Orania

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Mathew Lawrence

Orania: A Story of Discomfort in Isolation Mathew Lawrence For a village that aspires to statehood, Orania is rather difficult to find. The bare dot that marks a map of South Africa is barely commensurate with its ambition. A lovely road that runs from Upington into the desert brings you there. Trace it from the beginning. Drive past the town square where blossom trees in bloom scatter shade across proudly varnished wooden benches. See, perhaps, their burnished plaques that glint in the clear morning sun, commemorating love’s now somewhere beyond sight. Glance across at the civic hall’s diminished luster, the solid pile of pale sandstone now squatting awkwardly, no longer quite sure of its purpose. Atop the columns sit the faded crest of Pax Britannia, the lion and the unicorn, half-bleached by the patient sun, the permanence of imperial stone long since outlasted. All about, different tongues and faces busy themselves in its shadow, getting on. Some scurry between cars, the local traffic light tycoon with his oranges, newspapers, sunglasses, herbal remedies, wire sculptures, all proffered up. Others sit in their cars, the vehicle fumes spluttering into air. Around them, the hum of the morning commute presses gently upon their windows. Soon though, far too soon, this daily negotiation of necessary routine gives way to a different town. Here no sandstone buildings squat. Commemoration is different too; fresh piles of mournful soil mark the snaking devastation of AIDS, graves too young to be dug now littering the cemetery. The crosses are normally makeshift too. Instead you pass corrugated structures, ferrous metal piled together that bends precariously but does not bow; homes made from the off-cuts of industry. Wispy trails of smoke from morning fires gather like slack rope in the air. The taxis weave brazenly between obstacles. All about is noise, activity, defiance. Then, again, change. The dense lanes of township life are intruded upon by nature’s creep. The bush advances, at first precariously, into nooks and crannies, between stalls and schools. Then, almost imperceptibly, this ongoing struggle is reversed; it is the town that now encroaches, isolated homes outliers in the wilderness, less and less, until all around is the Karoo desert. On the road, emptiness beckons.

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Quickly the journey’s only company becomes the electricity poles. They mark the passing miles, wooden sentinels to growing isolation. Their power cables sag as they stretch onwards and onwards. Occasionally, a battered truck rumbles past, the ‘Northern Cape’ of its plates dustsmudged. The noise in the vastness swells like a cloud and then bursts, emptying out into the drowsy heat. A dorp or two pass; they do not take the eye. Laborers and farmers, their inhabitants get along in an uneasy dance. Beneath the wheels, the still-warm tar abruptly cedes to dirt. The asphalt veins of modern South Africa end. The dust is all that shows your presence against the blanketing horizon. Occasionally, flat-topped earthy green mountains break the skyline - strange, looming hulks on the landscape. Bright shocks of wild fynbos punctuate the surrounding khaki carpet. In bloom they blaze upon the desert’s canvass, deep fiery reds, lilacs, buttery yellows, immodest pinks. They grow deep roots in the dusty loam that fine-coats the soil. Somewhere nearby, drummer Hodge maintains his lonely vigil. This richness is a legacy of the volcanic activity that once made and remade the wilderness. Today however, the desert sits on a different, decidedly not dormant fault-line, that of race. Racketing towards its epicenter, the trek barrels towards dusk.

Africa’s harsh, brilliant light begins to dip its gaze. Before the Earth’s rotation sinks the Sun, you come at last to a statue by the road whose framed silhouette marks journey’s end. The blue-black granite face is austere, defiant, a permanent relic of stone. Hendrik Verwoerd, racist utopian and architect of apartheid, greets your arrival. His sneering eyes appraise you coldly. Welcome to Orania.

