Inside whites-only South African enclave where anyone with a criminal record is banned - as residents deny being racist and say 'streets are safe at night'

Thirty-two years after the fall of apartheid, black South Africans are barred from living or working in the town of Orania. Situated along the Orange River in the Karoo region of the Northern Cape province, this entirely white town is a disturbing vestige of decades of government-sanctioned racial segregation. In this hamlet of 3,000 inhabitants that was built on 8,000 hectares of farmland, entry is exclusively granted to Afrikaners, an ethnic group descended from predominantly Dutch settlers who first arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652.Frans de Klerk has spent the majority of his life in the secluded town and he intends to die there.At 26 years old, his mind can conjure nowhere better than the isolated enclave, founded a year after Nelson Mandela’s release from Robben Island in 1990, shortly before white-minority rule ended in the rest of the country.‘It’s not separatism as much as it is preservation, or just finding a place that we can simply call home,’ he says, insisting Orania is not motivated by white supremacist ideology, but cultural conservation.Yet everywhere you turn in the gated community are old apartheid flags and sculptures dedicated to apartheid-era prime ministers, as if time stood still in this eerie settlement that wants nothing to do with black South Africa.Detractors have likened the hamlet to a modern-day ethnic Bantustan established under former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, often dubbed the 'architect of apartheid'. Frans de Klerk has spent the majority of his life in the whites-only Afrikaner town of Orania, and he intends to die there Cara Tomlinson, 24, poses for a portrait in the 'Kultuurhistoriese' (Cultural History) Museum in Orania A spectator grills meat on a braai (barbecue) during an oval dirt racing event at the Orania Ovaalbaan Club in Orania‘What we are against is forced integration,’ he says over Zoom from his office desk, behind which the Orania flag hangs proudly, with its design bearing a striking resemblance to the old republic's orange, white and blue stripes.Every year on April 27, South Africa celebrates Freedom Day, commemorating the country’s pivotal first democratic elections in 1994 that heralded the official end of decades of racial oppression.But in Orania, which this year celebrated its 35th anniversary, the spirit of apartheid lives on just 380 miles south-west of Johannesburg.‘Orania is a town, certainly, but in a much more real sense, it is a project,’ de Klerk says. 'A project for Afrikaners to build their own freedom, to be able to make their own decisions.’The growing community – which has two schools, a college, shops, bars, hair salons and numerous churches – is increasingly attracting more young people, drawn to the prospect of ‘coming back to their roots’ and ‘finding their identity once again’.To be permitted entry into Orania, residents need to apply. Only Afrikaners with a clean criminal record and fluent Afrikaans are accepted.For many Oranians, a big draw to the enclave is a feeling of protection from the danger they associate with the outside world.‘There is a safety and security in this community that you will rarely see elsewhere in South Africa. In Orania, you are safe to wander the streets, even late at night. Children can safely ride their bicycles or walk to school and back,’ Mr de Klerk says.‘I see the interviews people do with residents of Orania, and many of them say they moved here for their own safety. I've heard stories about people's houses being broken into, and afterwards, they made the decision to come.‘I spoke to a lady this year, who was a victim of a farm attack in South Africa and is looking for solutions, and is considering Orania.’De Klerk suggests Afrikaners, who number more than 2.5million out of a population of more than 60million, are a persecuted minority.As he speaks of politicians calling for Boers to be killed, he echoes the language of US President Donald Trump, who in February 2025 delivered a controversial executive order announcing a refugee resettlement programme for Afrikaners who he said were fleeing a ‘white genocide’.Since then, more than 13,000 have moved to the US, according to state department figures. Arrivals are also accelerating, with more than 2,600 admitted in August. But the South African government has criticised Washington's decision to prioritise refugee applications from white Afrikaners, saying claims of a white genocide have been widely discredited and lack reliable evidence.In February last year, a South African judge dismissed the idea of a white genocide as ‘clearly imagined’ and ‘not real’, and ministers have tried to emphasise that official crime data does not show farmers or white people experiencing crime at higher rates.White South Africans still hold three-quarters of privately held land in the country, and control about 60 per cent of top corporate management jobs, despite comprising only 7 per cent of the