Addressing Orania
The Afrikaners’ Solution is Unique to Them
For those not aware Orania is a town in South Africa established by Afrikaners, the European ethnic group that founded the nation of South Africa (in conjunction with people of British extraction).
The town was established in 1991 in what was then a remote area of the province of the Cape of Good Hope as a cultural haven for Afrikaners in post-apartheid South Africa. A place where Afrikaners can live their cultural, political, and religious convictions without interference by outside ethnic or cultural groups. The town is almost entirely self-reliant, uses its own currency, and is even working to establish its own electric utility so that it will no longer be reliant on South Africa’s failing electrical grid.
The townsfolk provide all of the labor needed to construct their home and much of the community is involved in vetting new and prospective members.
From just 13 residents upon establishment the population of Orania has increased to some 2,300 as of the latest South African census. A recent interview with the leader of the Orania Movement, Joost Strydom, revealed that the towns population was now closer to 3,000 in 2024 and the council is planning for and developing the infrastructure to support a population of more than 10,000 residents in the coming decade.
The existence of Orania is made possible by Section 235 of the South African Constitution, which states:
The right of the South African people as a whole to self-determination, as manifested in this Constitution, does not preclude, within the framework of this right, recognition of the notion of the right of self-determination of any community sharing a common cultural and language heritage, within a territorial entity in the Republic or in any other way, determined by national legislation.
And informal recognition is what Orania has, thus far, been afforded. Nelson Mandela visited the just 4-year-old Orania in 1995 and now ousted South African president Jacob Zuma visited the town in 2010.
Both presidents were greeted kindly on their visit and Mandela toured the town in a gesture of what he called conciliation with Afrikaners who felt left behind. This informal recognition and approval from the father of post-apartheid South Africa has gone a great way in keeping the government of that failing state from imposing itself upon Orania, but this does not mean that Orania is done with its struggle.
Today the town is seeking formal recognition. The Freedom Front Plus (FF+), a party focused on Afrikaner interests, recently threw its weight behind the embattled ANC premier of the Northern Cape (the province Orania now falls within) and was able to return said premier to government in the province. In exchange the ANC and its Northern Cape leader have now begun a process of review and consideration which the FF+ believes will end in formal recognition of Orania as an autonomous Afrikaner political community in line with the provisions of South Africa’s constitution.
It is here that one should add that we fully endorse the Orania project its goals. The people or Orania reject a recreation of Apartheid (which was a failed and undesirable system by any measure) and instead seek to create what Afrikaner nationalists call a Volkstaat: a national homeland for Afrikaners as an ethnic and cultural group.
This makes manifest sense. In a country where White South Africans are just 7.27% of the population and number only 4.5 million against an African majority of some 57.5 million which is 81.4% Black it is only sensible that Afrikaners seek to carve out a unique political and cultural entity for themselves as there is no real prospect of this minority recapturing the South African state from the post-1994 rainbow nation that replaced the original Apartheid South Africa.
Many people, particularly minority journalists from Western countries that are themselves being demographically transformed, complain that Orania is attempting to “recreate” apartheid in some form. This could not be further from the truth. Official demographics (cited above) put the population of Orania at 98% White and the movement itself regularly catalogues the fact that only town residents work on major construction projects or run major businesses within it. Services are provided by Afrikaners, for Afrikaners, and with as little dependence on outside governments or services as possible. What these outsiders really have a problem with is a group of Afrikaaners building, for themselves, a community that excludes outsiders.
But, this is the only sensible way for Afrikaners to move forward.
Unlike in Sweden, the United States, or Germany, there are not large tracts of land with strong native demographic majorities where an electoral or political power base can be constructed. There is no equivalent to Thuringia in South Africa—a place where millions of Americans could vote for a nationalist party to look after their interests—nor is there a very native-born and deeply red state like North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, or Maine where Americans at least have the potential to politically organize in their own self-interest.
Instead, Orania has only itself and the project of construction protected by Section 235 of the South African constitution and the determination of the people of Orania and the Afrikaners as a stateless nation.
Then there is the fact that in the United States, and virtually all modern Western countries, the possibility of creating something such as Orania is not only politically fraught but outright illegal. Sundown towns, what all White communities in the US were once referred to, have been made entirely and explicitly illegal by civil rights era legislation and subsequent Supreme Court rulings. Specifically the Supreme Court ruled in a 1948 case called Shelley V. Kraemer that racial covenants that excluded minorities from the ability to buy properties were unenforceable under the 14th amendment.
Instead, the only option for westerners in our homelands and areas in the West where we still hold large and sometimes very strong demographic majorities is the political struggle. We must establish institutions, we must build local networks, and we must form informal communities that can offer support to one another and those formal institutions that are so desperately needed.
Orania is a fantastic project, but it is one that is unique to the South African context.
At least for now.
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