Orania began as a flight from inevitability. In the late Eighties and early Nineties, the creaking bough’s of apartheid’s exclusive arc were splintering. Slowly, tremulously, the white community was bending its own future away from a vicious race war and towards the contested dismantling of legalized discrimination. It was the long-postponed subordination of their own

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supremacy. First, the petty, dehumanizing injustices of racial segregation were repealed, if not practically undone. Second, the ban on the African National Congress and its ally the South African Communist Party was lifted. Finally, the saviour, long anointed, if for the past quarter century little seen, was released; on 11 February 1990, a hale Nelson Mandela walked out of Pollsmoor Prison a free man. This was all too much for some. Carel Boshoff the Fourth, originality of names presumably not being a family trait, stirred. The moon-spectacled pseudo-intellectual, white hair now papering over the tanned and craggy lines of his face, bought the land of what would become Orania from the Department of Water Affairs and trekked into the desert with forty families in December 1990. The colony he founded was named after the sinuous River Orange that cuts the surrounding landscape. He remains the leading advocate of his creation. Boshoff’s followers, then, as now, were all were white, all Afrikaans. Not for them the hard, frightening, exhilarating birth of democracy. Instead, they set out to build a town whose mission was the preservation of Afrikaans cultural and linguistic heritage. Rather predictably, this concern for one’s culture demanded that no room be left for their non-Afrikaans speaking or non-white compatriots. It was to be achieved by separatism. This is made abundantly clear by the sign that welcomes visitors, “Orania Afrikanertuiste,” which means Afrikaner homeland. It is this creation of a volkstaat, an independent sanctuary for the Afrikaner that animates Orania. Prinsloo Potgieter, the solid, extravagantly bearded chairperson of Vluysteskrall Aandeblok, the company that owns the title deeds to Orania, is explicit in its separatist ideology. “We do not want to be managed by people who are not Afrikaners. Our culture is being oppressed and our children are being brainwashed to speak English.”1 As ever, somehow, in some way, the dastardly English are to blame. The fear of cultural erosion, though, surely reflects less the rapaciousness of the Anglophone world - a world where Afrikaners only briefly pricked the conscious in the 1980s as thick-mustached, gutturalaccented alternatives to the usual Soviet villainy of Hollywood action movies - than a profound lack

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Prinsloo Potgieter quoted in Fienie Grobler, ‘The Afrikaner homeland - a fading dream,’ iAfrica, 12/02/04, p. 1.

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of faith in the vitality of their own future. Indeed Orania lies heavy with doubt. Past certainties of place and tongue have slipped forever. In standing so self-consciously outside and against the present, all that is left is a lived past that has little future.

The place itself is sparse. Grand dreams of statehood have now foundered. It has barely two dozen streets strung out in parallel lines to each other. A connecting loop road seals off Orania from the murmurs of the outside world. Along it, drab prefabricated houses with peeling white paint cake the outpost with a melancholic, tawdry aspect. There is little to distinguish between each home. The lawns are neatly kept, yellow-brown grass roasted by the sun. Unusually for South Africa, they are manicured by white hands. Equally uncommon is the absence of electric fences, of barbed wire, of warning signs that compete in trumpeting ever louder dangers to potential intruders.

Indeed, the entire paraphernalia of life in the larger cities is silently absent. There are few shops beyond the religious bookstores, no cinemas or cultural venues, no banks or polished new cars that reflect a waxing confidence, no dynamism and little of the nagging fear of violence that scales even the highest security walls of Johannesburg. The unlocked doors attest to pride in that. What it does have is an abundance of churches; nine for Orania’s one thousand five hundred and twenty-three inhabitants. Inside them the air is heavy, the dry parchments of Calvinist faith given voice by sonorous dominees. Glazed light trickles through the modest glass windows onto overpacked pews.

The congregation are all in Sunday best, even on Tuesdays. A popular modern hymn is “Wachet auf!” Phillip Nicolai wrote it in 1599. Far less busy, the Orania Bibliotek is painted in white and red like a road yield sign, a warning to the intrepid. The printed word complicates the world; Orania seeks to flatten it out, quite literally making it black and white.

The cartographer’s neat, ordered lines that lend a falsely solid sense of civilization abruptly end at Orania’s edge. There is an exception to the brown emptiness of the uninhabited sprawl; it is where most Oranians go to work. Here, where the stalking of waterless desolation threatens daily

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best intentions, a flourishing pecan nut farm juts into the desert. It exists in an agricultural quarantine, the tanned limbs of the farm hands busying themselves in isolation against the surroundings. The workers are mostly disenchanted urban South Africans with no more agrarian experience than the phlegmatic Dutch burghers of today, the ancestral home of most Afrikaners.

Yet the land remains mythical within the community’s self-perception. For a people who constantly, and preposterously, claim a kinship of persecution with the Jewish diaspora, perhaps they find some contentment in the fact that in Orania they have indeed made the desert bloom.

