By Richard Morin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 31, 2004; Page C01

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, the man who sent Mandela to prison for life, is a model for a larger statue that was never cast. It is not even three feet tall, little bigger than a lawn ornament.

Down the hill and hidden in the trees, 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.

On another low hilltop overlooking the village, Henda Joubert, six months pregnant, walks with her 16-year-old daughter Sindel. They lived in Orania for six years before money troubles forced them to leave last year for Johannesburg.

Joubert and her family moved back two months ago. "It was difficult living with the coloreds and the blacks," she says. "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."

It is the first Saturday in December, and more than 50 Orania residents are gathered in the parking lot of the community center for the monthly community auction.

Sunbaked farmers sit under the overhang of the center's broad porch and talk weather and crops. Young families with children mill around. Teenagers drift off to inspect a car. The auction is the social highlight of the week. On this overcast morning it may be the largest all-white gathering for nearly 100 miles.

Nearly everyone is in shirt sleeves and most are in bush shorts. The temperate spring weather is a brief respite from the usually inhospitable climate of the Upper Karoo, where temperatures regularly dip below freezing in winter and reliably top 100 degrees in midsummer.

One by one, items are offered: Piles of household utensils, farm tools and clothing. A model sailing ship, which draws more jokes than bids. Appliances, large and small. It is surprising that a town so small has so much to auction.

"It is mostly stuff brought with them when they moved here," says John Strydom, the town's official spokesman as well as the auctioneer. "Houses are generally smaller and people seem to have less spare time and develop other interests here."

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, is selling treats to auctiongoers in the parking lot. He 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 says. "I am happy here. We aren't a group of angels. But we are typical, established people doing our thing."

Other residents are less respectful of life in the new South Africa. "There is no future for white people in this country," says 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."

"Ten years" -- that's how long Piet Spoelstra expects democracy to last before it collapses into chaos. "I'm very pessimistic," says Spoelstra, 60, as he sits in the shade of a canvas cloth stretched between a tiny house trailer and two supporting poles.

He and his wife moved to Orania a year ago from Ventersdorp, a town in Gauteng Province, after visiting on and off for five years. They are building their house. A cement mixer stands near the partially poured foundation.

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 up in the Transvaal," says 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.

Chris Els, 52, an information technology consultant, first moved to Orania with his family in 1998. After the 1994 elections, he believed there was room for Afrikaner culture in the Rainbow Nation.

"There was a time after the ANC [the African National Congress, which has dominated politics since the 1994 election] took over that was like honeymoon time, where they treated us like we need you, it's going to be all right for you, we'll preserve your rights," Els says. "But things got worse and worse. Our language was being pushed down everywhere. If you talk to any government department or any semi-state organization, you can only speak to them in English. All the correspondence is in English. They force you to talk in English."

His complaint, echoed repeatedly by Orania residents and community leaders, is not without irony. Under apartheid, Afrikaans was the official language of South Africa even though it was the first language of a tiny fraction of the population. The historic Soweto Uprising in 1976 was precipitated by schoolchildren who protested being taught and tested only in Afrikaans.

That was wrong but that is history, Els says. "We just want a place where we could live and practice our own religion, our own culture, and we could make a living for ourselves."

"Numbers rule," Carel Boshoff, the charismatic 76-year-old founder of Orania, says with a smile. It is a realization that he and other Afrikaner intellectuals came to in the mid-1980s as three decades of apartheid, the Afrikaner-led government's repressive policy of strict racial segregation maintained with brutal efficiency by state-sponsored violence against blacks, was dissolving in blood around them.

"We need self-determination," Boshoff says. "And for self-determination in democracy, you must be the majority. Otherwise other people are going to take over the government and make the decisions and put up the institutions and go ahead and make it again the same as in the rest of South Africa."

Boshoff is sitting in his sunlit office in the Orania community center, a combination city hall, visitors center and political command post for the Afrikaner Homeland movement.

