page_title: Orania, Northern Cape
section_title: External reception
hierarchical_section_title: Orania, Northern Cape / Ideology and purpose / External reception
caption_attribution_description: English: SABC News crew interviewing Carel Boshoff IV, President of the Orania Movement
context_page_description: Orania is an Afrikaner town in South Africa located along the Orange River in the Karoo region of the Northern Cape province. The town is split in two halves by the R369 road and lies halfway between Cape Town and Pretoria.
  The stated aim of the town is to create a stronghold for Afrikaans and the Afrikaner identity by keeping their language and culture alive. The town residents state that anyone who defines themselves as an Afrikaner and identifies with Afrikaner ethnicity is welcome to live in Orania.
  Critics accuse the town authorities of rejecting the Rainbow Nation concept and trying to recreate pre-democratic South Africa within an enclave, while residents contend the desire to preserve their linguistic and cultural heritage and protect themselves from high crime levels as their motivation, claiming the right to self-determination as provided by the Constitution of South Africa. The town's relations with the South African government are non-confrontational, and although opposed to the aspirations of the community, it has recognised them as legitimate.
  The small community has a radio station and its own currency, the Ora.
context_section_description: The community receives numerous visits from local and international media organisations, so that Oranians are constantly in contact with journalists. The existence of Orania as a homogeneously Afrikaner town is controversial, and some news sources portray it as a culturally backward, racially intolerant, and separatist place.
  In 1994 the Los Angeles Times described it as "one of [South Africa's] strangest towns" and "a bastion of intolerance". A year later the Chicago Tribune saw it as "the last pathetic holdout of the former ruling class of South Africa", continuing that "the Afrikaners who once forced blacks to live apart from the rest of society are now living in their own prison". Bill Keller dubbed Orania "the racist Camelot". People from neighbouring black communities feel that they are not welcome to visit the town, even to buy in local shops or to use petrol stations.
  A Mail & Guardian article describes it as a "widely ridiculed town" and a "media byword for racism and irredentism". An article in The Independent similarly writes that residents of Orania "have a reputation for being racists, and that the town attracts plenty of negative press".
  Benjamin Pogrund described Orania as a "curious hangover from the vanished terrible past". Eve Fairbanks, former staff writer for The New Republic, sees Orania as an attempt to show that Afrikaner culture can be redeemed from its traditional exploitation of black labour.
  One commentator noted the diverging perceptions of the town between white liberals and blacks: the former see it as a "pathetic outpost of embittered racists", refusing to live in equality with black South Africans; the latter see it as a 1950s-style fantasy shielding locals from declining white privilege. Orania was deemed to lack privilege, however, as residents have no domestic workers and few material luxuries; white suburbs in the rest of South Africa, with their high levels of segregation and heavy use of domestic labour, were felt to more closely resemble the apartheid era than Orania did. Along similar lines, Orania was also seen as "one of the few places in South Africa... where class is not determined by skin colour". Another journalist found comparisons of Orania to the apartheid system inappropriate, as town authorities do not seek to exploit or subjugate blacks, but simply demand separation. In its obituary of Orania's founder Carel Boshoff, Foreign Policy magazine agreed with Boshoff's proposition that the position of white South Africans as a privileged class dependent on black labour is untenable.
  Andrew Kenny, a regular contributor to The Citizen newspaper, argued that a private community like Orania should be allowed to choose its residents. The executive director of the South African Free Market Foundation, Leon Louw, has also written an article questioning the perception that the town is a refuge for racial bigots.
  Orania is mentioned in one of the leaked American diplomatic cables, relating details of a 2004 visit to the town, where it is described as a "sleepy country town with few signs of growth or vitality".
caption: SABC News crew interviewing Carel Boshoff, President of the Orania Movement
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