Beneath the vase-shaped hickory trees then, they can play at history; the soil and the language and the isolation and the dream of a pure, unspoiled inauguration, all reenacted, overladen with the bathos of stunted mimicry. Out there, even in the farm’s shade, the heat bears heavy. Just beyond lies the creek. In it, the clay-red mud dissolves, water becoming murky.

Not that much swimming takes place there; the residents of Orania are largely greying beards and long-toothed omas. The promotional video would have you believe otherwise.

Designed to entice bored suburban families to make the “trek” it shows children skittering wildly about on blue and yellow tricycles. The volkstaat as freedom, rebirth. It is all so much fantasy; the most racing that takes place are the joyriders who sweep into Orania at night, the community’s shunning of the South African police service fully exploited in the throaty roar of adolescent boredom that echoes from out-of-town engines. The truism that anonymity of authorship breeds incivility of discourse is well proven too; the YouTube comments on the video descend as the discussion thread unspools from the inane towards racism and, with Godwinian inevitably, the inappropriate bandying about of National Socialism. Typical of the contributions include hearty congratulations from a Hungarian who feels the establishment of an Afrikaans homeland is the white man’s only hope in Africa (a rather neat inversion of grand apartheid theory), and one woman

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who demands ‘Afrikaners must also have at least four or five children per family.’2 Indeed most commentators seem to think it was the barrenness of Afrikaans women, not the bankruptcy of their husband’s politics that brought their community to this position. The video is deceptive in other ways too: the hundred-odd cast gives the impression of Orania having a substantial population when in reality they are over one-fifteenth of the entire total, far short of their initial dreams. Again and again, it is impossible to not conclude the utopian scheming that birthed the town has long since been superseded by the prosaic tedium of quiet failure.

Competing with the young tricyclists are elderly couples who shuffle contentedly past the clattering wheels. Too many, perhaps. A widespread concern in Orania is that it is becoming a large-scale old person’s home, slipping into dotage before being fully born, white beards awaiting the certain finish of age. Certainly children are an uncommon sight, the two local schools struggling to fill their classrooms. Yet to spot a child in Orania is actually very simple. One must merely catch a glimpse of the village’s insignia. It is hoped, though it is a dream rather indefinitely deferred, that this will one day be the flag of an independent Afrikaans state. Against a backdrop of the traditional Afrikaner colours of blue, orange and white (akin to the New York City flag, with its shared Dutch genealogy, albeit rather different subsequent evolution), it shows a young boy eagerly rolling his sleeves. He is anxious to begin building his volk’s new kraal. The image is ubiquitous, adorning everything from the comically large flags that limp slackly in the listing breeze to T-shirts worn on well-rounded, protruding bellies. The use of the child is doubly inauspicious. Not only is the figure engaged in the walling off of his own existence, shutting out the future of an integrated South Africa, but also, he appears suspiciously like a precocious drug addict. What is meant to demonstrate Orania’s determination to begin anew appears at a squint like the boy is tugging a belt tight around his puny arm, the dissolving blankness of heroin now merely a needle prick away.

Hardly the symbol for building one’s own Brook Farm.

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Quoted in video ‘Orania (Deel 1),’ YouTube.com

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Yet Orania is explicitly modeled on those early American utopian communities. “We’ve looked at those examples very carefully because the people who settled there were like us - people interested in making a new society with new principles,”3 declares an animated Carl Jooste, Boshoff’s chief ideologist. Those principles are explicitly not the betrayal of Afrikaans society that occurred in 1991; de Klerk’s supposedly shabby capitulation to world opinion and ANC terrorism is a source of continuing anger and disbelief in Orania. Boshoff maintains that “Afrikaners who live in the rest of South Africa must know they are doing it at their own risk.”4 That risk is as much physical - nearly 3,000 Afrikaans farmers have been murdered out of a total of 50,000 since 19945 as cultural. However, in searching for their own piece of utopia, Orania has run into more earthly problems. A new community has been built but is has not excised old divisions. “Do you want to know the truth about Orania? It is not about Afrikaans. Fuck Afrikaans. The people in Grootdorp are living a pipe-dream,”6 said Fannie Botha, a 38-year old resident. His picture shows a face prematurely fissured, great canyons of spent labour etched into his forehead. Grootdoorp is the name given to the upscale quarter from where Boshoff proselytizes for the volkstaat. Across the main square, the stolid prosperity of Grootdorp gives way to the rackety matchboxes of Kleingluck (Little Happiness). Here the words of Afrikaans renewal fall on bitter ground. Residents frazzled by time and change wander forlorn, the neighborhood home to the laborers and the desperate of Orania - the washed up for whom the shock of the New South Africa has seen them retreat to a fantastical facsimile of the Old.