The founding premise of the homeland movement is simple: "The difference between the Afrikaners who are European descendants is so much from the African tradition that it's really two worlds. It's two kinds of identity and two kinds of culture. So bring them together like one community, I don't think it's acceptable," says Boshoff, who is married to former prime minister Verwoerd's daughter.

He says that view is not bigoted but realistic. There are only 2.5 million Afrikaners in South Africa amid a total population of 44 million, and they are scattered across the country. When blacks or any other racial or ethnic group are the majority, it is inevitable that their language, their customs and their educational systems will hold sway, he argues. To maintain their identity, Afrikaners must establish their own communities where they are the majority and, ultimately, their own homeland to preserve their language and culture.

Anyone who moves into Orania must first pledge to support the establishment of an ethnic Afrikaner state -- not merely a predominantly white homeland, but one dedicated to preserving the Afrikaans language and Afrikaner culture and religion. In addition, they must agree not to hire black workers.

The last requirement seems crudely and spectacularly bigoted. Community leaders insist that it is not. Instead, the pledge not to employ blacks is designed as a kick in the pants to Afrikaners who, under apartheid, came to depend on black workers to mow their lawns, cook their food, clean their houses and dig their ditches.

There are too few Afrikaners willing to take the vow of self-reliance, Boshoff says. Today, the ban on black employment is the single biggest roadblock to growth, he says.

"We need a change of heart," he says wistfully, as if he's not expecting it to happen soon. "Many families cannot accept the idea of moving without their workers."

Of course there's another reason why black workers aren't welcome. In exchange for those freshly mowed lawns and gin-and-tonics served promptly at 5 p.m., Afrikaners in Orania eventually could find themselves outnumbered and outvoted -- and their culture once again under siege by democracy.

And no, he said, it will not be enough if Orania remains simply a small, self-sustaining community of Afrikaners. Without a homeland, he predicts that whites will empty out of South Africa, as "they left Angola, they left Mozambique. They are leaving Namibia . . . Zimbabwe and Zambia and Kenya and Algeria."

Absent a homeland, he believes it is "not possible for the Afrikaner to stay here forever. They will in time to come leave if we can't provide an alternative."

Orania is about a seven-hour drive southwest of Johannesburg in the Northern Cape Province. It straddles Route 369, which runs north-south along the Orange River. The land is punctuated with low, dry hills and rocky mountains. Fields of wheat lie like square, green mats across the otherwise brown landscape.

Except for the occasional zonkey -- a cross between a zebra and a donkey -- it could be Washington state east of the Cascade Mountains or the Imperial Valley in Southern California, other vast, empty areas where dry-farming techniques have made the desert bloom.

The nearest shopping mall is 100 miles away in Kimberley. So is the nearest movie theater. Young men and women in search of a good time empty out of Orania on weekends and head to the distant big cities.

"It's not so easy being single," Lucas Bartus, 21, who makes bricks, says with a laugh. "Not enough choices. But I like it here. I go to Kimberley or Bloemfontein," 150 miles away.

The immediate area is empty of people but not of history. Orania is situated in the middle of battlefields from the Boer War (1899-1902), and the veld is pockmarked with graves.

Not far away is the site of the Orange River Station, a British concentration camp set up in 1901. British soldiers burned an estimated 3,000 farms in the region and razed more than 40 villages. Trucks transported hundreds of women, children and elderly men to Orange River Station, part of a meticulously executed plan to bring Boer fighters to their knees by terrorizing their families at home. In a nearby cemetery, 500 graves, mostly of children, help explain the antipathy that still divides Afrikaners from whites of British ancestry and underscores the Afrikaner's bloody and star-crossed trek through South African history.

The few small towns nearby are poor, largely dying and overwhelmingly black. Their residents resent Orania for its relative prosperity and its impassive isolation from its neighbors and their problems.

The people here live in neat homes on 1,000 acres. An elaborately constructed boom gate guards the main entrance. It could be a checkpoint at a military base, except for one thing: "The gate is never down," Strydom, the town spokesman, says.

