South AfricaA separatist community believes it is facing its biggest crisis yet, writes Bill Corcoran in Orania
When the successor to South Africa's apartheid-era party, the New National Party (NNP), hung up its spurs recently, the moment hardly registered with Carel Boshoff, a grandson of one of apartheid's founding fathers.
The 47-year-old grandson of HF Verwoerd, who set in motion the concept of apartheid while a member of the ruling National Party (NP) during the early 1950s, and was assassinated in 1966 at parliament while South Africa's president, says the party's collapse had been coming for a long time.
"The termination of the party was just the logical conclusion. The party had a total lack of ideology; it did not stand for anything specifically. So it disintegrated as a political entity, just like the Afrikaner culture is disintegrating," he says.
"My father saw the problems that the Afrikaner was going to face coming, so he got together a group of like-minded people and bought the town of Orania for $200,000, where we could focus on the Afrikaner culture,"
The guilt associated with apartheid has led many Afrikaners to opt out of the political spectrum, as well as avoiding any open celebration of their own heritage.
Consequently, active members of the community believe they are facing their biggest cultural crisis in living memory. And, depending on which Afrikaner you speak to, if something is not done soon to reverse this rapid erosion, the culture could cease to exist in the coming decades.
So it was no surprise that, following the NNP's collapse, former party leader FW de Klerk released a statement - which was in effect a plea to the Afrikaner community for a leader - calling on a young person "to fill this void" left by the party's demise.
But the inhabitants of Orania, the small town in the Northern Cape established by Carel Boshoff snr, believe they have been filling the void that de Klerk is talking about for nearly 14 years now.
Located about 700km southwest of Johannesburg in the Northern Cape, beside the Orange river, Orania is situated on a sparsely populated section of land next to the expansive Karoo desert.
Founded in 1991, it consists of 3,500 hectares of land, and its community members believe in the idea of a state within South Africa in which Afrikaners would be allowed to determine their own futures.
"The emergence of Orania has everything to do with the fall of the National Party, because it [the NP] failed to secure a future for Afrikaners in South Africa. The idea of an Afrikaner community has dissolved as well, so we decided to try and change that and create something that is Afrikaans.
"What we are doing here is a cultural and political response to what has been happening," says Boshoff.
Today the town numbers between 500 and 600 families and is run in the form of a share block company, which means that when a person buys a plot of land they also own a number of shares in the town.
Since Orania's inception, the residents have been plagued by allegations that they are nothing more than a bunch of isolationist racists. And indeed, it is not difficult to understand why such views have prevailed when you find yourself walking through a town in Africa where no black people are to be seen.
To live in Orania one has to first go through an interview process in which you must prove that you believe in the idea of a self-sufficient Afrikaner culture, and be able to sustain yourself financially.
While nobody outside the Afrikaner ethnic group has been admitted to Orania in the 14 years it has existed, the town leaders argue that this is because they have never received an application from anyone other than Afrikaners who want to embrace their culture.
Boshoff - who lives in Orania and is also a provincial leader in the Northern Cape for the small Afrikaner party, the Freedom Front - is adamant that the allegations of racism are themselves embedded in prejudices that exist against the Afrikaner because of its links to apartheid in the past.
He also points to the fact that the people of Orania do not make economical gains from the cheap black labour, which many Afrikaners still avail of.
"We are not against interaction with other cultures, but for genuine interaction to take place there has to be a you and a me. If we lived in a wealthy Pretoria suburb behind electric fences, then the allegation of racist might stand up.
"But nobody upgraded when they moved here. We decided on this place because it is sparsely populated, and most of those that do live in the region are Afrikaners. Rather than this being the last bastion of the old Afrikaner tradition, we see what we are doing as the creation of the first bastion of the new Afrikaner tradition," he maintains.
As you walk around Orania one can see what Boshoff is talking about. Farming is the main source of income for many of those that live in the town, but the white locals work the fields rather than the dozens of black farm labourers one would have seen in the past.
"The idea of self-sufficiency is very important, because the Afrikaner in the past used cheap black labour to do all the manual work and was anything but self-sufficient.
"As well, the National Party did everything for the people in the past in terms of a creation of an ideology, and now that it [the party] is gone people do not know what to do," he says.
That people with racist tendencies live in Orania is apparent after you engage with residents, and the community elders will not deny that some racists live among them. But they argue that racists live in every society, and what is important is the leadership given to the society as it moves forward.
"We want to share what we have learned with other communities and learn from them, coloured and black," says 36-year-old Frans de Klerk, who has been living in Orania since 1993.
Another resident, Pieter Grobbelaar, says that if you come to Orania with the attitude that you want to "flee from the blacks" then you will not survive because "we live in Africa!" However, he adds that racism starts when a people feel threatened, so the best way forward for the Afrikaner is self-government.
"History tells us you must govern yourself to sustain your tradition," he concludes.
Boshoff is hopeful for the future because, he says, in the past two years many Afrikaners have woken up to their culture's plight.
Most of the new people coming to live in the community are young, and while the town is still quite small they have begun to buy farms in the greater area to allow for expansion in the future as they have about a further 1,000 patrons who believe in what they are doing.
"On its own Orania would not stand up to the destructive forces of modern culture, but as a symbol of and in alliances with Afrikaans . . . well, that's another situation," he concludes.