It is an existence regulated by iron, pettifogging discipline. There is a zero-tolerance policy on alcohol, swearing is prohibited, and even very minor misdemeanors can lead to expulsion. This is a closely guarded Eden. Moreover, the rudimentary welfare offerings to compensate for this 3

Carl Jooste quoted in Caille Milner, ‘Whites-Only Town - Utopian Dreams Marry Racist Ideals in South Africa,’ New America Media, 13/05/04, p. 2.

4 Carel Boshoff quoted in James Smith, ‘10 Years On, Orania Fades Away,’ News24, 22/04/04, p. 1.

5 Republic of South Africa: Criminal Justice Monitor: Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks, p. 35.

6 Fannie Botha quoted in James Smith, ’10 Years On, Orania Fades Away,’ News24, 22/04/04, p. 1.

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regime take its carefully considered pound of flesh. In the mid-Nineties, the scarcity of workers in Orania was undermining the local economy. The solution, a bleak barracks-like centre that dominates Kleingluck was established where itinerants are scooped up from the outlying regions and charged nearly $60 a month for a spartan room and the chance to break dignity on the pecan farm. The reason why the solution for labour shortages in Orania was eventually found in semifeudal labour is simple. The expected flood of Afrikaners in the wake of democracy was never more than a dribble. “If South Africa stays peaceful, if no conflict breaks out, then I do not think I will see the realization of a Volkstaat in my lifetime,”7 says Carel Boshoff. Democratization and its discontents were not experienced as advertised; most of white South Africa, no longer yoked to the insoluble guilt of apartheid, have thrived in a liberal, vibrant democratic nation. Almost as many have however seemingly been content to ignore the legacy of systemic injustices that remain; ill will fare the land if this goes unchanged. Yet Boshoff’s attitude stands testament to the oxymoronic character of Orania. For its success is to a large extent dependent on the collapse of South Africa, and by implication, the foundering of the vast majority of Afrikaners and their culture he professes to revere. One cannot thrive without the other falling. The town he built is therefore one reliant for its existence on rejection, fear, and ultimately, a craving for the easy comfort of failure. § If, by some injudicious turn of events, you find yourself at a loss in Orania there are distractions of a sort available. To access them, however, one needs to exchange the legal tender of South Africa, the rand, for Orania’s own currency. The ora was introduced on 15 April 2004 just two days after national celebrations marked the ten year anniversary of South Africa’s first democratic elections. Administered by the Orania Savings and Credit Co-operative, its claim to be an attempt to boost the volk’s self-reliance masked a thinly concealed and petulant spurning of the continuing, delicate process of reconciliation. The denominations range from one to a hundred with

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Carel Boshoff quoted in James Smith, ‘10 Years On, Orania Fades Away,’ News24, 22/04/04, p. 2.

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the images depicting aspects of Afrikaans history and culture. For example, the fifty Ora is for literature. It is of course rather unnecessary to confirm that peering piously out from the notes are not the faces of Breyton Breytenbach, Athol Fugard or J.M. Coetzee, nor of Andre Brink, Antjie Krog or Laurens van Der Post. The Afrikaans have not always confined themselves to a crabbed life, shrunken before change, yet in Orania they have become so by choice. This is not to say they lack entrepreneurial initiative, or, perhaps less kindly, blinding optimism. In March 2009 Orania Toere (Orania Tours) was launched, the village’s first registered tour operator coinciding with the opening of a luxury river spa and boutique hotel complex. On enquiry it was revealed that occupancy rates at the latter have been lower than expected with booking rates currently sluggish even with the forthcoming football World Cup. Blame was foisted unconvincingly on the troubled global economy; one feels the answer lies closer to home.

