ORANIA, South Africa
A group of white Afrikaners
was so opposed to majority Black rule when apartheid ended some three decades
ago that they carved out a separatist enclave, the only town in South Africa
where all residents, including menial workers, are white.
Now, the residents of Orania -
population, 3,000 - in the semi-arid Karoo region want U.S. President Donald
Trump to help them become a state.
Last week, community leaders
from Orania visited the United States seeking recognition as an autonomous
entity. South African authorities acknowledge it as a town that can raise local
taxes and deliver services.
"We wanted to... gain
recognition, with the American focus on South Africa now," Orania Movement
leader Joost Strydom told Reuters, on a hill strewn with bronzes of past
Afrikaner leaders, including from the era of racist white minority rule that
was ended by internal resistance and international outrage.
The 8,000-hectare settlement
is riding an unprecedented wave of support from right-wing Americans for
Afrikaner nationalists, who irrevocably lost power when apartheid ended in 1994
and Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first Black president.
In New York and Washington the
Orania leaders met influencers, think-tanks and low-ranking Republican
politicians.
"We told them South
Africa is such a ... diverse country that it's not a good idea to try and
manage it centrally," said Strydom.
Three senior Orania officials
interviewed by our reporter were vague about the help they sought in the U.S. They
said they were not seeking handouts but wanted investment to build houses to
keep up with its 15% population growth, infrastructure and energy independence
that it has almost half-achieved with solar.
Strydom declined to say
whether his delegation had contact with the Trump administration. The U.S.
State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
South African foreign ministry
spokesperson Chrispin Phiri told our reporter: "(Orania's) not... a
country. They are subject to the laws of South Africa and ... our
constitution."
Other Afrikaner nationalist
groups have also visited the U.S. to build alliances with overwhelmingly white,
Republican audiences, prompting accusations back home that such trips stoke
racial tensions.
The leftist Economic Freedom
Fighters (EFF) last week accused Orania's leaders of "destroying the unity
of this country", a charge they reject.
Afrikaners are descendants of
Dutch settlers who began arriving in the 1600s. They resisted the British
Empire in South Africa, but once in charge of the country, they hardened racial
segregation using discriminatory laws.
"There were 17,000 laws
on land alone," foreign ministry spokesperson Phiri said. "We had...
to reconstruct South Africa into a country that represents all those who live
in it."
In 1991, as the end of
apartheid neared, a group of about 300 Afrikaners acquired Orania, previously
an abandoned water project on the muddy Orange River, to create a homeland
exclusively for white Afrikaners.
"It's the start of
something," former Orania Movement leader Carel Boshoff, said of his
community, comparing its desire for independence - Orania even uses its own
informal currency - to that of Israel, established after World War Two despite
stiff resistance from Arabs living in that territory.
Boshoff, whose father founded
the town and whose grandfather, Hendrick Verwoerd, is widely viewed as the
architect of apartheid, dreams of a territory stretching to the west coast
nearly 1,000 miles away.
Orania's activities are funded
through local taxes and donations from supporters and residents.
Its leaders were dismayed to
find the only solution that anyone in the United States was interested in
discussing was U.S. residency, after Trump offered in February to resettle white
South African farmers and their families as refugees.
"We can't be exporting
our people," Boshoff told Reuters beside a framed photo of his late
grandfather. "We told them ... 'help us here'," he said.
Some U.S. right-wingers have
sought to make common cause with Afrikaners in their opposition to diversity
policies that aim to empower historically unjustly-treated non-white groups.
South Africa's Black empowerment laws have
been ridiculed by Trump's South African-born adviser, Elon Musk.
Those laws were the reason
Hanlie Pieters moved to Orania eight months ago, after 25 years of living in
Johannesburg, to become head of marketing for the town's technical college.
"Our children ... what
opportunities will they have?" Pieters said, bemoaning quotas for Black
workers, while trainee plumbers and electricians honed their skills in a shed
nearby.
A third of all South Africans
are out of work, most of them poor Blacks.
One such unemployed man,
49-year-old Bongani Zitha, said he thought "people in Orania... are doing
very well" compared to many South Africans. "So many people looking
for opportunities. It's a struggle," he sighed.
Zitha, who has lived in a
corrugated shanty town in Soweto with no piped water or sewage since 1995, said
at least the people of Orania have "rights to health, education,
everything".
And unlike himself under white
minority rule, he added, Orania residents are free to live wherever they want.
