Orania: A Socio-Economic Overview

During the weekend of April 27-29, while Marxists across South Africa were celebrating “Freedom Day” to mark the eighteenth anniversary of the ANC takeover, I had the pleasure of visiting Orania, a small Afrikaner town right across the border from my home province. I traveled there for the town’s first ever rock festival, known as Rock op Oranje. It was a very pleasant experience, with some high-quality Afrikaans rock artists performing. My friends and I all agreed that the standout performances of the famous band Beeskraal (Cattle Corral) and solo artist Bouwer Bosch made for a rock festival to remember. During his performance, Bosch, a devout Christian who regularly glorifies God verbally on stage, admitted to having had some preconceived negative ideas about the town due to mainstream media reports, but he apologized, having had a change of heart from his brief visit and having enjoyed his experience of the town. Another highlight was when the lead singer of the band Ridder de Jongh proposed to his Volkstaat meisie (nation-state girlfriend) on stage. And in an exceptional gesture, one of the town’s ministers opened proceedings at the festival with a reading from Scripture, followed by a prayer.

The Orania Movement describes itself as an “an independent Afrikaner community striving toward Afrikaner self-determination within a federal South Africa.”¹ It currently consists of a town with its surrounding rural areas of 20,000 acres of land, privately owned by the town’s approximately 900 residents, and located on the bank of the Orange River in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. The residents of the town also own more than 6,000 acres of land along the western coastline of South Africa, as the idea behind the Orania project has always been to set up an Afrikaner state that would span from the current town right through to the west coast of South Africa. However, it all started quite small twenty-one years ago. In 1991, professor Carel Boshoff, the son-in-law of the former nationalist Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, led a party of eleven people to buy a ghost town of 1,100 acres, with the purpose of setting up a white homeland in the Northern Cape.² They bought the piece of land for around $200,000 at the time. Orania is currently worth approximately $60,000,000. Over the past ten years, the average value of property in Orania has increased by 500%,³ and since 2010, the budget of this municipality has increased 60%. Frans De Klerk, the chief executive of the town council, comments that this “clearly indicates that Orania is now moving away from a dispensation where the [town] budget was solely focused on maintenance to a dispensation of decisive growth.”⁴

An example of the wise administration of the town council in recent times is that, after managing an agricultural water scheme for only a year, they have managed to cut irrigation levies to an annual adjustment of only 7%, despite a national increase of 25.5% in electricity costs.⁵ This is in part due to the town’s effective use of solar energy, an obligatory regulation for water heating in town. Apart from taxes, Orania generates income from outside donors who support the project. It also generated nearly $50,000 in interest during 2011 merely by maintaining its own monetary unit, the ora, which remains at a constant 1:1 exchange rate with the South African rand. The Orania Savings and Credit Union (South Africa’s only private community bank) exchanges ora for rand to the town’s citizens and then invests the rand to generate interest while Oranians continue to run their economy on ora. Orania produces jewelry to export to the whole of South Africa, also sending pecan nuts to China and vegetables to Great Britain.⁶ The town’s local approach to economic development seems to be paying off in many ways, and while other towns in the Karoo are characterized by a dying infrastructure, Orania seems to be going from strength to strength as investors are satisfied. One young businessman, who has lived in Orania for two years, told me that joining the Orania Movement was the best investment of his life.

Driving through Orania, I was quite impressed by a few things. Upon entering the town, one of the first sights one comes across is the Verwoerd Museum. The museum is set up in the house where the wife of former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd — the mastermind behind the successful implementation of the apartheid policy — stayed for the last few years of her life. On the highest hill in the town is a memorial for the Irish soldiers who fought with the Boers in the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), in addition to the busts of former nationalist Prime Ministers of South Africa, Hertzog, Malan, Strijdom, and Verwoerd. The town has two private schools with high academic standards and a thoroughly Calvinistic education. The largest school has 210 students and has experienced rapid growth over the past few years.⁷

Every neighbourhood in the town also represents a unique architectural style, and newcomers can choose their style of preference by virtue of the location where they buy or build their home. Die Oewer is a very modern holiday resort on the bank of the Orange River with its own spa and four-star hotel, attracting a significant number of tourists throughout the year. Orania has also recently started a retirement village with a care unit. It has a few small shops, a gas station, a couple of bars, and a large supermarket, providing all the essential daily industries to the town’s people. The town also maintains its own radio station, public swimming pool, and rugby field. During my visit, I bought a couple of CDs with voice recordings of the speeches of Hendrik Verwoerd at the town’s impressive gift shop.