A clue to the absence of tourists is found in Orania’s main tourist attraction, the Hendrik Verwoerd Museum. It is housed in his widow’s well-preserved home, Betsie Verwoerd having passed away in early 2001. Inside, the high ceilings are reached up to by cluttering piles of bric-abrac. Emblems from the callous heights of apartheid’s dominance compete for air with family portraits; archaic faces robed by beards of biblical inspiration gaze out in rigid arrogance. The photographs, like the museum - indeed, like the town - drain color to sepia. It is a fading existence.

The exhibition also contains the handwritten text of the inaugural address of the Nationalist Party’s third South African Prime Minister. In Verwoerd’s needly writings are contained the contours of separation that defined its author’s vision. Described as the architect of apartheid, his words led to the erecting of grand apartheid. Beyond the obfuscation of semantics this policy implemented one of the largest forced population movements in a long twentieth century of such tragedies. Next to it is the chair where he survived an assassination attempt in 1960. His assailant David Pratt hung himself a year later on 1 October 1961 in Bloemfontein Mental Hospital. Clearly the dystopic

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lunacy of Verwoerd’s ideas attracted kindred spirits. The museum’s main artifact is a grey, bloodspeckled suit that the Prime Minister was wearing on 6 September 1966, when a second attempt on his life by Dimitri Tsafendas succeeded. Tsafendas stabbed Verwoerd because he thought a giant tapeworm in his stomach ordered him to. Whom the gods wish to destroy they first seemingly make their assailants mad. Perhaps stranger still, the bloodstained carpet where the Nationalist’s martyr fell had remained in South Africa’s Parliament until 2004 when its perversely incongruous presence was finally removed. It was a relic, in both senses of the word, to apartheid. Its final resting place was therefore particularly apt, consecrated in the living museum of Orania.

The old occupant of the museum received an unexpected guest in early 1995. The man her husband had condemned as a terrorist now stood on the threshold of her door; Nelson Mandela had come for tea. Betsie Verwoerd, 94-years old and too frail to attend the invitation to the President’s official residence was in many respects a typical recipient of Mandela’s extended hand in this period. Despite Orania fleeing the wreckage of apartheid to the margins of society, there had nonetheless been a wholehearted attempt to reconcile it along with the rest of the white community to the new dispensation. Of course, the deep scars of the past are not undone with tea and sympathy alone. However, the birth of democracy was an inspiring moment of re-inauguration in which long centuries of racial suspicion and injustice were confronted by the tolerance of reconciliation. The founding of Orania, however, suggests the turned cheek of the new South Africa was not seen by all as a near-miraculous, unexpected opportunity for the contrite enjoining of white to black, African to African. Change of a sort frankly fantastical to imagine when Soweto exploded or Ruth First fatefully opened her mail did not and has not eroded old racial division. Rather, despite truly significant gains in many aspects of society, the spirit of Mandela’s era has turned to festering resentment and a slightly frantic body politic, edgy, energetic and fractious, despite hard-won

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progress. To understand this changed atmosphere, we need only compare a later visit by Mandela’s modern-day successor to Orania.

On the edge of Orania, the architects of the present milled awkwardly amidst their own hated past. A pair shuffled stiffly across the petrol forecourt. From somewhere a football was produced but few mustered a kick worthy of the name. Two men in their early twenties posed for a photo beneath a notice from history, “Welkom in die Afrikanertuiste” (Welcome to the Afrikaner's home). The group were awaiting the return of Julius Malema, the leader of their delegation and controversial head of the ANC Youth League, the position from where Mandela first rose to prominence. Hitherto he was most famous for his confrontational, debasing public slogans such as his claim that he would “kill for Zuma,” South Africa’s President, at the time on trial for corruption.

Another ditty Malema popularized was the struggle song, “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer.” Now, bizarrely, he was secluded in the putative homeland of the “Boer.” Meeting with Carel Boshoff on 28 March 2009 during South Africa’s fourth democratic general election campaign, his visit was a masquerade of the possibility of political reconciliation for both parties. Malema declared “We thought well-armed Afrikaners would stop the blacks.”8 One wonders how desperate the ANC, a still-great if creaking party, were for votes if such hyperbole was truly believed in Luthuli House; the press contingent that gorged on the novelty of the moment well exceeded the total votes Malema’s party would receive in Orania. Boshoff for his part liberally adopted the use of confused military metaphors declaring himself pleased that there was “no shoot out.”9 Instead of reasoned engagement, then, of discussion over tea and a genuine attempt at the complicating project of reconcilement, there was sniggering at the trinketry of the exotic; Malema and Boshoff engaged in a facile dance, each congratulating themselves heartily for an ability to meet with the Other. Little

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Julius Malema quoted in SAPA article, ‘Malema extends olive branch to Orania’ The Mail&Guardian, 28/03/09.

