Becoming Imperial

Abstract

On a warm July day in 1936, the north German port city of Hamburg was alive with yet another crowd of excited and anxious immigrants and adventurers who made their way into the Emigration Hall for one last check before embarkation.¹ In previous centuries, many emigrants who departed from that ‘port of dreams’ had favoured North and South America as their destinations. But in that buzzing crowd of 1936, many were destined for the southern hemisphere, including South Africa, which had attracted a critical mass of European settlers in the long 19th century and into the mid-20th. Among those excited travellers at the Hamburg port was Bertha Hardegger, a 33-year-old Swiss medical doctor who boarded ‘the steam-boat “Watussi” that took me from Hamburg to East London, South Africa’.² Like many Swiss nationals before her, from 1652 onwards — most of them men — Hardegger was drawn to an immigrant’s life in South Africa by a myriad of factors, especially better opportunities to practise medicine without gender discrimination in her profession.³ Hardegger was following in the footsteps of many educated European women who found an outlet in the colonies, where they could and did become their own mistresses and practised their professions fully.