Opportunities for further expansion and growth are plentiful. A number of projects are currently being launched in order to attract more residents to the town. There is no unemployment in Orania. Poor, unemployed newcomers are provided with free housing for a month to give them time to find a job, in order to avoid attracting poor dependents to the town. Luckily, job opportunities are not a rarity in Orania, because in principle the town residents are prohibited from making use of black labour. All labourers and residents of the town are white Afrikaners, making it a safe, crime-free, friendly, homogeneous community. The feeling of solidarity among all its residents is something that is not to be seen among white people anywhere else in South Africa. As Afrikaner guests in the town, we were also treated with a familiarity not found in modern multiracial communities.

The most immediate infrastructural shortcoming of the town remains its medical services. The town has a care unit and a clinic, providing the most basic services, but there are no hospitals or permanent doctors. The nearest doctors and hospital are in a neighbouring town twenty-five miles away, and currently, the two doctors from that town visit Orania weekly to provide Oranians with healthcare. Orania’s city council is, however, aware of this shortcoming and is working toward establishing essential healthcare services to the town in the near future.

Despite all the positives and the immense progress that is being made by Orania, there are some rather negative aspects of the project that deserve mention and seriously need to be addressed. First and foremost, I became aware of a significant religious problem in the town when I had a brief discussion with one of the youthful members of the Boshoff family about the cause and struggles of the Boers in the new South Africa. I noticed a rather compromised attitude in him, and he was rather surprised when I reacted by telling him that, while I agree that we must be open to differing methodologies when it comes to our struggle for independence, we must always seek the glory of God in our struggle and humble ourselves before Him. Make no mistake: Orania is a deeply religious community, much more than most most places in South Africa, and a lot of things are done right in that regard. Yet, the deeper you look, the more evident it becomes that their religious expressions are merely routine, not genuine. From my brief experience there, as well as the literature I received from leaders in the community during my brief visit, there seem to be very little signs of abasement before Christ by the community’s leaders as the Lord of all, and theonomy still seems to be a rather alien concept. This is somewhat of a letdown, especially considering that Dr. Carel Boshoff, the founder of the project, was a man deeply rooted in his Calvinist worldview. Further evidence of this letdown is the fact that the town, with four traditional Reformed churches, now also has a Pentecostal church — with the motto “Where the Holy Spirit is still welcomed” written on the signpost. This blasphemous statement cannot be tolerated in any God-fearing community.

The town’s current mayor, Carel Boshoff IV, is also rightfully considered too liberal by many traditionalist Oranians. Boshoff openly disagrees with his father’s vision for the town, and he once stated: “My father’s vision did not really work out. . . . We live in a post-nationalist age. Today’s Afrikaner is a modern, atomised individualist. . . . Here, because we are succeeding, every day we face a bigger picture and we have to be open to that.” Furthermore, when asked if an Afrikaans-speaking coloured person could join Orania, an Oranian tour guide replied to a reporter for the Sunday Times merely that they would “look at it on its merits.”⁸ But these are just concessions to unbelieving egalitarianism. First of all, Boshoff’s assertion that Oranians must be open to the tendencies of a “post-nationalist age” is both unbiblical and unfaithful to the ideal of freedom-loving Afrikaners. He might be correct in his observation, but to compromise an ideal to conform to the zeitgeist is unacceptable. Furthermore, the appropriate reply to the reporter’s question would be that the very formulation of the question is an insult to the Afrikaner’s identity and heritage, clearly presupposing that it is immoral for white people to govern and live among themselves. Sure, one coloured person in a community of a thousand would probably not destroy the community — but where does one draw the line? If one Afrikaans-speaking coloured would be allowed, why not a thousand? Why not ten thousand? And, if an Afrikaans-speaking coloured is allowed, why not a Mandarin-speaking Chinese? By no standard are Christians somehow allowed to discriminate on linguistic and not racial considerations. The only answer to such a question should be that we have a moral obligation to protect our race and white nations, and a compromise to multiracialism would eventually lead to exactly the opposite.

A final worrying factor is the acceptance of egalitarianism among Oranians. Oranians rightly recognize that one of the main reasons for the eventual loss of our freedom in 1994 was the use of black labour – to the extent that blacks largely outnumbered whites in their own country and eventually simply voted them out of power. Oranians guard against this by forcing wealthier citizens to only use white labourers. However, they still maintain that all its citizens are equal and that Orania should be run on democratic principles. If this philosophy is applied, and no class differences within the community are acknowledged, it could greatly hinder the forward progress of the project. Thankfully, egalitarianism here, just like everywhere else in the real world, remains only theoretical.

In conclusion: there are a lot of good and inspiring things happening in this well-intended project, but also several philosophical errors by the leadership, greatly dimming my enthusiasm for the project. I will, however, after my pleasant visit, constantly keep my Oranian kinsmen in my prayers, hoping that we as a people might someday put all the potential of this fascinating project to good use in the Boer people’s continual struggle for full self-determination.

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