Carel Boshoff quoted in SAPA article, ‘Malema extends olive branch to Orania’ The Mail&Guardian, 28/03/09.

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was achieved in this gaudy burlesque of meaningless political gestures bar a reconfirmation of difference. At the heart of this difference remains race.

Race in all its tortured forms is the defining feature of South African life; across the racial divide this truism is the one experience universally shared. Instinctively a divisive “they” not a collective “us” shapes communities. The binary opposite of one’s own group looms hypnotically, ominously, even when the threat perceived is illusory. Nowhere is this undercurrent of fearful exaggeration more evident than in Orania’s separatist goals, an aim suffused with racism, a corrosive characteristic of South Africa’s relationship with race. People of color cannot stay in Orania overnight, nor attend its schools, nor toil in the pecan farm, nor purchase food, nor own property, nor walk their dogs, nor do many of the insignificant little nothings that together make everything. They cannot even enter the churches. Israelite Vision, a fast-growing sect, would defend the last ruling because it believes that blacks have no souls and cannot enter heaven. Nor should one assume from this that the snake of atheism has entered the Edenic garden of austere Calvinism; the absence of a soul seems peculiar to black people in the Vision’s ramblings. Geoff Staanger, a retired police officer who looks as if he would relish overmuch the swinging truncheon of his old career is honest in admitting Orania’s motivation for these rules, “Everyone in this town is a racist. If they don’t admit it they’re stupid.” Mr Staanger’s admirable bluntness was undermined somewhat by his addendum, “But there’s nothing wrong with racism.”10 By that peculiar measure, Orania would be a place of virtue. Yet even if intuitively visceral racism seems to be the root cause of Orania’s development, this would ignore the bitter rift that has emerged between those who believe in that formulaically threadbare phrase, of races to be kept “separate but equal,” and those who despise blacks as naturally inferior beings. What both sides would agree upon, if pressed, would be the liberty to be racist in peace. As an acronymic motto for Orania, R.I.P. seems appropriate. Orania is not South Africa’s future; it is the deadweight of its past that

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Geoff Stanger quoted in Paul McNally, ‘Orania Tourism: Come Gawk at the Racists,’ The Mail&Guardian, 01/02/09.

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clings stubbornly to the present. How long the perniciousness of race will cloak South Africa to a large extent mirrors the question of its long-term success. The shrinking fearfulness that animates Oranian racism is perhaps less harmful than other forms, more visible to the eye; its very isolation lends a veil to its terrible aspect. Yet no nation can long prosper when its core is divided, and in this Orania provides a totemic example of isolated failure, of the dead-ends to which the country has escaped and to where it must not return.

In the gloaming sigh of early spring, another relic of the apartheid era came to an altogether different end. Eugène Terre'Blanche, the deeply unpleasant leader of the Afrikaans Far-Right, for what its support of barely a thousand members was worth, was found butchered to death on 3 April 2010. His face was like a battered aubergine. Purple-black puddles of blood clogged his bruised skin and crusted around his broken nose. His eye shells were pregnant with violence, the eyelids, egg-shaped in full swell, looking as if ready to burst. He was found sexually mutilated, his penis contorted and his testicles half-torn; the images of his body were so severe no photographs were published, just whispers. What was seen, however, over the following days was a palimpsest of the dying rage of the Afrikaner nationalist Right that, by violence, although not actual support, dominated public fears in the late Eighties and early Nineties. The hoary old community, their quasi-Nazi regalia dusted down and sported over steadily accumulated beer-guts, sprouted from the earth to protest into the wind. Scantily attended rallies were held, their air of hard-restrained menace undermined by mistimed “Sieg Heils” from arms now more used to lifting lager cans.