The houses inside the gate are modest, boxy and mainly well-kept. Many are prefabs that are tiny in comparison to the large homes the residents left in Cape Town, Johannesburg or on the farms. But they are mansions in comparison to the corrugated tin shacks and the haphazardly constructed one- or two-room concrete-block houses that most rural blacks call home.

The people who live within Orania's gates are the descendants of Dutch settlers who first came to South Africa in 1652. They see themselves as the defenders of the language and cultural traditions that evolved from those early settlers. Most residents are in their late thirties or early forties.

But there is little work, except what they bring with them or can create for themselves. Most farm or operate small businesses; Orania boasts the largest private pecan orchard in South Africa.

A smartly designed sign beside the entrance gate proclaims in bold orange letters Afrikanertuiste -- "Afrikaner homeland." In smaller print just below, visitors are told in four languages that they are about to enter private property.

It's important to read the fine print. Visitors, including journalists, must seek permission to enter Orania, which is not a municipality but a private corporation. Thus it is unencumbered by national and local anti-discrimination laws, and can freely decide who can and cannot visit or move into town.

Blacks do shop at the grocery on the main road. Although the town itself is open to blacks, they are rarely seen on the street. And when they do come, they're not always welcomed. When the black mayor of a nearby town paid a visit last year, he was chased around the village by a farmer driving a tractor.

Orania's leaders acknowledge that through the early and mid-1990s the town was a magnet for people who hated blacks, hated democracy, hated virtually everything about the new South Africa. In those days, members of one white neo-Nazi party walked the streets, guns holstered on their hips. But that's mostly changed, town leaders say.

"Many of the people who came at that stage came in fear of '94 -- that was our biggest problem at that stage," says Wynand Boshoff, 33, son of Orania's founder. "If a lot of reactionary people move in then it becomes reactionary, even if you didn't mean it that way. So that became our problem: How do you get rid of the reactionary element?"

The problem solved itself, he says. While Orania is a white separatist community, it is not strictly isolationist.

"We regularly talk to government representatives," Wynand Boshoff says, mostly to negotiate for Afrikaners' self-determination, which they say was promised to them in the new South Africa constitution. One of Boshoff's sons is a member of the provincial parliament.

Those contacts with the new South Africa infuriated the enemies of 1994 who wanted nothing to do with the new government.

"They felt dissatisfied -- the reactionary people moved out. The guys who stayed behind are not a problem. They are a minority community. They know it, they accept it. That kind of racist minority you get in every town in South Africa. We have ours. . . . It's just part of the sad reality," he says.

The younger Boshoff fears that Afrikaners are being denied a homeland as punishment for the sins committed during the apartheid era, when the white government liberally relied on violence and arbitrary arrests to turn the black majority into virtual foreigners within their own country by severely restricting black ownership of land, outlawing travel outside designated "group areas" -- the notorious "pass laws" -- and barring blacks from doing skilled work.

Boshoff's fear strikes some as somewhat amusing. Many blacks and whites in South Africa and elsewhere in the world are amazed that the majority black government led by Mandela didn't take more punitive action after 1994 to punish Afrikaners who committed unspeakable atrocities to maintain a white monopoly on South Africa's bounty during the 50 years of apartheid.

"Nobody today, despite all the atrocities of Nazi Germany, nobody today would say but Germany should not have self-determination," Boshoff says.

"Because we made some errors in our struggle to survive in the last 50 years, people think we should not have self-determination, we are not entitled to that. . . . That's why we have this problem today, of looking immoral just for surviving."

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 South African media pay little attention to Orania. The community recently got favorable notices for its progressive school system. But the coverage of Orania, for the most part, has been critical, dismissive and sparse. "The Afrikaner homeland: a fading dream," read the headline last month in the Sunday Times. 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, notes 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," says Piet Swart, 52, a college professor from Pretoria who was attending the Saturday auction 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 says, "I also sometimes like to visit malls."