![]() Violence actually affects blacks more frequently than whites, but for many Afrikaners, the most important feature of the new regime is that they are no longer safe. Nearly everyone in the town has a story to tell about having been or knowing someone who has been robbed, stabbed or killed. Other arrivals to Orania are victims of crime. In a country with an unemployment rate of 24 per cent, they now compete with similarly low-skilled blacks, who are more numerous, willing to work for lower wages, and who benefit from affirmative action policies that take into account race but not class or wealth. Apartheid's passing marked the end of artificially protected jobs for low-skilled, poorly educated whites, disproportionate numbers of whom were Afrikaners. A recent Standard Bank of South Africa study found the number of whites earning less than $80 a month grew by more than 50 per cent from 2000 to 2004. Poverty among blue-collar whites has surged. Here, all jobs, from the white-collar to the janitorial, are reserved exclusively for white Afrikaners. Orania, she says, is the only place where her husband, a lorry driver, could find a job thanks to affirmative action policies that favour blacks. That isn't the reason she gives for moving here from KwaZulu Natal a year ago, however. "I don't like black people, I'm sorry," says Barbara, a handsome, ashen-faced woman who I meet as she sits outside the town bakery. Clearly, those who retreated to this kibbutz-like settlement were not doing so to preserve their elite status or material luxuries. Though it has a flag and even its own currency (the Ora), Orania lacks most of the traditional accoutrements of white South African living: no private swimming pools or landscaped gardens, glass-walled conservatories and two car garages no luxury high-rises or mansions with their granny flats and quarters for servants (now euphemistically called "domestic workers"). Yet the putative Afrikaner homeland is hardly an oasis of privilege. ![]() The other, prevalent among many blacks, sees a privatised gated community shielded by a 1950s-style fantasy from crime, poverty, political turmoil and declining white privilege. One, common among white liberals, paints Orania as a bombastic and pathetic outpost of embittered racists who refuse to live side by side with their newly equal black countrymen. There are two main narratives about this small, privately owned agricultural community. "Orania offers the symbolic embodiment of a re-established Afrikaner collectivity that can once again become a historical agent," he says. "There are more Afrikaners living in London than in Orania." Nevertheless, he believes the tide may yet turn in the town's favour. "We have seen that we don't attract the masses," he admits. Boshoff openly concedes that the utopian farming project has not lured anywhere near the expected number of settlers. The bespectacled former philosophy lecturer looks like a mix between Woody Allen and Boris Becker and peppers his speech with words like "ontological" and "relativised". Like his late father, a theologist, Orania's current leader is no populist demagogue. "So where do you go when you are less than a 10 per cent minority in a system dominated by others?" ![]() "We are still viewed as the previous elite: the perpetrators, a previously dominant and very visible minority", he says. With the help of 900 or so true believers, Carel Jr keeps the autonomous Afrikaner community alive. "There's been an estrangement between Afrikaners and South Africa, which is becoming a dysfunctional state," Boshoff's son and heir Carel Boshoff IV tells me. Now, the founder may be dead, but his life's work, to establish an independent Afrikaner homeland, stubbornly refuses to follow suit. Twenty years before he had established the town as an all-white enclave. It was here in Orania, on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of last month, that the body of Dr Carel Boshoff was lowered into the arid soil. Nearby, one of the town's two bars occupies a wooden shell on the edge of what looks like a scrapyard for disused agricultural vehicles. What passes for the town centre has just a small bakery, a church, a grocery store and the offices of the local authorities. Concrete road slabs give way to pebbles, dirt and potholes. Street names are stencilled onto the kerbstones. In South Africa's remote Karoo steppe, the town of Orania is little more than a ramble of lanes and a few modest bungalows.
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