Inevitably, at such moments a gaze settles upon Orania for Terre’blance had been a well-known advocate for a volkstaat; are these not his people, his town? Yet the truer meaning of his death is in his irrelevancy, and by extension, of Orania’s ultimate future. Whilst not comparable to the man nicknamed “prime evil,” their paths lead to a similar dead-end. For though Terre’blance was deeply evil, he was nonetheless cloaked in the pastiche of comic-villainy, offering nothing to the future.

His deep, plum-rich voice preached race war to save the Afrikaner, yet his isolated attempts to

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instigate such an outcome collapsed in ignominy, barely worth terming a defeat such was the ineffectualness of the operations. This did not stop him parading like a tinpot Napoelon on his horse Attila. It was on this auspiciously named steed that he rode to prison for the crime of leaving one of his employees brain-dead. He well-deserved his epithet. His exit six years later was similarly absurd, spouting Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” to a media pack that still viewed him tentatively as the popular voice of the Right, rather than the anachronism he and his supporters had become. Despite his loud words, it was the hum of a changing South Africa that rendered him dead, long before his brutal murder. Orania may not suffer that fate, yet it is intertwined with it; absolute withdrawal ultimately defeats all absolutely.

A stooping curve elides land and homes and bright blue sky, meeting on a drowsy horizon.

As the road bends further Orania slips out beyond sight. Soon, little trace but memory remains.

The dour grayness of it all is burnt away, the desert sun’s clear light stalking shadows to vanishing point. What is left is the realization that Orania is not South Africa. Violent, harsh and frustratingly castrated by old divides, it may be all these things. Yet the Oranias and Terre’blances of society stand nowhere but on the margins, veering between ridicule and disregard. Which is more humiliating is difficult to tell. Instead, though severe challenges remain, significant and heartening progress has demonstrated the tired bankruptcy of racial division. Orania ultimately reminds us that though the bondage of fear still stalks the quieter recesses of South Africa’s soul, it is fast receding.

It is the narrow past that has broken on an expanding future. A new utopia in the desert has been forged, both created afresh but also in the sense of being made in imitation of the failed and evil creed of apartheid. Almost all South Africans have rejected that path. Instead, they have sought and continue to seek the disharmonious challenges of democratic freedom. Complicated, infuriating, fractious, but ultimately enlarging, it has a strange vitality of experience that the timid souls of Orania shall never know. And for that, the unborn child, inheritor of it all, shall not fear but be glad.

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Bibliography: Articles: 1. Daley, Suzanne, ‘Afrikaners Have a Dream, Very Like the Old One,’ The New York Times, 04/05/99.

2. Donaldson, Andrew, ‘Orania building a different future,’ The Sunday Times (South Africa), 10/04/10.

3. Flanagan, Jane, ‘South Africa: a separate homeland for Afrikaners?’ The Daily Telegraph, 10/04/10.

4. Grobler, Fienie, ‘The Afrikaner homeland - a fading dream,’ iAfrica, 12/02/04.

5. Haynes, Gavin, ‘Orania: The Town that Racism Built,’ Vice Magazine, 12/02/09.

6. Keller, Bill, ‘Orania Journal; In a 'Whites Only' Utopia, No Escaping Discord,’ The New York Times, 26/02/94.

7. Kirchick, James, ‘In Whitest Africa: The Afrikaner Homeland of Orania,’ The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 35:3 (July, 2008), pp.1-9.

8. McNally, Paul, ‘Orania Tourism: Come Gawk at the Racists,’ The Mail&Guardian, 01/02/09.

9. Milner, Caille, ‘Whites-Only Town - Utopian Dreams Marry Racist Ideals in South Africa,’ New America Media, 13/05/04.

10. Smith, Chris, ‘Remains of the Night,’ The Age (Melbourne), 01/02/03.

11. Smith, James, ‘10 Years On, Orania Fades Away,’ News24, 22/04/04.

Press Releases: 12. BBC News Webpage, ‘Whites-only money for SA town,’ 29/04/04.

13. South African Associated Press Release, ‘Malema extends olive branch to Orania’ The Mail&Guardian, 28/03/09.

14. South African Associate Press Release, ‘Mandela Visits Widow Of Apartheid Architect Who Sent Him To Jail For Life,’ 04/08/95.

Government Publications: 15. Republic of South Africa: Criminal Justice Monitor: Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Farm Attacks, pp. 1-42 Books: 16. Giliomee, Hermann, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (Reconsiderations in Southern African History), University of Virginia Press, May 2003.