Orania is a majority Afrikaner town located along the banks Orange River in the Karoo region in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa.
Orania lies along the R369 Regional Route on the Free State provincial border, approximately 680 km from Pretoria and 871 km from Cape Town
Orania falls within Thembelihle Local Municipality and the Pixley ka Seme District Municipality.
Orania has been developed as a stronghold for Afrikaans culture and the Afrikaner as a people who wish to exclusively preserve their language and identity. It is a place where anyone who identifies themselves as an Afrikaner is welcome to live.
Orania is therefore a town and community that rejects the concept of a multicultural and diverse South African State and has as a consequence attracted a great deal of controversy in terms of its exclusion of all South Africans that do not identify as Afrikaners.
The town has an exclusively White population of approximately 3,025 people and has developed its own identity with the adoption of a town flag, radio station and local currency – the Ora, which can be used in the town together with the South African Rand.
The residents of Orania subscribe to a strong sense of self-reliance and all jobs, from management to manual labour, are filled only by Afrikaners. Non-Afrikaner workers are not permitted to work in the town unless they have skills none of the residents possess.
Orania has three residential areas, Kleingeluk – or small happiness, Grootdorp – or big town and Orania Wes – or Orania West. Kleingeluk is slightly separate from Grootdorp and is a poorer area of the town. Many of the houses constructed in the town have Cape Dutch features, however most date back to the time when the town was under the control of the Department of Water Affairs and as prefabricated structures were not designed for durability and have therefore needed renovation.
Some innovations in housing construction have been introduced with the use of plastered hay bales and the conversion of shipping containers as housing units.
The town was originally 300-hectares in extent, however this has been expanded to include neighbouring farms where olives, fruit and pecan nuts are cultivated. Further agricultural land has been acquired by Kambro Landbou Koöperatief, a legal entity established to buy land on behalf of Orania.
Although Orania is officially part of the Thembelihle Local Municipality with its headquarters in neighbouring Hopetown, it is not governed by the Thembelihle Local Municipality and as such receives no services from the local municipality. Orania is the only town in South Africa that still has its own Transitional Representative Council in place, and this Council oversees service provision for Orania. Citizens of Orania do not vote in elections for the municipal council of the Thembelihle Local Municipality, but they vote for their own transitional representative council on the same day as the local elections take place.
In April 2001, a commission was installed by the South African government looking into the question of Orania’s municipal status. By 2016, the negotiations about the status of Orania were still not finalised. This special status of Orania only exists at the local level. At the provincial and national level, Orania is an integral part of the South African political system.
The town is privately owned by the Vluytjeskraal Share Block Company. Ownership of plots and houses is in the form of shares in the company, in terms of a share block scheme. No title deeds are provided, except for agricultural land. Share blocks are linked to portions of the company’s real estate, and the shareholder acquires the right to use the property linked to the share block that they have purchased or acquired.
The Orania Cultural History Museum includes inter alia an outdoor exhibition of agricultural equipment, the Felix Lategan gun collection and a Vierkleur Flag (flag of the former Zuid-Afrikaanse Republiek or Transvaal Republic), that was carried by Jopie Fourie who was a scout and despatch rider during the Second Anglo Boer War and who was executed by firing squad during the Rebellion of 1914 – 1915 against General Louis Botha, the then Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa.
A collection of busts of Afrikaner leaders, sourced from institutions that no longer wanted them after the 1994 transition, are located on Monument Hill overlooking the town. This display of busts is shared by a statue of the Klein Reus, or Small Giant, a small boy shown rolling up his sleeves and used as the symbol for the town’s flag, on the Ora – the town’s local currency and other merchandise.
Orania also features a Hendrik Verwoerd museum, where personal items and photos of this former South African Prime Minister are on display. It was the house where his widow, Betsie Verwoerd, lived from 1992 until her death at the age of 98 years in 2000.
The Koeksister Monument, erected in 2003, celebrates the women who baked and sold koeksisters, a syrupy sweet Afrikaner delicacy, to collect money for charity and is one of the town’s tourist attractions.
Orania also houses the Irish Volunteer Monument located on Monument Hill, dedicated to the Irish soldiers who fought for the Boers during the 2nd Anglo Boer War.
The monument was moved from Brixton in Johannesburg to Orania in 2002 by a group of Afrikaners concerned for its continued existence.
The Old Karooplaas, or Karoo Farm Shopping Centre, provides retail therapy for the local residents and visitors alike.
The shopping centre includes a cinema, pizza parlour, a pub, coffee shops, supermarket, DVD shop and an Adventure Park.
History
The first inhabitants of the Orania district were nomadic San or Bushmen hunter-gatherers. A number of late stone-age engravings indicate their presence and they remained the main cultural group until the second half of the eighteenth century with the arrival of White hunters, trekboere or nomadic farmers and the Griqua people. The earliest indication of the presence of White people in the vicinity of Orania dates back to 1762, and in the early nineteenth century many farmers moved seasonally back and forth across the Orange River in search of grazing for their livestock.
An 1842, Rawstone map shows the Vluytjeskraal farm, on which Orania would later be built. The first known White inhabitant of what is today Orania was Stephanus Ockert Vermeulen, who purchased the farm in 1882.
The modern town of Orania had its origins as a temporary settlement named Vluytjeskraal, established by the Department of Water Affairs in 1963, in order to accommodate the workers who were building the irrigation canals linked to the construction of the Vanderkloof Dam upstream of the town. Similar transient settlements were established along the Orange River at Vanderkloof and Oviston linked to the construction of the Vanderkloof and Gariep Dams respectively.
The settlement’s name was later changed to Orania and by 1965 it was home to 56 families. Coloured workers who participated in the construction project lived in a separate area named Grootgewaagd. After the Vanderkloof Dam was completed most of the workers moved away, and the town fell into disrepair. The town was abandoned by 1989 although a group of Coloured people continued to live in Grootgewaagd.
In December 1990, about 40 Afrikaner families, headed by Carel Boshoff, the son-in-law of the former South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, bought the dilapidated town for about R1.5-million on behalf of the Orania Management Services and the first inhabitants moved to Orania in April 1991. The Coloured community of Grootgewaad were moved after being supplied with alternate housing in surrounding towns and Grootgewaad was renamed Kleingeluk – today a suburb of Orania.
The Orania town council was first established in February 1992 and the first Transitional Representative Council was elected in 1995 after South Africa’s transition to full democracy in 1994.
President Nelson Mandela visited Orania in 1995 as part of his programme of reconciliation and famously visited and enjoyed tea with Betsie Verwoerd, the widow of Hendrik Verwoerd.
The town has experienced an influx of Afrikaans families seeking an exclusively Afrikaans environment in which to live and there has been a commensurate investment of millions of Rands to set the town on the path of economic development and growth.