unable to find any once they were released, asked to be placed back in jail, where there was at least food provided. Eventually, New York state’s Charity Department scraped together money to send them home.

Just as Brighton Beach sits at the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean and the mouth of Jamaica Bay, so too did its Boer Spectacle stand at the intersection of critical currents. With large blocks of European immigrants navigating their relationship to America and one another, a particularly strong strain of urban frontier fetishism, and New York City’s vast quantities of show business capital, it’s no surprise the performance peaked there. Ultimately, the show served as a celebration of the twin processes of white assimilation and black exclusion: warring whites who once divided public opinion could be newly reconciled under Old Glory; black Africans would labor in support of this rapprochement but be forced to live out in the cold. Though black Americans recognized themselves in these workers, few others did, especially not those in power.

While the Brighton Beach shows glorified the valor of the Boers, there’s no positive equivalent in today’s Afrikaner episode, suggesting that white Americans’ emotional connection to them is not primarily built on a shared self-image as liberty-loving pioneers. Just as resistance against British imperialism once proved a key bond, now invented oppression at the hands of black people—whether the majority of South African citizens or the nebulous forces of American wokeness—works to unite the two nations under the banner of a whiteness supposedly under siege. The U.S. immigration system remains ever ready to serve as an apparatus through which that process is formalized, an enduring spectacle of tragedy and farce.