VIEWPOINT
A dangerous experiment in South Africa is a warning to the UK, says Ade Adepitan
Apartheid in South Africa finally ended in 1994, when free elections brought Nelson Mandela and the ANC to power. No longer would it be a country where different races were brutally separated to the economic and social advantage of the minority white population. From now on, South Africans were all in it together.
Strange then, some 30 years later, to find myself in Orania, a small but growing town close to the Orange River in South Africa’s Northern Cape province, which is run exclusively by and for members of the Afrikaner community, descendants of the white Dutch colonial-era settlers.
When I visited to make a documentary, the only person in town who wasn’t white was me. In fact, I was the first black person to stay there for more than a day or two. Oranians argue that anyone is welcome to live there. But applicants have to go through a selection process. Theoretically it would be possible for a person of colour to be selected, but in practice, no one ever has.
I have no issue with people of the same culture wanting to live among each other. Occasionally, most of us enjoy that feeling of belonging we find in the community we come from. But context is everything. Afrikaners creating a monoculture in South Africa hasn’t worked out well in the past. Thousands of black Africans were murdered by the apartheid regime; millions were denied their freedom.
Yet in Orania I found a community that seemed to have learnt very little from the horrors of apartheid. For them, the only thing wrong with running a country on the grounds of racial and cultural separation is that it hadn’t been done properly the first time around. Now they hope to get it right – first as a town, then as a city and perhaps, one day, as an independent country. And there are plenty of right-wing organisations around the world that are helping them to do it, providing the investment needed to turn a small town into a state.
I met young people in one of Orania’s schools who had only the vaguest notion of who Nelson Mandela was or what he had achieved. At the same school I also met a teacher who couldn’t recall the language spoken by the black South Africans that lived immediately around Orania. They claim to be saving their Afrikaner culture. In reality, those who choose to live in Orania haven’t really come to terms with losing power in 1994, and they seem disaffected, possibly even dangerous.
Ironically, I understand disaffection only too well. I grew up as a black disab
