Jooste lives in Orania, a town created by and for the Afrikaner minority who once ruled South Africa. “People went to places like [New Harmony] because they believed in the idea of a new society with new principles,” says Jooste. “We’ve come to Orania for the same reasons.”
Indeed, there is a tangible esprit de corps in the town. Residents wave at one another in the street; class divisions appear muted and cooperation is the order of the day. Everyone participates in collective projects–and every family is responsible for its own farming and domestic work. This last point is important to Oranians; in a country where most whites grew up in homes with black servants and middle class families still routinely hire housekeepers and gardeners, the residents of Orania make a statement by doing their own cleaning. “A lot of South Africans find that funny,” says community spokesman John Strydom. “But we think it’s racist to say other kinds of people are only good for work.”
By “other kinds of people,” Strydom means the country’s black majority who, under apartheid, were often relegated to menial labor. But to many South Africans, Strydom’s comments smack of hypocrisy. The real reason, they say, that Oranians don’t hire non-white workers is because they don’t want them living in their Afrikaner-only community.
Neither the debate-nor the notion of an Afrikaner homeland-is new to this country. But recent political developments are again focusing the spotlight on this remote settlement and its supporters. A shadowy group of militant rightwing Afrikaners, known as the Boeremag, is said to be behind a spate of attacks against blacks, including a bomb blast that killed a woman in the black city of Soweto last October. Twenty-two Boeremag members were due to go on trial in Pretoria today on charges of trying to overthrow the black-led through a terror campaign that included bomb attacks and a plot to assassinate former President Nelson Mandela. The trial, originally due to start in mid-May, was postponed for the third time because of a dispute over legal payments. It is now scheduled to start on June 17.
Nobody at Orania has been linked to the Boeremag or the 22 treason trialists. But reports that police had uncovered right-wing plans to bomb dams and power stations and sabotage last September’s World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg-as well as far-right protests against last month’s three life sentences for a white militant who killed three black bus commuters in 2000–inevitably are reverberating in the enclave.
Residents would prefer to have avoided with this attention, saying they just want to maintain their own culture while living in peace with their black neighbors. Orania rejects applicants if they are suspected of harboring violent intentions, says Jooste, and townsfolk are determined to avoid trouble. “We’ve actually got a bad name among right-wing Afrikaners,” says Carel Boshoff IV, an Orania resident and a member of the provincial parliament. “We believe in peaceful co-existence with all people.” The town even gets along with the national government: “The constitution of this country is based on the principle of non-racism and we’ve consulted them about that,” says Zem Titus, special advisor to the national minister for provincial and local government. “They’ve got no laws on their books that say they must keep out blacks.” In fact, most Oranians describe their community as inclusive rather than exclusive: anyone who shares their mission is welcome to join, says Boshoff. That mission? “Living in favor of a particular ethnic, cultural, and political identity–that of the Afrikaner,” says Boshoff. “Oh, and doing our own work.”
To some Afrikaners outside Orania, that’s merely double-speak for avoiding integration. Many mixed-race South Africans, known as ‘coloreds’ during the apartheid years, also speak Afrikaans, the language derived from the country’s original Dutch colonizers, but those of mixed-race have not exactly been encouraged to join the homeland. “The acid test for Orania is to what extent they include ‘colored’ Afrikaners into their fold,” says Fanie du Toit, a program manager at South Africa’s Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. “And so far their model hasn’t given young [Afrikaners] the opportunity to rid their culture of a racist and chauvinist past.”
Residents say no one of mixed race has been turned away from Orania-but that’s because no one has asked to move in. Nor is that likely to change, given the ethos of the town. Any visitor who doubts residents’ sympathies need only visit its local museum, which is devoted to the former prime minister known as the father of apartheid: Hendrik F. Verwoerd. It was Verwoerd’s son-in-law, Carel Boshoff lll, a softly-spoken university professor, who was one of the main forces behind the development of Orania as an Afrikaner volkstaat, or nation state. “Some of us always knew it wasn’t possible to maintain the so-called white country, white land,” says Boshoff. “So we began trying to convince our people that we needed to prepare for the inevitable approach of black rule.”
As part of those preparations, Boshoff and 12 others began looking for a place to begin what he calls “an experiment to show how Afrikaners can re-win their freedom after years of black rule.” In 1990-the year Mandela was released from almost three decades in prison–they discovered Orania, an abandoned town built in the 1960s to house workers for an irrigation project. They purchased the site from the government for about $190,000. Expecting an initial turnout of thousands, Boshoff was disappointed–but not defeated–when only a few hundred Afrikaners showed up to build the town. “We realized that most Afrikaners have a lot invested in the Republic [of South Africa],” he says. “But the more the transformation of South Africa takes place, the more Afrikaners will realize they’re becoming second-class citizens.”
Are they? The younger set in Orania thinks so, though they tend to couch their arguments in terms of opportunity rather than race. Andries Pienaar, a 33-year-old farm worker, moved to Orania two months ago because he was having trouble finding a job. “I’m not a racist,” he says, “but because of affirmative action it’s impossible for a white guy to get a start in this country.” Those who don’t share the Orania philosophy would argue that it’s tough for everyone in a country with an estimated 37 percent unemployment rate. And those who see it as an apartheid throwback may derive some comfort from remembering that most communal “utopian” settlements around the world have invariably failed. Jooste knows his history, but hopes his 10-year-old town may escape that fate. “Many of those communities saw the ideals they were standing for become mainstream,” he says. “I have the feeling that won’t happen to us.” Given the pain of South Africa’s racial legacy, he’s surely right.
