Posted on 10/23/2002 2:07:55 PM PDT by Glutton
They once called apartheid "separate development"; black South Africans were at one stage referred to as "plurals"; the apartheid state's military death squad was called the "Civil Co-operation Bureau". That's weird enough, but then, pre-1994 South Africa was a weird place. But have you ever heard, in the New, post-1994 South Africa nogal, a whites-only town built on the pillars of old-style apartheid being called a "progressive society"? And that on national television, and not even during a comedy show?
That's what The Presenter - I can never again refer to him as a reporter or a journalist - called Orania, the town built to glorify Hendrik Verwoerd, on M-Net's Carte Blanche show on Sunday night. Oh, and some weird former Zimbabwean economic adviser went even further and called Orania a "model" and a "benchmark". That's clearly why the poor soul is now trying to be clever in another country than his own.
I have not seen so much nonsense on television since Al J Venter and Cliff Saunders reported "from the frontline" of the "border war" in Angola and Namibia.
For half an hour, we were bombarded with how magnificent, progressive, noble and sustainable the rightwing white Afrikaner volkstaat in the Northern Cape is. We were shown hi-tech farms, tree-lined streets and a building constructed with natural materials. The Presenter was almost breathless in his praise for the computerised classrooms of the "volkskool". Children were shown planting seedlings, and The Presenter and his interviewees crooned that this was "sustainable development" at its best. This is what the rest of the world should be doing, they said. God forbid.
An old Afrikaans saying came to me when I watched this circus: Moenie my vertel perdedrolle is vye nie - don't tell me horse droppings are figs. As desperate as I am as an ethnic Afrikaner to see and hear other people say nice things about my tribe, this was simply misinformation and bad journalism. Very bad journalism, and that from what M-Net calls its flagship programme. This was brilliant public relations for white racist isolationists.
There are no black people, or even dark-skinned people with Afrikaans as mother tongue, living in Orania. They are not allowed there. This town is for people from the pure white race only. A whites-only town in a country where 90% of the population are black.
The Presenter, after posing next to the bronze statue of apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd in the town, did get to ask Orania's Resident Intellectual, Verwoerd's grandson Carel Boshoff the Fourth, some lame question about the town's racial policies. To which the Resident Intellectual replied: "Oh, we are so far beyond the black and white issue" or something like that. And that's where The Presenter left it.
He even said the Resident Intellectual was a "conscientious objector" who refused to do military service! Well, if he was, it certainly was not because he opposed apartheid and wanted South Africa to be a non-racial democracy.
The facts about Orania are simple. It was conceived as an Afrikaner volkstaat by a group of rightwing Afrikaner fundamentalists. They bought an almost abandoned town in the Northern Cape and started recruiting like-minded white Afrikaners to live there so they did not have to be in contact with black South Africans. Only Afrikaans would be spoken, whites would be the entrepreneurs and the labourers, and the education given to children would be of the Afrikaner Christian-National variety. The leading dynasty in the town is Verwoerd's daughter, her husband and their son.
Yes, I think it is quite sweet that a community can be self-sufficient, ecologically friendly and try to stay in touch with the land. And I really think Orania should be left alone and be allowed to do their odd little thing in the desert. But we should not forget that it is a community built on racial exclusivity and that their dreams and ideas are exactly what we want to root out of our society.
The Presenter never asked what exactly the children in the "Christelike Volkskool" were taught; he never wondered how on earth these poor kids would one day adapt to South African society when they had to leave Orania to look for jobs.
This is not "sustainable development". Ethnic narrow-mindedness and racial isolationism can never be sustainable. This is not a model society that grew organically to self-sufficiency. It is an artificial place where people moved because they didn't like blacks. It is not progressive in any conceivable sense of the word.
So why did Carte Blanche mislead us?
I have no idea. Perhaps I should be kind and say they were ignorant and naïve and fell for a superb con-job.
But perhaps Orania could still become a South African asset. We could put up a fence around it and take buses full of tourists to look at these peculiar relics from the past. Locals could sell Eugene TerreBlanche watches and "Europeans Only" T-shirts at curio shops.
The author supported this concept. What he opposed was the rhetoric.
I understand and accept a desire to be seperate from South Africa. I doubt, however, that this is a sustainable economy, as they claim. Eventually growth would force increased trade activity, which would almost guarantee more interaction with black South Africa.
This is yet another artificial utopia guaranteed to fail.
Tell that to your neighbor Mugabe, yutz.
Nah, they'll end up just like the white farmers in Zimbabwae, (formely Rhodesia). A mob will come in the middle of the night and throw them out of their own town.
One honest look at sub-Saharan Africa provides plenty of brilliant public relations for white isolationists.
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