Afrikaners declare independence in their desert ‘Eden’

In the harsh, empty stretches of the Karoo desert sits South Africa’s last whites-only outpost — and it is thriving.

Deepening rifts in the rest of the country over race and wealth, rising crime and crumbling services have been a boon for Orania, which was established in 1991 by descendants of Hendrik Verwoerd, the founding ideologist of apartheid.

The influx of people retreating from the chaos has defied predictions that the town’s incongruous social experiment is doomed.

Farming is in the blood for many Afrikaner families

PER-ANDERS PETTERSSON/GETTY IMAGES

“The town used to be talked about as a bit of a joke, but not any more,” said Joost Strydom, the spokesman for Orania, where the population has climbed by 55 per cent to 2,500 since 2018.

New houses going up to meet the demand are all being built with white labour: self-sufficiency is a cornerstone of the project.

A “staggering” flow of applications to join the community comes in each week from families and individuals seeking refuge among like-minded neighbours, away from the crime and civil unrest that has worsened in many cities and towns.

Murders across the country rose by 22 per cent in the first quarter of this year, with 67 recorded each day.

Orania has no black residents, but the same could be said of some smart, unreformed suburbs elsewhere in South Africa, Strydom said, where the only non-white faces are servants and labourers. Orania’s residents, by contrast, clean their own homes and dig their own ditches.

“The difference is that we are transparent about what our community stands for. We are intentional, not exclusive,” he added. Residency in Orania is open only to those committed to Christian disciplines and the Afrikaner culture and ideology.

The town is privately owned by the share block company, Vluytjeskraal Aandeleblok. Those who want to live in Orania buy shares in the company, but only after being screened. No title deeds are provided, except for agricultural land.

The settlement has its own currency, flag and calendar of public holidays. June 16 is a national day off to honour the lives lost in the Soweto uprising, a key date in the anti-apartheid struggle, but it is commemorated in Orania for a very different reason: the Afrikaners’ struggle against the mighty British empire during the Boer War.

Its leaders are adamant it is not an Eden for racists, but a place to live a particular way of life with the language and lifestyle of the Afrikaners who are descended from the original Dutch and French who settled in the 17th century.

Orania welcomes new residents as long as they follow the traditional Afrikaner lifestyle

STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Formerly a ghost town of workers’ shacks from a Sixties irrigation project on the southern banks of the Orange River, Orania was established in 1991 by ideologues led by Anna and Professor Carel Boshoff, the daughter and son-in-law of Verwoerd, who served as prime minister from 1958 until his assassination in 1966.

It has thwarted multiple challenges to its existence, including an attempt to remap its boundaries to bring it under a democratically elected municipality. Its lawyers argued successfully that South Africa’s progressive constitution afforded its residents their own rights as a minority cultural group.

The town makes the most of its year-round sunshine, with a solar-power plant in the pipeline

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With the ruling African National Congress distracted by internal squabbles and a vigilant civil society busily picking up the slack of the dysfunctional state, the 8,200-acre settlement has been left to develop with little scrutiny.

Progress is being made with its founders’ original ambition towards secession. A sewage works to meet the needs of a population of 10,000 has been built, and a solar-power farm will capitalise on the bright desert skies to get the town off the crumbling national grid. Power cuts threw 59 million South Africans into darkness for seven weeks in 2020.

The town’s remoteness provides a captive market for dozens of small businesses, from jewellers to small factories, its leadership claims. A technical training college is producing a future workforce, while two private schools that teach South Africa’s national curriculum have an emphasis on Afrikaner history and lessons in so-called “own labour practices” teaching practical skills.

Tony Correia, a recent arrival, said he had taken the safety of back roads to join his brother in the last bastion of white separatism after KwaZulu-Natal province was subjected to days of violent looting in July last year. About 340 people died in the mayhem. “We were right in the middle of it,” said Correia, 33, an accountant.

Finding how much Orania had to offer in terms of security, work and a young population, he decided to make the move permanent. The chance to “live my culture, my Christianity and not be marked down” has been life-changing, he told The Times.

Correia is the sort of educated, young professional that Orania is keen to attract. “Our [the Afrikaners’] place in society is being robbed and frowned upon. This is a breath of fresh air,” he said — although doing his own laundry and mopping floors is a downside.

Visitors to the town are greeted by a bust of Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid

EVA-LOTTA JANSSON/ALAMY

He is renting a home until more housing stock comes available. Blocks of flats have been constructed for the poorer migrants; a detached home in a smarter street sells for about £125,000, more than the same home would fetch in the average South African town.

Pressure for space comes from other quarters too: the town provides sanctuary for busts and other paraphernalia celebrating former Afrikaner leaders whose names and likenesses are being cleansed from South Africa’s street signs, schools and town halls. A semi-circle of the discards peer down from the rocky hillside, including Verwoerd, Marthinus Steyn, who was the last leader of the independent Orange Free State republic, and the former state presidents John Vorster and Paul Kruger.

The town’s museum is full to bursting. “We are being offered things every day — photographs, paintings, statues,” Strydom said. “It is becoming quite a problem to find space for them all.”

Asanda Ngoasheng, an academic and race-equality activist, had once wanted Orania to be disbanded, but has softened her stance on giving white people the choice to “live in some apartheid nostalgia utopia”. She added: “They’ve created a prison for themselves. Why should we force them to be part of a free South Africa they don’t want to recognise?”