Close-up
A lingering color line: White bastion in South Africa clings to past

By Richard Morin
The Washington Post

	RICHARD MORIN / THE WASHINGTON POST A barely 3-foot-tall statue of former Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, overlooks the all-white community of Orania in South Africa. This statue of the man who sent Nelson Mandela to prison for life is a model for a larger statue that was never cast.
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ORANIA, South Africa — The statue of Hendrik Verwoerd, former prime minister and architect of apartheid, looks down approvingly from the rocky top of a dry, windswept hill onto the tree-shaded homes and whitewashed churches of this white separatist community on the empty fringe of the Great Karoo Desert.

In 1995, newly elected President Nelson Mandela journeyed to this isolated pocket of white resistance to have tea with Verwoerd's widow, Betsie, in a gesture of unity and forgiveness. He climbed the hill to see the statue, and burst out laughing.

"But he is so small!" Mandela reportedly exclaimed. Indeed, this statue of Verwoerd, who sent Mandela to prison for life, is a model for a larger statue that was never cast. It is not even 3 feet tall, little bigger than a lawn ornament.

The flags of the 19th-century Boer Transvaal Republic slap smartly in the hot breeze along the streets of Orania, the community that its founders say will be the capital of a new Afrikaner homeland — and its critics say is where apartheid has come to die.

Founded in 1991 in the bloody twilight of the apartheid era by a former missionary and religion professor, Carel Boshoff, this community dedicated to white separatism and Afrikaner culture has grown from eight families to more than 500 permanent residents.

In the early years, only a trickle of settlers made the trek across the dry grasslands to this all-white enclave, which was organized as a private corporation to exempt it from anti-discrimination laws. But with the fall of white rule in 1994, interest in Orania has boomed. Property values reportedly have doubled. Today, families anxiously await permission to settle in this village that organizers openly promote as the first step toward a predominantly Afrikaner Volkstaat — a "people's state" that would extend 100 miles from the banks of the nearby Orange River to the Atlantic Ocean.

It is a vision propelled by Afrikaner pride, but also by fear of crime, fear of AIDS and, for many residents, by a relentlessly bigoted view of blacks.

Henda Joubert and her family lived in Orania for six years before money troubles forced them to leave last year for Johannesburg.

	ADIL BRADLOW / AP In August 1995, newly elected South African President Nelson Mandela paid a reconciliation visit to Betsie Verwoerd, the widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, in Orania. She has since died, and her home is now a museum.

They moved back two months ago. "It was difficult living with the coloreds and the blacks," she said. "You can't let your children out to play." She then breaks into a litany of evils that would be repeated often by other residents over the course of a three-day visit: "The hijackings. The raping. The drugs.

"The devil is loose out there."

Afrikaans, derived from 17th-century Dutch, is the language of choice for most here. Older residents are often fluent in English, which had largely supplanted Afrikaans as the language of commerce in South Africa even before the fall of apartheid. But many younger children — and even some teenagers — raised in the isolation of Orania can barely speak English.

Kobus Van der Merwe, 57, the town manager, has lived in Orania for seven years. "I'm interested in safety and doing my own thing and being here with my own people." He says Orania is not founded on hatred of blacks.

"I appreciate other cultures. How others want to live, that's fine. But I want to protect and live with my own culture," he said.

Other residents are less respectful of life in the new South Africa. "There is no future for white people in this country," said Koos Van der Westhuizen, 62, a farmer. "A white male, there is no job. You stand in a queue. They (black people) don't speak to you. They put people in jobs (and) they know nothing about the job. They carry on, they get the salary. ... You've got to do something for yourself. There's no culture left."

	Henda Joubert

"Ten years" — that's how long Piet Spoelstra, 60, expects democracy to last before it collapses into chaos. He and his wife moved to Orania a year ago from Ventersdorp, a town in Gauteng Province. The vision of a self-sustaining Afrikaner community first drew his attention to Orania. But it was crime that set him packing.

"They were stealing us blind," said Spoelstra, a former lawyer who now travels throughout South Africa selling knives. "One bloke they caught was a little black boy that I had brought up. I had employed his grandfather and I employed his mother. And he just broke in with a gang of youngsters and 60,000 rand (about $9,000) worth of stuff just disappeared. That was the straw that broke the camel's back." The burglary was in March. By May, he and his wife were on the road to Orania.

The South African government has viewed Orania so far with little more than annoyance. With so many other problems facing the country, the fact that 500 white separatists have chosen to isolate themselves in the middle of nowhere is probably cause for relief rather than alarm.

The community recently got favorable notices for its progressive school system, but the overwhelming majority of South Africans either ignore Orania or are embarrassed by it — if they have heard of it at all.

"Their numbers tell the story," Matilda Burden, a professor at the University of Stellenbosch who teaches Afrikaner cultural history, noted in an e-mail. "By far the largest percentage of Afrikaners don't give the homeland idea even a thought."

Burden says there are simply too many practical obstacles for Orania to ever be more than a distant and uninviting experiment. Even those sympathetic to the concept "are aware that the economics of this homeland is very fragile and they are afraid to make the change."

"I think what they are doing is heroic," said Piet Swart, 52, a college professor from Pretoria who was visiting an auction in Orania with his wife. "They are doing a good thing and they have a lot of courage." But there is little chance that he would move to Orania. "I don't think we (would) really be happy here. I'm an engineer. I'm an academic. There would be no real challenge for me here."

And besides, he said, "I also sometimes like to visit malls."

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