population.And while affirmative action policies have helped to develop a black elite and middle-class, about 38 per cent of black South Africans are unemployed, compared with 9 per cent of white South Africans, according to official data.Three decades after apartheid, the average white household in South Africa still holds 20 times more wealth than the average black household.But Mr de Klerk insists white people are the victims in the democratic nation. ‘The race-based laws of apartheid have certainly switched to a more discriminatory law system, discriminating against white people,’ he says. The growing community - which has two schools, a college, shops, bars, hair salons and numerous churches - is increasingly attracting more young people, drawn to the prospect of ‘coming back to their roots’ Norman van Heerden (left), 18, Belly Sharpe (centre), 18, and Eben Mans, 20, pose for a portrait in a room at the 'Vaalbos Manskoshuis', Vaalbos boys hostel A group of students look into a room of the Steenbok hostel in Orania The community’s totem is the De Kleine Reu or ‘the little giant’ - a man with rolled-up sleeves, symbolising self-reliance and manual labourOn Friday nights, the younger generation of the town congregate at Stokkies bar, where students from the enclave’s new training college gather for country music and drinks.Nearly all its 250 students come from elsewhere, selected – as are all residents – on the basis of ethnicity, religion and a strong work ethic.The college is planning for an intake of 800 students within four years, according to town spokesman Joost Strydom, noting the dormitories under construction.But few are likely to stay after graduation: jobs are scarce and the biggest nearby town, Hopetown, with 10,000 inhabitants, is 25 miles away.Nevertheless, Mr de Klerk posits that within the settlement, quality of life is vastly better than anywhere else on the outside. ‘You have the freedom to organise your own jogging club, go for a swim in the river, or at the swimming pool. 'Picnics, stargazing… there are sporting clubs, movie nights, the churches also have their own youth groups organising coffee [outings].'Try as he might to paint the enclave as a quaint idyll, anybody who does not fit the white-only racial profile of inhabitants is likely to feel like an unwelcome outsider in the arid land. The town, which he says is supported by ‘strategic relationships’ with sympathisers in Belgium and American Republicans, has its own distinctive calendar, different to the rest of the nation.April 6 marks Founder's Day, commemorating the date Dutch colonial administrator Jan van Riebeeck, working for the Dutch East India Company, established the settlement at the southern tip of Africa that became Cape Town in 1652.The day was once celebrated country-wide as a national holiday, but was abolished by the new democratic government in 1994.The face of Mr van Riebeeck also formerly adorned the national currency, the rand, which now bears the image of the first black president.Other historical events are granted special importance such as the Day of the Vow, when a small force of Voortrekkers (people of Dutch extract) defeated a Zulu force on December 16, 1838, during the Battle of Blood River.On a rocky hill above the settlement, the bronze busts of pre-democracy Afrikaner leaders preside over the town. Paul Kruger, JBM Hertzog, DF Malan, JG Strijdom and Verwoerd gaze out across the vast semi-desert of the Karoo, as vestiges of another age.Disdained elsewhere, Oranians herald these men as heroes. Verwoerd, the editor of the National Party's pro-Nazi Die Transvaler during the Second World War, is widely dubbed the 'father of apartheid' for his fundamental role in socially engineering the country's segregation decrees as minister of native affairs in 1950 and later as prime minister in 1958.He instantiated the system that banned marriages across racial lines, reserved many skilled and semi-skilled jobs for white people, and forced black people to live in what were called townships and homelands.He infamously remarked in the 1950s that 'blacks should never be shown the greener pastures of education. They should know their station in life is to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.' Two groups of student build a fence at the farm of the Bo-Karoo Opleiding training institution, in Orania Eben Mans, 20, poses for a portrait in his room at the 'Vaalbos Manskoshuis' Students talk at the balcony of the Steenbok hostel in Orania, on January 29 Students at Bo-Karoo Opleiding training institution in Orania during a rehearsal for a concertThe dismantling of white minority rule in 1994 ushered in a new era for South Africa, widely dubbed the ‘Rainbow Nation’, but for some Afrikaners like Mr de Klerk, the change was threatening.‘Forced integration forces people into not being able to freely or practically speak their own languages, or have their own heritage days,’ he says.