Every year when global market research specialist Ipsos releases the lists of the world’s top concerns, South Africa finds itself in the forefront alongside the other pessimists. The nerves of our nearly 62million souls at the southern tip of Africa have long been on edge about the unemployment rate (31.9% in the third quarter of 2023), crime, growing poverty and inequality, and corruption. Those who can afford it, seek refuge in security complexes with high fences, access control and security guards. Others move to the Cape or emigrate.
And since 1991 approximately 3500 of them – all white, unashamedly Christian Afrikaners – have found a home right at the heart of the country in the construction town of Orania, which the former Department of Water Affairs built in 1963 to accommodate workers constructing the irrigation canals to the Vanderkloof Dam. After the first phase of the dam was completed in 1976, most families relocated and Orania had become a ghost town by 1989. The state moved the 64 coloured and black families still living there to Warrenton and sold the town, which at that stage was costing R33000 per month to maintain, on auction.
A group of Afrikaner families, led by the late Prof Carel Boshoff, sonin-law of the former Prime Minister Dr Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, purchased the dilapidated prefab village at the end of 1990 and registered it as a joint-stock company.
Since then, Orania has been operated as a privateflesh from the town in the form of income tax and VAT, a government representative recently stated in a United Nations debate that most South Africans do not care about what happens in Orania and also do not want to live there.