‘When one culture starts to accommodate another, then you have to take a little bit away from yours to make space for another. And then it is lost to history.’He continues: ‘It’s a question of freedom of association. We feel that people should be free to associate with their groups – with their cultures – as far as they can.’For Mr de Klerk, marrying out of the Afrikaner ethnicity, or attending schools where other languages apart from Afrikaans are spoken, is destructive to his sense of identity, making its dissolution inevitable.‘I don't see Afrikaners as superior. I see the Afrikaner people as the culture that I'm in, and that I'm most comfortable in.‘I would always choose to rather live amongst my own people than with others, but that's not a superiority complex – that's simply association and comfort,’ Mr de Klerk says. White-only enclaves such as Orania and Kleinfontein, founded in 1990 near Pretoria, have met fierce criticism from across South Africa.'ActionSA firmly declares that Orania and Kleinfontein are not cultural enclaves but ideological fault lines,' said the party's chief whip, Lerato Ngobeni, in a May 2025 statement.'These communities are not heritage sites; they are sanctuaries of apartheid nostalgia, dressed up in the language of self-determination, but founded on the very bones of a brutal, exclusionary past.'She warned that behind the fences of Orania and Kleinfontein, 'children are not learning culture'.'They are being taught to fear difference, to internalise racial superiority, and to live apart rather than together.' Orania founders displaced a community of 500 poor black and mixed-race squatters, who had made their homes in the buildings of an abandoned 1960s industrial project on the banks on the southern banks of the Orange River A cross, lit with red bulbs, decorates the facade of a house in Orania A group of students during a break outside the Bo-Karoo Opleiding training institution Residents reveal a commemorative statue depicting a British soldier kicking a Boer woman holding the hand of a child at the cemetery built on the site of the Anglo-Boer war concentration camp of Doornbult near Orania Carel Boshoff (right) holds his grandson Carel Boshoff, Alida Boshoff (right), 23, sits on the floor next to her brother Hendrik Boshoff (left), 28, Anje Boshoff holds her grandson Sarel Boshoff, 4, Willem Boshoff (left), 20, stands next to his brother Carel, who holds his son Hendrik, 1, and stands next to his wife Melissa Boshoff in Orania Belly Sharpe (centre), 18, and Eben Mans (right), 20, laugh with a friend at the entrance of their apartment at the 'Vaalbos Manskoshuis', Vaalbos boys hostelWhile the 26-year-old, who works for the Orania Movement, maintains that he is not racist, the town he spends his life promoting has a troubled and violent history.By the end of the 1980s, the probability of losing governmental authority had already dawned on several Afrikaners, with some assuming impending democracy put their way of life at risk.During apartheid, Afrikaners ruled South Africa. The regime repressed the black majority, while keeping white people protected and affluent.The fear about becoming a powerless minority motivated a small group of Afrikaners – including Verwoerd’s daughter and son-in-law, Carel Boshoff – to purchase a strip of land in the sparsely populated Karoo desert, which would become their new homeland.By moving in, the founders displaced a community of 500 poor black and mixed-race squatters, who had made their homes in the buildings of an abandoned 1960s industrial project on the southern banks of the Orange River.According to Cambridge historian Edward Cavanagh, Orania’s genesis marked one of the final large-scale evictions under apartheid.It was completed with beatings, pistol whippings and dogs, he said.One 55-year-old black man and his wife, who have lived on a small nearby plot since the 1980s, told The Guardian they were once pursued and harassed by a pickup truck laden with Orania stickers when walking home after an evening with friends. 'Now you must run,' he told his wife at the time, pushing her through a fence. 'I’ll be behind you.'But Mr de Klerk even rejects that his people descend from colonialists, framing the Afrikaners as a precarious people in an echo of rhetoric from the Trump administration.‘Throughout history, we are often described as a nation always fleeing, a people in flight,’ he says.He is also hesitant to recognise the sanctioned racial oppression that defined apartheid – associating the system instead with an unsustainable period of 'centralisation'.'There was certainly discrimination, but we can see that today as well,' he says regarding the country's racist history, quickly claiming there are more 'race laws' in present-day South Africa than there were during apartheid.He believes the separatist model of Orania is one which other countries should learn from.‘I do hope so,’ he says, when asked about whether other nations might introduce a similar model of ethnicity-based living.‘I'm not sure if it will happen, but I do hope so, and if there are people considering it, if they are looking at the experiment or the blueprint, Orania is always open to visitors.'For people to come and see what we are doing, and how we are doing it, and how it works.'